Warcraft Battle Chest
First published in GRIND IV, pages 114–117.
“Geek, the Warcraft Remastered Battle Chest is out, are you buying it? It seems to be surrounded by controversy, and the developers used AI without a hint of shame.” What was I supposed to say? I'd already bought it while watching the livestream where it was announced...
It would be unfair to the one doing the writing (me) if I didn't explain a little what Warcraft means to me; it would be unfair to those doing the reading (you) if I didn't try to be as objective as I can. But since the truth always sits somewhere in the middle, half of what I say will be subjective and half objective, and I'll leave it to you to work out which is which! This isn't a review of the games, nor a detailed analysis of each of the three, just the opinion of someone who bought the Warcraft Remastered Battle Chest, played it and paid attention!
I played Warcraft I when I was 12–13, but not very much, and then I went straight to Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos in the year it came out, when
I was... 15. Since then I've kept playing, and I still play, Warcraft III and World of Warcraft, so it's fairly obvious that Azeroth is my second home... whenever I step into that world, whether through the wooden gates of the strategy game or the velvet gates of World of Warcraft, once I'm there I can breathe the clean air, visuals sweet to the eye, music sweet to the ear, and all of it together sweet to the soul... chicken soup for the soul, nothing else, only this hen is terribly old, and so the people at Blizzard decided to put it through a rejuvenation process... did they pull it off? What's the story with the Warcraft Remastered Battle Chest, is it worth it, is it chicken soup or a brew of weeds?
WarCraft Let's start with the first game, Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, and I quote — well, I quote myself — after a bit of time in the campaign: “Today I played Warcraft 1 Remastered, two missions, and I declare myself satisfied; the visual and quality of life improvements are extraordinary.”
Blizzard boast that they rebuilt the game's visual elements by hand... some people on the internet swear Blizzard leaned on AI hard and the results fall well short of expectations.
This is a dance I've no intention of joining — not because I'm more virtuous than anyone else, but because it's a vicious circle, and once you're in you don't get out again without frayed nerves and a foul mood. What I can say is that if I hit F5 to switch between the new graphics and the old, I for one can no longer play with the old graphics, at least not on my modern machine with a widescreen monitor; in the original graphics you can't really tell what's on screen, the units are a jumble of pixels, and even if the units and buildings in the Remastered version look almost too precise, too crisp, as though they were made of plastic, at least I can tell what's in front of me.
I The interface looks far better. Instead of that bland slab of stone with no shape or outline to it, we get a kind of mini-castle built out of stacked stones, with separate chambers for each of the three elements: minimap, units, actions. Resources sit in the top right in a minimal style, without cluttering your field of view, so you see more of what's going on — and speaking of which, we also got a slider to push the camera higher, much too high in fact; now you can genuinely see everything properly.
The game supports widescreen now, with both the remastered and the original graphics; you can select more than 4 units, 12 to be exact, and you can set up unit groups, an absolutely essential improvement, and it changes the game's dynamics enormously.
You can select units by holding left-click and dragging with the mouse — no more clicking every single unit in turn. You can use left and right click for actions, leaving behind that excruciatingly clunky system where you selected the unit, selected the action, then clicked where the action should happen. You can also see unit health easily, each unit carrying a health bar above its head.
But is that all, Blizzard? What about attack ground? What about rally points for units? What about the unit queue — why can I only make one unit at a time? And why can't I queue things while I'm building, why do I have to build one at a time, why can't I give three orders to build three buildings, one after another, with Shift?
Maybe the attack ground part wasn't all that easy to implement, given that new attack scripts had to be added and the AI had to be tinkered with, but the rest was low-hanging fruit. The music got the remaster treatment too, it sounds better, and you can even use it as the main music in Warcraft 3.
BUT — and I miss the days when you didn't have to throw in this “but”, this little villain — not everything is rosy... you'd think it's all simple, like addition: add something to something that already exists and you get more than you started with. But that's an outdated notion; modern remakes have to lose something the game used to have. It's a kind of ritual: you have to sacrifice something on the altar of the three modern gods: Vreubaniacu, Namtalent, Stricoricevechi.
The mission brief screen in the campaign isn't animated any more, and now the people look... suspiciously sad, and you'd say they were painted in oils rather than a jumble of pixels. All the same, the remaster of Warcraft I is welcome; the UI and unit management improvements are very good, because let's be honest, Warcraft I hasn't aged well at all and it's desperately awkward to play. Warcraft I Remastered is fine because the original Warcraft I is hopelessly dated.
WarCraft Moving on to Warcraft II, things change, because Warcraft II has aged beautifully, and even on my big high-resolution monitor the original Warcraft II graphics still hold up, really hold up. So what does the Remastered version add?
For a start, the original music in Warcraft II is better than the remastered stuff... it's punchier, you feel it in your chest when you listen, it's more... masculine, sweatier, more war; the remaster is too tame, too un-Warcraft.
You can pick a UI scale, and there are a few settings for unit portraits too. For Warcraft 2 I can't say the new graphics look better; the unit portraits are softer, and so is the way the units look... in the footman's portrait his beard used to be scruffy, unkempt, and now you'd swear he'd been to the barber before marching off to the battlefield. Everything looks a bit plastic, just like in Warcraft I.
Maybe it's all in my head, but when I switch to the modern graphics the unit animations are too... stiff, you'd say they were
II robots; on the old graphics they move far more fluidly. I refuse to believe someone tested this and didn't spot the glaring difference in animation fluidity between new and old — and if they did spot it, why didn't they report it? And if they did report it, why wasn't the problem fixed? This isn't a trivial thing, and it isn't the only problem; what I've described here applies to a lot of these remasters.
At least the new version has Battle.net support. I don't know if it has LAN support, because no option appears for me, just a “Multiplayer Lobbies” screen; before, you could choose whether you wanted Battle.net or LAN, or something else. It's not the only thing that's gone, for instance the victory screen is no longer animated, it's just a static screen. That translates into one thing: a lack of personality... and if Warcraft ever had anything, it had that, personality... please give it back, thank you!
So Warcraft II can be played like this now: you play the original version if you want the original version; you play the Remastered version if you want the quality of life improvements, but with the original graphics rather than the remastered ones.
As someone who hasn't played much of Warcraft I or Warcraft II, so that nostalgia pulls me neither up nor down, I'd say the two remasters deserve a 7... and then I remember Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition exists, and I remember the interviews I watched with the developers who worked on AOE II: Definitive Edition, and watching their passion for Age of Empires, seeing the plan they had and what came of it, I can't give more than a 6 to Warcraft I and Warcraft II Remastered — and that's because you get the original games in the Battle Chest as well.
What we have here is low effort; almost all of it screams “two developers and one artist who did the whole thing on the fly, just so it would be ready for Warcraft's 30th anniversary, because management realised they had to do something with the Warcraft franchise, with three weeks to go before the anniversary.”
WarCraft III But how is Warcraft III Remastered? Because unlike the first games in the series, Warcraft III Reforged already existed, and now we have Warcraft III Reforged 2.0 – I'm getting palpitations already – Warcraft III Reforged came out in 2020, and now they've released Warcraft III Reforged 2.0, that is, Re-Reforged, a remaster of Reforged.
No, friends, believe me, I wish it were a joke too. To get to version 2.0 I'll do a quick retrospective: Warcraft III came out in 2002 and immediately became one of the best and most representative strategy games, a game that culminated in the well-known MMORPG World of Warcraft and declined into MOBAs, starting with DotA, Defense of the Ancients.
Being such an important game, Blizzard decided to make a remaster, and so, in 2020, Warcraft III Reforged appeared, which quickly became the lowest-scoring game in the history of games on Metacritic... bravo lads, a total failure, a failure so enormous that even if they'd planned to be this bad, they couldn't have pulled it off; it wasn't just the planets that aligned, the galaxies aligned, and whoever gave the go-ahead to press the deployment button on this game has probably racked up enough negative karma for 100 generations.
They completely replaced the original game, they broke the multiplayer, features that existed in the original were cut from Reforged, the graphics, although “modern”, look far worse than the original graphics, Reforged's graphics are NOT Warcraft, they may be something else, but not Warcraft, and as a result most professional Warcraft III players chose to use the old graphics. They promised changes to the campaign, they promised improved in-game cinematics, but they lied, what they showed as promotional material for the game never made it into the game, we were sold a lie for €40, the launch price... and that was in 2020.
Now, in 2024, the Warcraft Remastered Battlechest also includes Warcraft III Reforged, version 2.0, which is to say they've tried to fix many of the problems Reforged had in 2020... did they manage it?
A small mention: if you've already bought Warcraft III Reforged, this 2.0 update is free, you don't have to pay for it, so we're off to a good start. I can say that, by and large, pretty much everything that was wrong with Reforged in 2020 was... how shall I put it, the things that were wrong got worked on, and on top of that we got a few extras. I'll start with the fixes.
The 2020 menu, which was ugly, ran badly and was hard to navigate, has been changed for a menu that now does the Warcraft name proud, and you can pick the Remastered menu themed around Reign of Chaos or The Frozen Throne. Features that were cut in 2020 have been brought back, in both single-player and multiplayer, more options have been added, including for multiplayer, such as showing ping. There are improvements to the lighting, in theory, and to the environment, and we also got an HD version of the old, original graphics.
There are several options that let you choose whether to use the original graphics or the Reforged ones, and you can select individually per unit, building, environment, special effect and so on. The UI has been improved with quality-of-life features, both the old UI and the Reforged one. But of course, there's great drama in the Warcraft III community after this 2.0... the HD textures for the original graphics are almost identical to the original, AI was used – ooh, The Boogeyman of game development
– AI that generated some strange images unworthy of the Blizzard name, the FPS is still much lower when you're using the Reforged graphics, some custom modes, maps and campaigns have been broken... in other words, the community of custom map and custom campaign makers is angry. Ugh!
If I could send some feedback to the Blizzard team about the Warcraft Remastered Battle Chest, it would be this: “Blizzard, I appreciate that you're trying, thank you for the good changes made recently, but I can't excuse at all the fact that your passion and interest in Warcraft is 10 times smaller than the community's passion and interest.”
Some industry specialists (i.e. YouTubers) have said it would cost too much for Warcraft III to be remastered properly; okay, then leave it as it is, at least don't break it, it's all or nothing, it's either for the Horde or for the Alliance, there's no middle ground.
The people who made Warcraft III believed in the slogan “it will be released when it's ready”; the slogan is gone, and Warcraft with it... but Chris Metzen is back, and maybe he'll be able to convince the “suits” that Warcraft is more than a product that does or doesn't bring in enough money, Warcraft is a brand, a brand Blizzard's reputation is tied to, and maybe it's worth investing money in Warcraft, not to produce money directly, but to raise the reputation of the whole company.
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