Rejoice! After a wait of over a year (since it was first announced at BlizzCon 2018) and a delay of about a month, Warcraft III: Reforged is finally available!
For the occasion, we had the opportunity to speak with Kaeo Milker, Production Director for Reforged, and Rob McNaughton, Lead Artist.
We discussed everything from design to balancing, esports, and the future of the series.
When did you first hear you were going to work on Reforged? How did the project get started?
McNaughton: It started with working on StarCraft: Remastered. We got really far into that, it was looking really good, and we were thinking ‘how can we continue doing this with some of our other games?’ I would say it just ballooned out of that, and how we can improve our back catalogue.
A lot of people were playing StarCraft at the time, and we wanted to give them a new, modern game that connected to Battle.net. In doing so we updated the graphics at the same time. It almost seemed like an easy fit that the Classic team decided to do as a whole.
I wouldn’t say it was any one particular person jumping in and saying ‘this is what’s got to be done,’ but it was a pretty big collaborative effort.
Milker: There was a lot of passion for it on the team. This is a game that we love as gamers and as developers, so I think it’s a pretty natural fit for us to go from StarCraft: Remastered into Warcraft III: Reforged.
Many fans are wishing for Warcraft IV, and were a bit disappointed by the Reforged announcement in 2018. Could you tell us the reasons why there has been no Warcraft IV announcement?
Milker: RTS is going strong right now, with StarCraft II and StarCraft: Remastered, and Warcraft III still has a really strong following around the world. There’s also a huge opportunity to bring a lot of gamers — especially World of Warcraft gamers — to check out this game and get into RTS, maybe for the first time.
The opportunity is really fuelled by the fact that this is really the origin stories for World of Warcraft, and a lot of really cool pivotal moments that shaped World of Warcraft and its overarching storyline exist here.
So, I think we want to start with ‘let’s get everyone reintroduced to this’ and see what happens with it. We don’t have any plans for a Warcraft IV, but we’ll see. Time will tell on that, let’s all play some Warcraft III together and see how we feel from there.
What would you say to people who consider Reforged a distortion of 'their' game?
McNaughton: I think one of the biggest things, even for those people who want to play the original game, is that we’re adding the newest, most modern Battle.net features. You can have your friends list, and chat with them all. I also think one of the biggest advantages for Classic players is the support for widescreen monitors and all the additional features we’ve added there.
Basically, the Classic game is getting a massive improvement, and that alone makes this great. And, you can still cross-play — one Classic player can still play against a Reforged, and it’ll be seamless. I actually think it will prolong definitely the life of the original Warcraft III and allow it to continue.
That said, that same Classic player may see the art and the accessibility to be very nice and seamless. I feel like you can jump into the Reforged and the new art, and actually really enjoy it without any real negative.
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What are the main differences between the old campaign and the Reforged campaign?
McNaughton:There has been a lot of polish and clean-up work. As an example, the interlude cutscenes have all been made a little cleaner, a little smoother. Additionally, there were some tile or background environment changes to make Warcraft III: Reforged look more like what World of Warcraft became.
Milker: It’s just quality-of-life changes that make the overall experience that much better. They also spent a lot of time on cleaning up quest objectives and doing work on minimap pings and callouts, so players would always have a much better idea of exactly what they’re supposed to be doing and where they’re going.
Like Rob said, we definitely focused some time on those pivotal moments that — and we didn’t know it at the time we made the original Warcraft III — ultimately became pivotal moments for the storylines of World of Warcraft. You’ll see a lot of polish went into some of the in-game cutscenes that are around things like Sylvanas, and the Arthas-Illidan fight got a huge overhaul. Those are the things that we really tried to focus on.
We wanted to stay as true as possible to the original, but we also just wanted it to look as awesome as it could for a new audience and for everybody who’s coming back today.
What can we expect from you in terms of 'after-sales service,' apart from patches and bug fixes?
Milker: There will be a lot of people that are focused on Warcraft III for the foreseeable future, so I think there’s a combination of things we know we want to do right now, and there will be things we decide we want to do based on the excitement that’s going to come with Warcraft III when it launches.
No plans I can share now, but we’ll talk more about this in the post-launch timeframe.
Matt Morris [Lead Designer on Reforged] has said he would like to have a World Championship at BlizzCon 2020. Is there a link to the recently announced ESL Pro Tour?
Milker: I don’t have specifics on how that will go down right now. I’m very excited about this partnership with ESL to support Warcraft III: Reforged for the next few years, I think it’s a really cool opportunity. The game has had an esports scene forever, but this is a really cool front-and-center type of approach to it.
I don’t know about BlizzCon yet, but I think we’re all going to be excited to have a Warcraft III presence at BlizzCon, it’s just a question of what that presence will be and how is it tied into ESL versus being something else.
Will it be possible to create custom hotkeys in game?
Milker: The answer will be brief on this subject — it's really a feature which is close to our heart, and which is highly requested by the community, but we have no date to communicate at the moment. But it will come...
Finally, which races do you play, and why?
Milker: I’m really enjoying Night Elf again, and I think I'm just kind of addicted to the buildings of Night Elves. I kind of forgot how awesome it is to just destroy things with giant walking trees.
The art of Night Elves turned out really beautiful to me, and it’s something I just forgot how gorgeous it was. Looking at the Frozen Throne version of the game again, it was always really cool ,but the level of detail that was put into the Night Elf race and structure is just awesome.
I can’t wait for people who haven’t played the beta yet to be able to see all that.
McNaughton: I’m definitely not a competitive player, but for whatever reason I enjoy playing Human.
The wait for Warcraft 3 Reforged is now over! Campaign, PvP, Custom Maps: all the modes are here to make you happy again with this legendary Blizzard franchise.
