I would be shocked if they mess with the gameplay too much. Little tweaks sure, but I wouldn't expect major changes to the end game or anything like that. Changing the difficulty scaling in Hell sounds like pretty much what they did at D3 launch, a system that was almost universally hated. It's a revered classic, and lots of people will be upset with big shifts in gameplay.
D2 is still awesome from a gameplay perspective, with a few minor quibbles. Like if they remove stamina entirely, that would be fine! It just serves to be annoying for 15 levels then you never think about it again.
The graphics though, obviously can be improved. 800 x 600 is uhh, pretty old. Just giving it support for modern resolutions (without the solution being just a hack to zoom the camera out) will make a tremendous difference.
Was War3 Reforged ever fixed? My impression was that it was more or less left to be forgotten, but I stopped following it pretty quick after release.
no not really. they have fixed bugs. the multiplayer system is still pretty much an unfinished embarrassment.
blizzard seems to not really... realize this? care? its hard to tell. they put out a statement every month saying they're working on it and nothing changes.
Was War3 Reforged ever fixed? My impression was that it was more or less left to be forgotten, but I stopped following it pretty quick after release.
no not really. they have fixed bugs. the multiplayer system is still pretty much an unfinished embarrassment.
blizzard seems to not really... realize this? care? its hard to tell. they put out a statement every month saying they're working on it and nothing changes.
Was War3 Reforged ever fixed? My impression was that it was more or less left to be forgotten, but I stopped following it pretty quick after release.
no not really. they have fixed bugs. the multiplayer system is still pretty much an unfinished embarrassment.
blizzard seems to not really... realize this? care? its hard to tell. they put out a statement every month saying they're working on it and nothing changes.
Big blue post to right now with specific changes.
are you... referring to the one they put out yesterday where they tell people what MMR is?
yeah I am not impressed. No leagues... no visible evidence of a ranking system... no stat tracking, no profiles... the game has been out for 6 months and you can't even tell how many wins and losses you have
starcraft has these things does it not? i don't understand why WC3 doesn't have them yet... it is not okay. The entire point for disabling the old client was to provide these features...
War3 reforged was developed during the handing over of the torch from Morhaime to Brack. Given how the scope was painfully cut on the project, it's pretty easy to see it was not a priority for the new regime (whether due to internal leadership, or due to Activision's outside influence.)
I'm guessing the only reason it wasn't outright canceled is some executive figured they could still make a quick buck on it.
my impression is the task of making the new and old graphics cross-compatible turned out to be massively more challenging than they had anticipated and has mired the whole thing
I'm not one of those people who are like "classic or nothing!!!!".. I actually like most of the new graphics and I would play them. I think that the old school community is essentially impossible to please and it was a design mistake to even try
that would have greatly freed their hand and the end product would have been WC 3.5 instead of WC 2.9999
I think MOST people would not have minded that, and the pro community would have silently faded to obscurity while everyone else enjoys the new thing... like how I'm sure there's still 50 dudes playing CS 1.6 while everyone else enjoys CSGO
I don't understand that when they ran up into the fact that combining the old and new WC3 clients was a far more problematic issue to tackle to not just simply pivot to letting both games exist in parallel but separate silos.
I'm in the boat where I don't want D2 classic remastered. I'd honestly rather have some QoL improvements. D2 was fine, but there's some janky game mechanics that could/should be changed or removed in my opinion.
-No dodge while running is one. Remove that shit and add always-run.
-Remove stamina as someone else already mentioned
-And I know this one is a bit more controversial, but I'd like to see charms completely removed. Charms work 100% counter to the entire design of a loot based dungeon crawler. I can't loot all the things if my bag is stuffed with charms. It's such a stupid design implementation. Alternatively, they could add a separate inventory for charms if they want to keep them in the game. But either way, charms going into your primary loot inventory is the stupidest thing ever and I hate it. Charms are my #1 dislike in D2.
I'm in the boat where I don't want D2 classic remastered. I'd honestly rather have some QoL improvements. D2 was fine, but there's some janky game mechanics that could/should be changed or removed in my opinion.
-No dodge while running is one. Remove that shit and add always-run.
-Remove stamina as someone else already mentioned
-And I know this one is a bit more controversial, but I'd like to see charms completely removed. Charms work 100% counter to the entire design of a loot based dungeon crawler. I can't loot all the things if my bag is stuffed with charms. It's such a stupid design implementation. Alternatively, they could add a separate inventory for charms if they want to keep them in the game. But either way, charms going into your primary loot inventory is the stupidest thing ever and I hate it. Charms are my #1 dislike in D2.
Good point! I forgot that charms are the worst. A separate inventory for them would be cool! Honestly I'm pretty sure most of these QoL improvements are already in Path of Diablo if you're looking for QoL changes without the graphics changes.
Or you do what I do, which is to clear a floor, go to town and drop all your charms on the ground, then go back in and do a loot pass. It's a horrible way to live, but I can't stop myself. If I have the option for more power, I'm gonna take it.
Was War3 Reforged ever fixed? My impression was that it was more or less left to be forgotten, but I stopped following it pretty quick after release.
I'm wondering the same, for an almost exclusively single-player experience. It seems like they (unsurprisingly) fell far short of the graphical and artistic hopes they originally suggested, but if there was some general visual improvement to unit, building, and landscape models I'd probably still buy it.
I found charms to be one of the best changes that the expansion brought over original. The new expanded stash seemed to balance them with space to place your items when holding a lot of charms.
but having an entire row of 3 slot +ability charms with poison charms/+hp filling the entire single slot row is part of the experience!
also i just cant get into path of exile, for some reason it is always very sluggish and lags when i push any buttons. at least diablo games were pretty snappy.
The game was originally announced with stuff like remade cutscenes (they released the original orc vs human vs inhuman trailer and it looked great) and an altered campaign to better fit with World of Warcraft (Strathome was the one first mentioned, being altered to look more like the WoW level)
It's funny, when it came out they WEREN'T doing that, they claimed it was an act of preservation. Given how rushed and unfinished the final product was, I'm forever going to suspect they just got their budget slashed to hell.
ill go out on a limb and say WC3R is fine if all you want to do is the campaign
it was a little shaky on week 1 but they fixed it quickly.... it's not perfect but the imperfect things (framerate, unit colors) are not going to be fixed anytime soon apparently.
Or you do what I do, which is to clear a floor, go to town and drop all your charms on the ground, then go back in and do a loot pass. It's a horrible way to live, but I can't stop myself. If I have the option for more power, I'm gonna take it.
By end-game, my inventory is 100% charms.
Yup. The problem with charms is that it doesn't end up being a trade-off between power and loot, it ends up being a trade-off between power and convenience and lack of annoyance. And that's just not the kind of trade that's actually in any way fun.
The game was originally announced with stuff like remade cutscenes (they released the original orc vs human vs inhuman trailer and it looked great) and an altered campaign to better fit with World of Warcraft (Strathome was the one first mentioned, being altered to look more like the WoW level)
It's funny, when it came out they WEREN'T doing that, they claimed it was an act of preservation. Given how rushed and unfinished the final product was, I'm forever going to suspect they just got their budget slashed to hell.
For all of Reforge's problems, at least they did something about War3/TFT's CG cinematics. Those things aren't just compressed, some of them are so badly overexposed, of all things, that they're a pain to watch.
A game with an inventory incentivizing you not to have an inventory is crap design full stop. Its not trading a little inventory space for some power, it's trading nearly ALL your inventory space for power. If there's one "balance" change they make in remastered it has to be this.
Or you do what I do, which is to clear a floor, go to town and drop all your charms on the ground, then go back in and do a loot pass. It's a horrible way to live, but I can't stop myself. If I have the option for more power, I'm gonna take it.
By end-game, my inventory is 100% charms.
Yup. The problem with charms is that it doesn't end up being a trade-off between power and loot, it ends up being a trade-off between power and convenience and lack of annoyance. And that's just not the kind of trade that's actually in any way fun.
I'm not seeing it. The point of the game is get phat loot. But in order to do that you need to get stronger to kill faster to get loot faster.
Enter charms. They increase your power but at a cost of your inventory space. Do I keep this +10 STR charm on so I can equip this sword earlier and therefore do more damage or do I leave it so I can hold more shit.
I think having a "charms bag" would completely remove the point of them where you gain a benefit at the cost of something crucial. The only way you could handle it without them taking up inventory space is if they all had a positive and negative stat on it. So 10% run speed but -10% attack speed.
I never ONCE thought of filling my entire inventory up with charms and then killing everything and then swapping everything out. That sounds like an awful choice to me lol.
Or you do what I do, which is to clear a floor, go to town and drop all your charms on the ground, then go back in and do a loot pass. It's a horrible way to live, but I can't stop myself. If I have the option for more power, I'm gonna take it.
By end-game, my inventory is 100% charms.
Yup. The problem with charms is that it doesn't end up being a trade-off between power and loot, it ends up being a trade-off between power and convenience and lack of annoyance. And that's just not the kind of trade that's actually in any way fun.
I'm not seeing it. The point of the game is get phat loot. But in order to do that you need to get stronger to kill faster to get loot faster.
Enter charms. They increase your power but at a cost of your inventory space. Do I keep this +10 STR charm on so I can equip this sword earlier and therefore do more damage or do I leave it so I can hold more shit.
I think having a "charms bag" would completely remove the point of them where you gain a benefit at the cost of something crucial. The only way you could handle it without them taking up inventory space is if they all had a positive and negative stat on it. So 10% run speed but -10% attack speed.
I never ONCE thought of filling my entire inventory up with charms and then killing everything and then swapping everything out. That sounds like an awful choice to me lol.
But that's not a choice. It doesn't stop you from getting phat loots. It just makes you burn more TP scrolls. There is no meaningful or interesting trade off here. It's just between power and inconvenience.
I inadvertently thought of a pretty cool compromise on charms. Have each charm have a penalty as well as a buff. Like I said above "10% run speed, -10% attack speed" as an example. You could also set it to where if you had more charms the more the penalty is applied.
So if you had a single large charm that had +10% run speed/-10% attack speed, then the penalty wouldn't be applied. However if you put on 3 charms (just to give you an example) then the penalty would be applied for each of them. Until you reach this point you could equip as many charms as you want without penalty.
But if you went significantly over then the penalty would apply even harder, but you could still gain the benefits. So you could risk it all by equipping more charms.
Large charms are 3 charm points, medium is 2 charm points, and smalls are 1. You can equip up to 10 points without penalty. Everything above 10 means the penalty is applied only slightly and if you get up to 20 then you get the full (or double) penalty.
Sounds like a fun risk/reward scenario and keeps them out of the inventory slots. It's probably a stupid idea that you guys can poke holes in but this was way more fun for me to think about than this Automated Deployment script I should be writing for work.
The most valuable charms in the game are the +skill charms. People aren't just stacking a little bit of extra strength with charms. People are stacking skill levels, which equates to huge boosts in power.
Carrying around a bag full of trivial low level charms might not make a lot of sense, and it might be easy to find a compromise for bag space if you're just giving up a little bit of strength here and there. But that's not what people are giving up. People are giving up skill levels and elemental damage and other huge power boosting modifiers.
there's a new WC3 patch on PTR, although it's being billed as a balance patch, the PTR appears to contain several overall client changes that give some indication that maybe they are still interested in making their game good
they added back LAN support, they added back the ability to play solo custom games offline (you technically had to be on Battlenet before)... they seemed to change some other menu/UI stuff around...
I want the game to be good so my optimism meter has been reset to "cautious"
The most valuable charms in the game are the +skill charms. People aren't just stacking a little bit of extra strength with charms. People are stacking skill levels, which equates to huge boosts in power.
Carrying around a bag full of trivial low level charms might not make a lot of sense, and it might be easy to find a compromise for bag space if you're just giving up a little bit of strength here and there. But that's not what people are giving up. People are giving up skill levels and elemental damage and other huge power boosting modifiers.
this. you can hold 10 +skill charms, 10 levels worth of skill ups is insane. especially after they added the spell synergy stuff.
there's a new WC3 patch on PTR, although it's being billed as a balance patch, the PTR appears to contain several overall client changes that give some indication that maybe they are still interested in making their game good
they added back LAN support, they added back the ability to play solo custom games offline (you technically had to be on Battlenet before)... they seemed to change some other menu/UI stuff around...
I want the game to be good so my optimism meter has been reset to "cautious"
Niceee, all I wanted is to play solo custom games offline. I still prefer WC3 for my TD fix.
H3KnucklesBut we decide which is rightand which is an illusion.Registered Userregular
I'm honestly not that interested in the online multiplayer, but I'd like to get Reforged at some point. The thing is, I still have the discs for the original release and Frozen Throne (and I'm pretty sure they aren't old enough to be suffering disc rot yet *fingers crossed*), so I'm basically just holding out for when War3 Reforged becomes a better way to play through the campaigns. Last I heard there's bugs that affect the scripting for some missions? Also, does it have the Frozen Throne Horde campaign (the Diablo-lite one with Rexar, Rokhan, Chen, et al)? How about the demo mini-campaign where Thrall lands on the Dark Spear islands and has to save them from the Sea Witch?
I'm honestly not that interested in the online multiplayer, but I'd like to get Reforged at some point. The thing is, I still have the discs for the original release and Frozen Throne (and I'm pretty sure they aren't old enough to be suffering disc rot yet *fingers crossed*), so I'm basically just holding out for when War3 Reforged becomes a better way to play through the campaigns. Last I heard there's bugs that affect the scripting for some missions? Also, does it have the Frozen Throne Horde campaign (the Diablo-lite one with Rexar, Rokhan, Chen, et al)? How about the demo mini-campaign where Thrall lands on the Dark Spear islands and has to save them from the Sea Witch?
Vicarious Visions has been melded with ActivisionBlizzard. There is news that the company is producing Diablo 2 Remake instead of the remastered.
Blizzconline will likely have an announcement this year about the game.
+1
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
So, stupid cynical joke aside, yes, Vicarious Visions was moved from the Activision Publishing part of the company (where it's been since 2005 I think) and they've become Blizzard employees. It seems like the dev company doesn't exist anymore, but what is for sure known is that they won't be making their own projects anymore. Prior to this move they were reportedly working on a Diablo 2 remake or remaster and I guess they Activision-Blizzard execs decided to just slap them in as Blizzard employees for some reason.
The real tragedy in all of this is that "Team 1" was disbanded and scattered to the wind. A few remained with Blizzard, but many of them left the company for greener pastures. "Team 1" is the RTS team. They were responsible for Starcraft 2, Heroes of the Storm, and the SC1 Remaster, which was honestly a very well done remaster. It's too bad that WC3 Reforged will be their final legacy, because a suit decided to release it far too early.
With "Team 1" disbanded, that means the chances of getting a new RTS from Blizzard anytime soon (or ever) is very slim. Blizzard isn't "an RTS company" but RTS is what made them a household name, and this is a damn shame.
Ahh well. Nothing is forever, and change is inevitable.
+7
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
Team 1 got split up prior to being disbanded. "Team Classic" was pulled from them, and once WoW Classic was set in stone, the tasks of SC2, HOTS, and Hearthstone continued-support got moved to Team Classic. WC3 Reforged was a shitshow, and sure, part of that is poor management decisions and constraints / lacking support, but some of those devs got shitty toward people when they said shit like "it's YOUR fault for having higher expectations" and such. So I can't say I'll miss the team since they didn't have great representation to the public.
I'm not sure I'd call Team 1 the "RTS" developers of Blizzard. They were making the side-projects, and any RTS games they touched were remasters - not remakes or sequels.
What I consider the tragedy is that Vicarious Visions didn't have to get rolled into being Blizzard to make Diablo 2's remaster or remake; they were already doing it prior. And they are a company that is CLEARLY competent at the work they do and have a good development track record. All of that was killed off for the sake of... I dunno, APPEARANCES for who you'd want to be working on Diablo 2? Was this Blizzard being scared of comparisons to the Diablo 1 expansion being outsourced so long ago?
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Hopefully D2 remastered won't suck, if it exists at all
I did enjoy the mod, although wasn’t super fond of some the game play changes but overall still really enjoyed.
There were lots of great mods, house of the eastern sun I think was the name was great.
I tried to play it recently but the pain of rolling back d2 versions was too much of a blocker.
D2 is still awesome from a gameplay perspective, with a few minor quibbles. Like if they remove stamina entirely, that would be fine! It just serves to be annoying for 15 levels then you never think about it again.
The graphics though, obviously can be improved. 800 x 600 is uhh, pretty old. Just giving it support for modern resolutions (without the solution being just a hack to zoom the camera out) will make a tremendous difference.
no not really. they have fixed bugs. the multiplayer system is still pretty much an unfinished embarrassment.
blizzard seems to not really... realize this? care? its hard to tell. they put out a statement every month saying they're working on it and nothing changes.
Big blue post to right now with specific changes.
are you... referring to the one they put out yesterday where they tell people what MMR is?
yeah I am not impressed. No leagues... no visible evidence of a ranking system... no stat tracking, no profiles... the game has been out for 6 months and you can't even tell how many wins and losses you have
starcraft has these things does it not? i don't understand why WC3 doesn't have them yet... it is not okay. The entire point for disabling the old client was to provide these features...
I'm guessing the only reason it wasn't outright canceled is some executive figured they could still make a quick buck on it.
I'm not one of those people who are like "classic or nothing!!!!".. I actually like most of the new graphics and I would play them. I think that the old school community is essentially impossible to please and it was a design mistake to even try
that would have greatly freed their hand and the end product would have been WC 3.5 instead of WC 2.9999
I think MOST people would not have minded that, and the pro community would have silently faded to obscurity while everyone else enjoys the new thing... like how I'm sure there's still 50 dudes playing CS 1.6 while everyone else enjoys CSGO
-No dodge while running is one. Remove that shit and add always-run.
-Remove stamina as someone else already mentioned
-And I know this one is a bit more controversial, but I'd like to see charms completely removed. Charms work 100% counter to the entire design of a loot based dungeon crawler. I can't loot all the things if my bag is stuffed with charms. It's such a stupid design implementation. Alternatively, they could add a separate inventory for charms if they want to keep them in the game. But either way, charms going into your primary loot inventory is the stupidest thing ever and I hate it. Charms are my #1 dislike in D2.
Good point! I forgot that charms are the worst. A separate inventory for them would be cool! Honestly I'm pretty sure most of these QoL improvements are already in Path of Diablo if you're looking for QoL changes without the graphics changes.
By end-game, my inventory is 100% charms.
I'm wondering the same, for an almost exclusively single-player experience. It seems like they (unsurprisingly) fell far short of the graphical and artistic hopes they originally suggested, but if there was some general visual improvement to unit, building, and landscape models I'd probably still buy it.
also i just cant get into path of exile, for some reason it is always very sluggish and lags when i push any buttons. at least diablo games were pretty snappy.
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198004484595
It's funny, when it came out they WEREN'T doing that, they claimed it was an act of preservation. Given how rushed and unfinished the final product was, I'm forever going to suspect they just got their budget slashed to hell.
EDIT: That comparison between the original cutscene and the remade one.
it was a little shaky on week 1 but they fixed it quickly.... it's not perfect but the imperfect things (framerate, unit colors) are not going to be fixed anytime soon apparently.
Yup. The problem with charms is that it doesn't end up being a trade-off between power and loot, it ends up being a trade-off between power and convenience and lack of annoyance. And that's just not the kind of trade that's actually in any way fun.
For all of Reforge's problems, at least they did something about War3/TFT's CG cinematics. Those things aren't just compressed, some of them are so badly overexposed, of all things, that they're a pain to watch.
I'm not seeing it. The point of the game is get phat loot. But in order to do that you need to get stronger to kill faster to get loot faster.
Enter charms. They increase your power but at a cost of your inventory space. Do I keep this +10 STR charm on so I can equip this sword earlier and therefore do more damage or do I leave it so I can hold more shit.
I think having a "charms bag" would completely remove the point of them where you gain a benefit at the cost of something crucial. The only way you could handle it without them taking up inventory space is if they all had a positive and negative stat on it. So 10% run speed but -10% attack speed.
I never ONCE thought of filling my entire inventory up with charms and then killing everything and then swapping everything out. That sounds like an awful choice to me lol.
But that's not a choice. It doesn't stop you from getting phat loots. It just makes you burn more TP scrolls. There is no meaningful or interesting trade off here. It's just between power and inconvenience.
So if you had a single large charm that had +10% run speed/-10% attack speed, then the penalty wouldn't be applied. However if you put on 3 charms (just to give you an example) then the penalty would be applied for each of them. Until you reach this point you could equip as many charms as you want without penalty.
But if you went significantly over then the penalty would apply even harder, but you could still gain the benefits. So you could risk it all by equipping more charms.
Large charms are 3 charm points, medium is 2 charm points, and smalls are 1. You can equip up to 10 points without penalty. Everything above 10 means the penalty is applied only slightly and if you get up to 20 then you get the full (or double) penalty.
Sounds like a fun risk/reward scenario and keeps them out of the inventory slots. It's probably a stupid idea that you guys can poke holes in but this was way more fun for me to think about than this Automated Deployment script I should be writing for work.
Carrying around a bag full of trivial low level charms might not make a lot of sense, and it might be easy to find a compromise for bag space if you're just giving up a little bit of strength here and there. But that's not what people are giving up. People are giving up skill levels and elemental damage and other huge power boosting modifiers.
they added back LAN support, they added back the ability to play solo custom games offline (you technically had to be on Battlenet before)... they seemed to change some other menu/UI stuff around...
I want the game to be good so my optimism meter has been reset to "cautious"
this. you can hold 10 +skill charms, 10 levels worth of skill ups is insane. especially after they added the spell synergy stuff.
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198004484595
Niceee, all I wanted is to play solo custom games offline. I still prefer WC3 for my TD fix.
Yeah all of it.
Blizzconline will likely have an announcement this year about the game.
With "Team 1" disbanded, that means the chances of getting a new RTS from Blizzard anytime soon (or ever) is very slim. Blizzard isn't "an RTS company" but RTS is what made them a household name, and this is a damn shame.
Ahh well. Nothing is forever, and change is inevitable.
I'm not sure I'd call Team 1 the "RTS" developers of Blizzard. They were making the side-projects, and any RTS games they touched were remasters - not remakes or sequels.
What I consider the tragedy is that Vicarious Visions didn't have to get rolled into being Blizzard to make Diablo 2's remaster or remake; they were already doing it prior. And they are a company that is CLEARLY competent at the work they do and have a good development track record. All of that was killed off for the sake of... I dunno, APPEARANCES for who you'd want to be working on Diablo 2? Was this Blizzard being scared of comparisons to the Diablo 1 expansion being outsourced so long ago?