I miss those times so much. It was a literal golden age.

Blizzard killed many W3 custom maps to give SC2 space before release, and we all know how well that went, with SC2 being utter garbage from a modder's perspective. The forced popularity sorting only made it worse.

I don't think that's going to return, at least not with Blizzard, but boy do I hope another studio tries to bring back the spirit of W3 in some way some day.

They should have allowed editor customization of the UI and what's shown on screen. Doubt it's going to happen with Reforged, but one can only hope.

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Metzen: They are one of the ancient races of Northrend that we haven't spoken of before... because we hadn't made them up before. (laughter)

~Main: Expansion theorycrafting, Expansions list, The Age of Nightmare, Empire of the Tides (coming soon)~
~Fan ficton: Anachronos Journey: The Timeless Heir~ ~Geography of continents series: Old Kalimdor (original), Pandaria~
~Locations as zones series: Azjol-Nerub, Barrow Deeps, Zul'Aman, Demon Hunter zone, Caverns of Time~

Are you seriously telling me you want to maintain the gameplay of Warcraft II for a potential remake?

The Tides of Darkness custom campaign for WarCraft 3 already was able to add oil as a resource. It required some obvious workarounds to make up for the limitation that the game engine wasn't really intended to handle it, but it was able to make oil work.

There are WC3 conversions of WC1 and Tides of Darkness, but not Beyond the Dark Portal. These conversions were very faithful, but therein lies the problem.

The gameplay, map design, story, etc of WC1 and WC2 doesn't age well especially in the original WC3 engine. RTS games since then have introduced all sorts of new ideas, such as hero units, gear customization, sub-factions, co-op and so forth. I didn't get to play the full diversity of RTS titles back in the 2000s, but I did play non-Blizzard games like Impossible Creatures, Emperor: Battle For Dune, and Dawn of War.

I'm not saying WC1/2 are bad, they were just limited by the technology and experience of the time they were made. While I'm not a fan of how Blizzard introduced hero characters whose soap opera dynamics took over the plot a la the Star Wars prequels' love story, I do think stories work better if they have characters to provide an emotional connection for the audience rather than being a largely detached depiction of a commander fighting a war.

One of the criticisms I have of WC1/2 is that it didn't really give the player much context for why and where they were fighting, giving the missions a fairly disjointed feel. The Command & Conquer series (prior to EA's mishandling) made up for this by including characters who talked to the player personally and explained the course and consequences of the war in an entertaining fashion.

You might chime in about now to say that Starcraft did the same thing, but I would contest that. Command & Conquer did include colorful characters, but the story did not revolve around them. They were just an emotional connection for the player to sympathize with the war effort, since humans famously struggle with empathizing with large numbers of people at once.

Starcraft made the terrible decision to make the story revolve around a tiny cast rather than the war they were fighting. Aside from the increasing number of plot holes and incompetency on the part of supposed military prodigies, from an objective perspective the characters are all complete a*holes who care more about their personal vendettas and romances than the fact that they are fighting in the middle of a war involving two hostile alien races and a bazillion political factions. The writer was clearly biased in favor of humanity, since the few zerg and protoss characters receive nowhere near as much characterization as the humans (which wasn't much to begin with).

I watched a let's play of Insurrection, and I was astonished by how the protoss characters there expressed more character and self-awareness in a few exchanges of dialogue than the canon protoss characters did in the entirety of Episodes 1 to 6.

But I digress.

I doubt Blizzard will remake Warcraft 1 and 2. It is probably up to the fans to do that. Hopefully Reforged will inspire more people to take up the mantle of custom campaign maker.

What I would like to see is, rather than a faithful adaptation, a spiritual adaptation with a more tightly plotted story. Perhaps the first and second wars would be best served by multiple campaigns depicting different theaters rather than one campaign for an entire war.

For example, Fall of the Lion and Coming of the Horde depict different parts of the First War and its aftermath. These campaigns are stronger for that.

As I said previously, I believe that the way to go would be to create a First/Second War "expansion" for Reforged, rather than creating a completely separate remake, as that would either end redundant by maintaining the outdated gameplay or by trying to reinvent the wheel when you already have Reforged that can be used as the basis.

As for the campaigns of the Second War, there's no way to do the war justice bar a larger number of different campaigns (ideally divided along the lines of the Gul'dan - Doomhammer - the Blackhands power triangle for the Horde and different power groups for the Alliance) that would cover different theatres, events, characters.

Yet, I think there's something to be said for playing a mission without any hero units. It's a different sort of feel. You can recreate this in some of the WCIII missions by ignoring your main character or killing him off (without using an Altar to bring him back). One of my funnest experiences in WCIII was the great Gryphon Rider roflstomp of Mal'Ganis in the final human level... which requires pretending that Arthas and Muradin don't exist, except to kill the soldiers with them to free up some food.

Hey, Bill Roper was a great way to give mission briefings! But we could've used more maps. The Command & Conquer games had maps between levels (as did WCIII), for fuller immersion.

Anyway. I hope Reforged doesn't take away the juggernauts on Outland or the Second War flashback. I hope they don't remove the Forest Trolls from Draenor in the BtDP flashback. But if they wanna add Lothar, Garona, and Khadgar to the flashback of killing Medivh? I'm good with that.

So help me if I see another map with Tol Barad west of Gilneas...

That's certainly true, and a full blown Warcraft II remake should absolutely not involve heroic units (at least not in the way Warcraft III does), yet that does not mean it should contain all these archaic gimmics and mechanics. And if one was to redesign the gameplay to be modern enough, he'd be essentially designing a completely new game at that point. And that is something I am wary of, plus I am not sure Blizzard would want to tackle such a hassle, so First/Second War campaigns/expansion for Reforged is the safest bet.


Since both Kul Tiras and Crestfall are now west of Gilneas as well, that is pretty much likely.

Well hey. The Grunts have helmets instead of thrallic ponytails. No retcon there, despite recent art. So that's one thing not to worry about!

You think they are going to give proper buildings for the Forsaken and the Blood Elves in their campaigns come TFT?

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If you go that path, the Forsaken could use new UNITS. And I don't know what they'd even be.

If they make a First and Second War expansion for Reforged, I think it's very, very likely that they'll want to have hero units like in WC3. Whether it's a good thing or no, I actually think it's unreasonable to think that Blizzard wouldn't do this. Expect Anduin Lothar, Turalyon, Alleria, Khadgar, Kurdran and Danath; Orgrim, Gul'dan, Cho'gall, Zul'jin, Rend and Maim.

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Daelin was right.

Oh god, this is all a setup for a conceptual rebirth of Anduin Lothar, isn't it? Coupled with Lothar's main role on the movie and Anduin Wrynn taking up on plate armor + sword-wielding (not to mention his old beardy face in the comic).

It all makes sense to me now.

Expect a Orcs & Humans DLC for Warcraft 3 and Anduin Wrynn being in WoW the King Lothar the Alliance never had.

Also expect a remark from Turalyon on how much Varian's son actually looks like Lothar /facepalm

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So...no remade cinematics...only the intro that we just saw...

https://www.gameinformer.com/exclusi...sic-cinematics

Min 4:27

Jesus Christ Blizzard...

Alchemists? Bats? Shadow priests? Undead rogues?

The challenge is (1) that the Scourge tech tree naturally assumes Cult of the Damned units with cultists and necrosmancers, and (2) many potential unique Forsaken units were WotLK+ innovations (e.g., valkyr, plague wagons, etc.).

Meh. At least they'd have more time focusing on game content.

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But here's the rub: over half of the battles in Warcraft II are linked to naval combat. The physical geography of everything north of continental Azeroth... Baradin Bay, Loch Modan, Darrowmere, Lordamere, the Great Sea itself... on a meta level the world was shaped this way to accomodate the seafaring elements of WCII.

You would have those hero units hanging out in Transports for a lot of the time. Especially if you bind Kurdran to a mountain king and steal Sky'ree from him.

EDIT: And if they tried to make a Proudmoore hero in his flagship, I'd expect to see a Blackrock or Stormreaver equivalent pulled from WoD lore.

Alchemists might replace Acolytes well enough...

Eh, frankly that trailer is the one cinematic that doesn't still hold up; the actual in-game ones are still good enough to stand pretty strongly alongside most of WoW's, really.

Redoing the "orc vs. human vs. infernal" cinematic made sense as it was originally the WC3 announcement trailer, which if memory serves came out far enough in advance of WC3's actual release that there's a pretty significant bump in polish and quality between it and the cinematics in the final product.

If we are going to wishlist variants of the faction tech trees, I would like to note that Warcraft 3 did include variant tech trees in various states of completeness. Since they were usually campaign only and almost always enemies, most of them never received a consistent treatment and appeared in bits and pieces across the campaigns.

It is incredibly difficult to find information on these since I couldn't find any documentation of them online anywhere. The only way to learn about them is to extract the maps from the game MPQs and then open them in the world editor.

The High Elf and Blood Elf tech tree was a fully functional variant of the Alliance tech tree which consisted entirely of elven units. This variant is almost entirely cosmetic as far as I know, since all the unique units were added to the Alliance tech tree with the exception of the Elven Ranger being cut.

The Fel Orc tech tree was a fully functional variant of the Horde tech tree which served as a throwback to the Horde of older games by including warlocks and pig farms, as well as in one mission the cut orc hero unit Warlord. Like the High/Blood Elf tech tree, it is a largely cosmetic variant.

The Corrupted Ancients tech tree was an incomplete variant of the Sentinel tech tree which consisted of corrupted ancients, corrupted moonwells, corrupted treants, satyrs and skeletons. They didn’t appear to have worker units or heroes (btw, the Monolith map introduced the Gimp worker and Incinerator hero in an unrelated satyr tech tree).

Goblins and Demons, IIRC, were intended to receive their own tech trees but this was later scrapped and they became creep mercenaries and campaign units/buildings.

The Naga received a fully functional tech tree, but it was nowhere as large as those of the big four factions. Their tech tree was unique in that nearly all their units were amphibious, since TFT introduced naval combat although in a much cruder form compared to WC2. (There is a WC2 custom campaign, but to my knowledge there have never been naval combat mods for WC3 that take advantage of the WC3 mechanics.)

The “Underworld Minions” from the demo/prologue campaign had unit producing buildings and heroes but I’m not sure if their tech tree was functional or not. They may have been a precursor to the Naga, since their leader was a “sea witch” that used the banshee model (in WoW, she was depicted as a naga banshee, making the connection explicit).

All of these were precursors to the co-op commander tech trees introduced in Starcraft 2. Perhaps WC3R will introduce the concept of co-op commanders in the future?

What I would like to see are fully functional tech trees (probably mod only given how much Blizz is likely to care), or at least better documentation for them.

If based on WC3, I figure it would be a lot of 'mind controlled creeps' or undead variants of them. The Bandits, the Ogres, or even freshly raised versions of Garithos' army. Instead of the generic skeleton look they would be skeletons in footmen armor or wearing bandit clothing, stuff like that.

The Lost One Draenei also had a minor techtree.

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Don't forget the forces of Snarlmane the Gnoll and the Murloc Puddle Lord.

I actually forgot about that, it's been so long since I played.

Funny enough, they're gonna be reworked as Broken Draenei.

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All of the Draenei models will be replaced with Broken? Or will the new engine add new creeps for both?

I never understood the concept of the broken and lost ones. If they were the result of demonic mutation, why did the eredar not suffer the exact same effect?

It's not been officially stated, but my personal theory is that it's because the Broken of Outland were specifically created by the Red Mist, which was in effect delivered via a fel-corrupted variant of the Curse of Sethe-based Red Pox.

Argus' Broken produced by straight fel corruption seem to still be tall, upright and clear-minded as a whole, while the stooped posture, more warped proportions and mental decline that leads to some of Outland's Broken eventually becoming Lost Ones seems rather in keeping with the particular physical deformities and gibbering madness that appear among many of the arakkoa who've been afflicted by the Curse of Sethe.

So in effect the Lost Ones could maybe be examples of the Curse of Sethe manifesting more fully, as a semi-parallel to those cursed arakkoa who ended up driven too mad and violent by exposure to Sethe's blood to join one of the three arakkoa groups gathering recruits from the pools.

It's perhaps notable that some of the Lost Ones even ended up worshiping ravens, a potentially interesting development when one considers the semi-deranged Ravenspeakers in AU Draenor and the arakkoa raven cult in Outland. Perhaps the Curse of Sethe aspect of their corruption caused specifically Outland's Broken, like the cursed arakkoa, to cleave toward the void and in some cases through it, toward Anzu.

Well that's the problem with retcons. Draenei never had a connection to Eredar until TBC. The same strange behaviour exists with Orcs going from Brown to Green, then Green to Red and Spiky. But then sometimes you have Green and Spiky like Gul'dan, or just Red like Grom.

I guess there's supposed to be a difference between granted Fel power and residual Fel power, but I think the easier answer is because it was all a retcon oversight.

How difficult is it really to contextualize the various mutations and other side-effects due to fel corruption, blood-curse, exposure, addiction, overdose, withdrawal, etc within a unified framework?

There are obvious parallels between elves suffering magic addiction and demons feeding on magic/life, so why hasn't there been a connection drawn in canon? All elves are clearly in some transitional state between mortal and demon due to their exposure to the Well of Eternity, since they are the only races that experience magic addiction in the first place. The orcs experienced the same thing after drinking demon blood, which was supposedly a prerequisite to them eventually becoming demons (according to some sources fel orcs are demons, which raises more questions since the criteria for being a demon includes immortality and feeding on magic/life).