Biggest thinga are IMO save/load for online games and also a rollback of the campaign changes from 1.33.
Though, thinking about the latter: Fucking hell, Blizzard. Fucking. Hell. It should never have come to a situation such as this in the first place!
I was so excited for this initially.
All they had to do was add higher res resources and release it.
Such a shame.
Basically they should have done what they did with the Starcraft remaster. But they fucked it up.
I don’t understand the hate for reforged. I played it a lot at launch and it was great for me. I honestly only stopped because the player base fell off so finding matches became a chore. The graphics had been updated, the multiplayer/networking had been reworked, and the custom games/world editor had been improved. As far as I could tell it was just an improved version of the game I loved playing years ago and it brought the player base back. People always shit on it saying it was trash but I legitimately don’t understand why or how. There’s obviously something wrong since everyone stopped playing, but I don’t understand what it is unless I just got lucky and didn’t see some crazy bugs or something.
The three biggest (note, not only ) points
-It was patched over previous versions. You can’t play the non-reforged version anymore
-It removed features the previous version had. In particular networking
-It released with desync issues that would randomly drop players from the game. Wc3 doesn’t support rejoin so this basically killed maps depending on how severely they were affected (and note, it even affected normal maps. But custom maps suffered tremendously from this)Like just given those three points: Why don’t you understand?
The fact you even say that custom games improved just makes me think you’re being dishonest for some reason…because it wasn’t some secret or even rare occurrence. 90% of custom maps were suffering it.
So the other comment pointed out plenty of things I was unaware of which was helpful especially since I admitted that I didn’t understand what I was missing considering the obvious lack of a player base now. I’m only replying to this comment because I didn’t expect to be called dishonest in a condescending way.
Regarding the lack of the original version, I was aware of that and while it was a bummer, I didn’t consider that to be a game breaking issue to me.
I legitimately didn’t know it removed features and until reading the other reply and watching the linked videos I wasn’t aware of a lot of the changes or even the existence of features like rejoining matches. If I ever got disconnected from a match I just played something else even back in the day. I don’t remember ever having an option to rejoin a match, unless that’s specifically a ladder games thing. I don’t recall getting disconnected from many games though, but I know it did happen. Definitely not enough for me to have been upset about it.
I’m assuming that’s what you’re referring to by missing network features because it still has multiplayer and I’m pretty sure it still has the chat lobbies although I never really used those back then and I don’t use them now either.
As far as me saying the custom games were improved I’d say you’re the dishonest one if you’re saying that’s not the case. They definitely improved custom games and while I don’t know all the changes, an easy one to point out would be the saved ranking system that exists for line tower wars now. That definitely didn’t exist back in the day. The other custom games I played that had reforged versions also had improvements although off the top of my head I can’t think of what those specifics were. They also improved the download speeds for maps in the custom game lobbies. That used to take forever back in the day and I remember people being kicked if they started downloading because nobody wanted to wait. I remember having to download maps from 3rd party sites to get around that.
I don’t play ladder matches so I wasn’t aware of those issues and I only played the reforged campaign a bit with the majority of my time in custom games where I had a blast going back to those old games. That’s why I was confused and understood there was clearly a disconnect in what I experienced and others had issues with.
I legitimately didn’t know it removed features and until reading the other reply and watching the linked videos I wasn’t aware of a lot of the changes or even the existence of features like rejoining matches. If I ever got disconnected from a match I just played something else even back in the day. I don’t remember ever having an option to rejoin a match, unless that’s specifically a ladder games thing. I don’t recall getting disconnected from many games though, but I know it did happen. Definitely not enough for me to have been upset about it.
Warcraft 3 itself never had rejoin as in you could not close WC3 start it up again login and rejoin, but if you were having connection issues it would pause the game and wait a minute or so to give you a chance to reconnect before dropping you.
Some private WC3 servers did a have better reconnection features added, like ENTConnect, but obviously those were obviously just for games hosted by their own bots (although you could still join these games from official battle.net lobby search until Blizzard nuked host botting a year or so before Reforged came out)
But if you get Desynced there’s no waiting for reconnection, you’re just dropped.
Because being Desynced means the game state on your client doesn’t match with the rest of the players, so to fix that the game would have to be rewinded until before the desync happened and no such feature existed in WC3.
And the patches leading up to reforged and Reforged itself added a ton of desync issues.
I’m assuming that’s what you’re referring to by missing network features because it still has multiplayer and I’m pretty sure it still has the chat lobbies although I never really used those back then and I don’t use them now either.
LAN doesn’t exist. Ranked Ladder & profiles didn’t exist until 2022, and it still sucks and everyone uses W3Champions instead anyway, and the auto hosted in game tournaments don’t exist.
As far as me saying the custom games were improved I’d say you’re the dishonest one if you’re saying that’s not the case. They definitely improved custom games and while I don’t know all the changes, an easy one to point out would be the saved ranking system that exists for line tower wars now. That definitely didn’t exist back in the day.
Regarding custom games, the custom games are not made by Blizzard, they’re made by players. However in the patches leading up to Reforged Blizzard did add a lot of new functions that modders/map makers could use which were great additions, thus allowing for new cool stuff in custom games.
One super obvious and huge change was that in version 1.30 24 player support was added, instead of the usual 12.
But that doesn’t change that Blizzard then also made changes in Reforged that broke basically every existing custom map and they had to be updated to fix.
There were some desync issues and saving games in single player was broken but for custom games version 1.31.1 (the last patch before Reforged) was the best patch, you had all the new functionality added to the map editor but a lot less bugs and problems from Reforged.
Also there still haven’t even added the ability to play custom campaigns to Reforged lol. The few single player campaigns you can play in Reforged are thanks to people independent of Blizzard coming up with a work around and they’re technically just a series of custom games you play (although that is what campaigns are so).
Yanked from the “other” site, section 3.e:
3e. State of the Game FAQ
WTii’s videos Warcraft 3 Reforged ONE YEAR Later… and TWO YEARS Later… as well as THREE YEARS Later… goes over some of these points and makes a number of observations and highlights.
- Why did Blizzard fail in the making Reforged? This article goes over some behind the scenes during the games development process.
- Custom Campaigns? Is finally back. Before now were and are still able play them in normal map form, if they were updated/transformed. Or make use of the Campaign Splitter that was made to split w3n files into w3m/w3x. The Quenching is a mod that can be used with some CCs. Or just use it with the normal campaign.
- Player Profiles? Yes, but it seems to mainly be ladder stats, W3C has more extensive ones.
- Cross-realm hosting? Yes its finally back again.
- Clans? Yes however in a glitchy state. And W3C has both custom made chat-rooms as well as clans.
- Ladder? Yes as of 1.33 its out but not working without issues. And W3C still going strong.
- Automated Tournaments? Not yet. Some communities have seasonal things going for both ladder and customs but nothing official yet. And should soon be a thing on W3C.
- Old BNet Chat System? No and on Europe realm chat do not auto-scroll either, is also in the way of the map description but toggle-able. And no kind of chat log with joins or leaves that we had before or timestamp on messages. W3C has made their chats in this “old school” spirit.
- Game Reconnection (GProxy)? No. In case of a player leaving disconnecting or crashing or desyncing that player is unable to rejoin. But it can be determined by looking at different things what the cause was, desyncs will have an UI glitch for the portrait, crashes might have a fatal/unknown error and DCs one can check the replay or logs.
- Competitive Customs & Ladders? Not really. However with Community made wc3stats and in the future FLO-host enables this in a number of forms with replay uploading.
- Hosting & BNet Commands? Yeah. But they are limited and do not work as they should or you’d wish. For example !ban is just a “long kick” preventing the banned player/user from rejoining that current lobby not all games you host, thus you can’t mange bans and need to black list them yourself. Commands found here. As well as a !stats and zoom via scroll.
- Campaign Overhaul to fit in with WoW? No. Five missions were remade and a most were reworked and to some degree, some “new” characters were introduced but not to the scale people wish or expected, for good or ill. However the Reforged version of the Campaigns difficulty among other things was updated more details here. As of patch 1.36.1 this is no longer the case as campaign was reverted back to its 1.32 state.
- Improved Cutscenes? Not like we saw during BlizzCon. This was aborted and as it looks now wont be a thing at all. What we had and have now is showcased in DailyWCRF’s Videos.
- Reforged(HD) Vs Classic (SD)? Well that is up to you. Reforged has a few things in the campaign that Classic don’t. Aside from that it would depend on preferences and the maps you want to play as some work better in either version or only in one. Most do use classic and some swap between them so by popular vote Classic(SD) would win as for reasons or factors well most of those are personal.
- Follow/Join or invite friends to lobbies? If you both are on the same gateway you can right click your friend and “Join Game”. However you have to restart the game to be able to do it again (keep in mind that Blizz-app server and Wc3 Gateway might not fully sync friend list and thus causing problems as well as not being online in Blizz-app). Invites seems to be fully-partly glitched and broken as of this moment(1.32.10).
- Are we able to select more than 12 units/buildings? No, unlikely to be added to the base game too. Small possibility to be added into the editor if at all.
- When will X be implemented? SoonTM. We do not know at this stage we used to have monthly patches and updates from blizzard but not atm. Some of this can be explained the Bloomberg article. Even though there is a team from Playside Studios out there working on the game again we still do not really have any ETA for things that is not mentioned in PTR or Patch notes.
Did they ever fix the desync issues?
