RTS WarCraft 3 gets a huge patch; showmatch/tournament soon; possible remaster?

[Dzupakazul]

Juicier excerpts from the patch announcement:

- Widescreen support
- World Editor now supports 24 player maps
- numerous QoL changes to the World Editor to allow better maps (including lifting the maximum food limit)
- the notorious Blademaster has been nerfed whereas Farseer and Tauren Chieftain has been buffed hopefully changing up the Orc playstyles
- numerous lesser balancing changes (at a glance, MK, Paladin, Dreadlord, UD heroes across the board, Keeper of the Grove got overall buffs)
- on the 27 / 28 February a tournament is taking place featuring Grubby and a bunch of old pros

At the very least, I'm looking forward to the possibly free WC3 integrated with the Blizzard client (but on the other hand if they bloat the classic game with all the possible future "Remastered" graphics and WC3 ends up weighing 7 GBs like SC1 now does, it's gonna be awful).

 

[CptMace]

Well that's quite unexpected. I have 0 faith a potential remaster would bring anything, since wc3 still works like a charm and still looks good thanks to the cartoon design. But if younglings around the world get to know the game thanks to the advertisement, good for them.

 

[Dzupakazul]

I have 0 faith a potential remaster would bring anything

Blizzard integrated a ladder system with the SC Remaster, but SC:R has had quite a few problems with latency and servers, so it was a mixed bag of sorts. Also, SC:R still hasn't gotten out of the "Season 0", a.k.a. the Frontier League, so it's like the laddering proper hasn't even started yet.

 

[v1rus]

God, do I miss some of the custom maps.

Island Defense, Azeroth Wars, Island Troll Tribes. Great stuff. Oh, and Warlocks are utterly awesome, even tho I got in them just recently.

 

[gongal]

If remaster means dedicated servers then

 

[Cross]

Well that's quite unexpected. I have 0 faith a potential remaster would bring anything, since wc3 still works like a charm and still looks good thanks to the cartoon design.

 

[CptMace]

Interesting take on the problem, mate. But I found your method quite lacking and decided to give you a hand with your demonstration.

Spoiler

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

Frostmourne hungers

 

[Seethe]

Well that's quite unexpected. I have 0 faith a potential remaster would bring anything, since wc3 still works like a charm and still looks good thanks to the cartoon design. But if younglings around the world get to know the game thanks to the advertisement, good for them.

Proper ladder system, get rid of stanking dirty maphackers. Or at least reduce the amount.

 

[ChaDargo]

As a former Brood War player who got real excited about that remaster, I wonder if (and hope that) a WC3 remaster will have a bigger boost to its success than one did for SCBW. Haven't played WC3 in a long time, any of you have an opinion on what good a remaster would do for the community? Just to provide a bit of insight into what the remaster did to BW: http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/531010-starcraft-rm-weve-lost-more-than-we-gained

Although I don't know how serious anyone on these forums might be (or have been) about WC3

 

[RhodokMasterRaceOfficial]

Most of the actual scene is in China and Blizzard has zero control over anything that goes on there, so I'm slightly more optimistic about things going well for the scene overall if Blizz makes the political power-play of remastering the game and attempting to kill pirate servers. You bet your ass European players like Foggy are still going to go to China to play in GCS and that GCS will still be around, even if Blizzard pulls the same crap they pulled with SC:R.

 

[Cyberarmy]

- World Editor now supports 24 player maps

Bloody hell?

 

[ChaDargo]

Most of the actual scene is in China and Blizzard has zero control over anything that goes on there, so I'm slightly more optimistic about things going well for the scene overall if Blizz makes the political power-play of remastering the game and attempting to kill pirate servers. You bet your ass European players like Foggy are still going to go to China to play in GCS and that GCS will still be around, even if Blizzard pulls the same crap they pulled with SC:R.

It would be awesome to have a resurgence of the WC3 scene, I played it a ton back in college, even played in the TFT beta. Good to hear that Blizzard won't be able to interfere over there... I really wonder if their whole intention with SC:R was to kill the Korean scene -.-

How big is the Chinese scene for WC3? I'm pretty excited to watch the little tournament next week and it might be fun to get back into the game (even if I did and would really suck).

 

[RhodokMasterRaceOfficial]

How big is the Chinese scene for WC3? I'm pretty excited to watch the little tournament next week and it might be fun to get back into the game (even if I did and would really suck).

It's about as big as Korea's current Starcraft 1 scene, honestly. The prize pools aren't as huge, yet, but they still have offline tournaments in a studio with player booths. The current major premier tournament (equivalent to SC1's ASL) is the Golden Championship Series, which basically runs 3-4 times a year. The Back2Warcraft youtube channel is basically the official English casting for the event, and they've got all of the vods there.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

- World Editor now supports 24 player maps

Bloody hell?

Would't they have to create a bigger map size?

But that's pretty damn cool.

 

[RhodokMasterRaceOfficial]

Would't they have to create a bigger map size?

But that's pretty damn cool.

You can already get maps out to 512x512 (over 256x256) in hacked editors, and they load fine on Battle.Net. This doesn't really have many implications for a lot of custom maps that, to begin with, didn't use the full vanilla 256x256 size though.

 

[deama]

If they include a new campaign, that would boost it nicely; something like the rexxar campaign? Maybe some sort of burning crusade campaign?

 

[ChaDargo]

Just in case you guys were interested, there's a reddit thread where you can basically ask Blizzard about WC3. Was opened up 4 hours ago by Neo, the guy who runs Back2Warcraft on YouTube (which was a channel suggested earlier in this thread). Apparently he's in Irvine for the event in the next couple days.

https://www.reddit.com/r/WC3/comments/80dqji/ask_them_anything_your_questions_and_feedback_for/

 

[ChaDargo]

Also, I played on the PTR and I thought I noticed something but then I just wrote it off as not having played in forever. Then I looked up a thread about the game changes on TeamLiquid and...

1.28

1.29

Blizzard zoomed out the camera. Apparently veteran players don't like it. Also it's odd that it wasn't in the patch notes.

 

[deama]

I like the zoomed out camera. I always hate how everyone wants most RTS games to be played so zoomed in, like, why?

 

[ChaDargo]

I like the zoomed out camera. I always hate how everyone wants most RTS games to be played so zoomed in, like, why?

From what I understand (and from what TL people have said), it's a problem of not having as much control of micromanagement, and the zoom-in feature isn't useful for correcting the issue. From what I remember (didn't zoom in while playing last), when you zoom-in, it slightly rotates and isn't very controllable. Also, I read another post where a guy pointed out that being able to zoom in for more control gives your opponent unfair sight advantage... but that doesn't make much sense to me

One thing I've learned about competitive RTS games is that they're a lot like the hardcore RPG community: no one is ever satisfied, and everyone has long-winded, technical opinions on how they want things to go lol

Personally, I like the idea of being able to zoom out and in, but they should make it more functional. This is exactly how they started the process of remastering SC (big patch of features, not balancing), then eventually testing the new features on PTR, then releasing SCR. I imagine a WCR would be required to make the zooming more functional.

Here's hoping we get some news about that this week! Pretty exciting stuff

Edit: Also, I like your idea of a new campaign. After I see if they're going to announce anything tomorrow or wednesday, I'm thinking of replaying through RoC and TFT campaigns again. Probably my favorite RTS campaigns ever.

 

[hivemind]

lol

 

[Great Deceiver]

The zoomed-out thing is probably just on widescreen resolutions. It wasn't possible to get aspect-correct widescreen before this patch. Did you compare 4:3 resolutions directly on both versions?

 

[Dzupakazul]

Edit: Also, I like your idea of a new campaign. After I see if they're going to announce anything tomorrow or wednesday, I'm thinking of replaying through RoC and TFT campaigns again. Probably my favorite RTS campaigns ever.

Recently beat them on Hard for the first time. I consider myself rather good at RTSes and yet WC3 was causing me grief. Interestingly enough the final mission with Illidan, Vashj and Kael wasn't as hard as Slaughter the humans before they escape! or that bloody siege of Lordaeron with Balnazzar and his happy green friends. Took me a while to just learn to plop 40 towers at each expo and defend with hero until you can get 3 saturated bases and slowly get up to High Upkeep and 100/100 something. Still, some missions really suck even if you try that, e.g. Kael's second mission forces you to storm a fully furnished UD base without any siege units, with a handful of Naga you can't regain if they die, and the enemy base has I think a Pit Lord and a Lich at level 9. I ended up waiting for the enemy to move out with his army of wyrms and a hero and attacked his base while he ravaged mine.
Also I'm kind of terrible at managing 100/100 fights because units kinda blend together too much. Whenever I would go up against something like Garg/Destro/Wyrm or those wretched Couatl that plague the Night Elf campaign, they would carpet-cover my entire army and I would have a ridiculously hard time finding my own units.

Still it felt like a huge accomplishment to get through this whole thing, especially since I beat the final UD mission in my second try, with some decisive attacks and a race to the final obelisk that I won against Illidan by a second. It's IMHO the hardest Blizzard campaign and probably one of the harder RTS campaigns as a whole.

 

[ChaDargo]

The zoomed-out thing is probably just on widescreen resolutions. It wasn't possible to get aspect-correct widescreen before this patch. Did you compare 4:3 resolutions directly on both versions?

Those actually weren't my screens because my PC is an embarrassingly shitty laptop. My gaming rig died on me a few months ago and I've yet the money to purchase new parts. But, because I'm a cool guy, I took some screens for you

Unless I'm in window mode, I think it's even more obvious at the resolution I'm using (it will only even ALLOW me to go up to 1024x768 because of my wondrous Intel Mobile Chip Series 4 video card!). I seriously noticed as soon as I was playing, but it was so laggy (I made the mistake of running a 2v2v2v2v2 on this crap laptop) and I hadn't played in so many years that I just dismissed it as me being a tard.

So here are three screens that demonstrate the difference pretty conclusively, again, apologies for the crap quality! Also, all pics are taken completely zoomed out with space bar used to center on the Necropolis


Full screen, 1.28, 1024x768

Full screen, 1.29, 1024x768

Windowed, 1.28, 1024x768

Windowed, 1.29, 1024x768

Running both clients simultaneously

The windowed versions demonstrate that widescreen isn't the issue. Also, if you look at comparisons of SCR in widescreen vs SCBW 1.61.1, the units remain the same proportions. This lack of any differences besides pure cosmetics was very important to the competitive scene, a scene of tryhards and elitists which makes RPGCodex look almost casual by comparison lol. Just the issue of allowing remapping of hotkeys in SCR was a very contentious issue that the developers were extremely cautious about implementing.

I believe the competitive scene of WC3 wouldn't be as strict about the fidelity of the game and the maintaining of the status quo, for various reasons I could probably explain, but even this slight difference above is upsetting the hardcore competitive 1v1 players from what I've seen on TeamLiquid.