Not too long ago, Blizzard released the remake of their famous and massively influential RTS title, Warcraft III, titling it Warcraft III: Reforged. Unfortunately, not everything went as planned.
Instead of the faithful remake that everyone was expecting, fans were handed a massive dumpster fire of a release. Entire features were missing, the graphics were lower quality than expected, and all in all the game was just incredibly far from finished.
Blizzard has done what they can to fix it in the meantime, but some of the fixes that they’ve made make you wonder why they needed to make them in the first place. So many of these changes shouldn’t be necessary – they should’ve been in the game by release, but here they are. We’ll get into the visual fixes that Blizzard has had to make in this patch.
Blizzard has posted the patch notes for the latest Warcraft III: Reforged update, which focus on campaign, art, and gameplay fixes. The patch with Ranked Ladders, Profiles, Clans, and Custom Campaigns is still on the way, but there is no ETA.https://t.co/dcJzBnMlwx pic.twitter.com/3i24mvAUlu
— Wowhead💙 (@Wowhead) March 18, 2020
Looking to the art, let’s get started:
- Naga units will now have footprints in the Reforged graphics mode (presumably a long line since Naga don’t have feet)
- Random items placed with the unit palette will not be invisible
- Animation issues with the Naga Sea Witch’s Tornado ability have been fixed
- Magtheridon will now “animate correctly” when he’s been affected by a slow
- Death Knights are now the actual size instead of larger than they should’ve been
- Guard Dog critters are no longer invisible in Classic graphics
- Added the autocast frame to the Firelord’s Incinerate spell
- Selection circles for neutral ground units will not properly fit
- Blademaster’s attack animations will now have “less horizontal movement in Reforged” to make it more consistent
Considering so many of these aren’t bugs but are missing animations makes it hard to understand why they weren’t there to begin with. Looking at Campaign fixes, we could ask the same.
- Priests and Sorceresses will no longer use their Blood Elf model during certain Reforged cutscenes
- “A New Power in Lordaeron” will no longer have city gates to stop the AI from attacking the player
- Blood Elf Archers/Swordsmen have been updated to the correct model on their command cards
- Blood Elf Lieutenants in “The Dungeons of Dalaran” will have the correct command card icon
All in all, it’s kind of difficult to grasp why these were issues in the first place. It seems that issues like incorrect command cards and models during cutscenes shouldn’t be issues that persisted out of the beta and into the full version, especially for such a highly-anticipated AAA release.
Either way, these visual fixes have been put in now, so better late than never.
