WC3 Modding Information Center
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Hello my dear WC3 Modder Community:

Blizzard woke up us with a tremendous news, so big and unveilable that, for a moment, I thought we were on April's fools. But no, and DEFINITELY NO!!!!! this is a REAL NO FAKE news: Warcraft 3 will enter in the Blizzard's wandagon of remastering their old games.

In this writing I'll show my own perspective about this revolution in WC3, and this will mean that there's a lot to discuss and share. If you find something inaccurate, please share with us your thoughts about it.

Previous moves.
They started with Starcraft Remastered, offering as an slightly improved version of this classic game adapted to be played in up to date monitor standards and nicer 2D graphics to make the visuals of the game according the the new demand.
But that move had a higher version, Starcraft 2, which now is a game not so popular, with an awesome game engine but with an over complicated editor that scares the users to make a single mod. It's bet for passing the WC3 community to the fields of Starcraft failed boldy and now this game is in the land of free games to try to get an audience.

The WC3 community: a retrospective
Blizzard at last heard us... is probably the feeling of the WC3 community. Years of oblivion, after the patch 1.26 and very few and spaced updates to the classic WC3 game with requests done by the community not attended for years, made the community to find its own way and the result is that we developed our own tools for everything: coding, modelling, skinning and more.

• Vexorian implemented a better coding in the WC3 engine offering a script layer called vJASS and the final tool, JNGP that moved us to a new level of coding possibilities.
• In the area of multiplayer, WC3 + classic Bnet was not the best thing to deal, and with the problem of port configuration, lacking hosting system and the limitations of the game engine in terms of keeping the users connect in a running game, or even more to track players and stats in the game, produced a need of supplying a technological framework to solve this issues by external companies or communities like ENT and MakeMeHost, which with the help of application like Ghost++ and such were able to automate the hosting process in a moderate to decent way.
• In the modelling, despite Blizzard offered to the community the Art tools, this became old and obsolete just for the requirements to only work with 3DMax 4 or 5, it was mandatory to implement tools like Neodex which works with recent version of 3DMax and GMAX. Not to mention the exclusive tools for basic modelling like Magos and MDLVIS, which helped to the non expert in the modelling field to achieve from good enough model editions to ripping models from other games.
• And there's a lot of more tools which were the process of reverse engineering of all the stuff done in the WC3 engine, and the decompilation of all the W3X format.

All of this has created its own technological ecosystem around WC3, where the users loves their tools, the developers spent too many hours improving them and giving the community the best they could, and it took the neccesary time time to get used and become dependent to them. when Blizzard started again in the scenario with the new patches, this brought to the third party developers some winds of fear and disapproval. A big example of this is the latest patch (1.30.2) which  has started a serious clash between Blizzard and the communities that manages hostbots. This can be seen clearly in the ENT's Discord chat:

Link
I for one am a very disappointed customer of Blizzard entertainment. For dozens of years, they have left WC3 players to themselves, without any updates, without any 'real' customer support, without any consideration for us. The War III community has had to bring the 21st century to Warcraft III on their own, notably with host bots, ELO, stats tracking, games list, communities, private hosting (many were unable on their own), multiple handy commands, etc. Competitive gaming environment were also a direct result of stats tracking and community regroupment with higher ELO bots, leagues, etc. Let's not forget @ENT Staff and other communities' staff who have helped to maintain our games free of ruiners, trolls, etc. Te list of things that the host bots bring to the community goes on and on. As of late, Blizzard has decided to get involved again in WCIII, pushing an agenda we still have no idea about. Some of their updates were good (24-players slots, more balanced units, faster replay speed, etc.) However, they have recently decided to get rid of host bots for no specific reason.

In association with other Wc3 communities, we have engaged with blizzard in an attempt to change their minds about bots. At this point, multiple thousands of customers had signed a petition asking blizzard not to remove bots. Dozens and dozens of users had been posting on blizzard forums in uproar. Blizzard did not care, they went on with their plan. We asked them to integrate the necessary features of host-bots into Wc3 itself.; They added !kick and !ban to manage the Public Relations aspect. When we asked them to delay the removal of host-bots until most features had been implemented, they simply refused to answer.
In order to keep Warcraft III community alive and with the same gaming standards players had been used to for years, ENT has spent many hours developing and promoting WC3Connect (https://entgaming.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=135760). However, today around midnight, Blizzard, in a direct attack to its playerbase (albeit possibly faithful to their longstanding incompetence), has decided to ban all of ENT's host-bots.

While we are at a late stage and communication is unlikely to be a possibility, I believe Blizzard still has to answer for its actions and be accountable to its customers. While we all know that Blizzard does not give a single shit about the input on their website ( https://us.battle.net/forums/en/bnet/12790218/ ), direct messaging is slightly harder to ignore.

For those of you who wish to demand answers, feel free to contact the lead developer who has been pushing for the removal of bots.

How can we interpret this reaction? a community that don't want to receive the desired attention from Blizzard, or a community that fear the change and uses the shield of its own development as an argument to demand the respect for the host bots system. The true thing is that Blizzard at last is aware of all the work put into the game by the community and not thanks to them, and the great ideas that this Wc3 community has achieved with the custom games done in the process (DOTA and AoS genre, Tower Defense genre, just to mention a few). This has shown to Blizzard that they've lost too many power and this attitude let other companies and indie enterprises to take advantage in the game market.

The next move: Give stamina to WC3

We can't deny that this move is really awesome, the improved graphics (which remembered me of this project) made me think they implemented the SC2 engine over to keep the balanced style of WC3, than ks God that's not the case. According to this list made by @Wareditor this are the features of this remastering (all the information from grubby stream):

Link

• Same engine as classic WC3, current engine upgraded (confirmed),
• On Battle.Net Launcher (confirmed),
• Crossplay between Reforged and Classic (confirmed),
• In options, you can choose to play with old graphics (confirmed),
• Classic mods compatible on Reforged (confirmed),
• Reforged includes ROC & TFT campaigns (confirmed),
• Ingame footage : http://puu.sh/BVeXM/ea8d0219cb.jpg,
  
• Ingame footage : http://puu.sh/BVf3F/e0898d817d.jpg,
  
• "Skins" and cosmetics, Paladin can be either Arthas, Uther, Arthas /w Frostmourne... (confirmed)
• Released in 2019 (confirmed),
• Founding of Durotar "revamp" (confirmed) and probably more (not confirmed),
• New editor can import old maps (confirmed),
• Old map will load HD models (confirmed),
• Animated trees (confirmed and seen),
• Frozen Throne getting remastered as well (confirmed),
• Audio will be upgraded, in every language Classic had and even more (re-recording with the same old actors) (confirmed),
• Old audio will still be in the game (confirmed),
• Achievements system (confirmed),
• New editor will be an improved version of the current editor (confirmed),
• Melee gameplay mostly unaffected (confirmed),
• New races ("Can't comment."),
• Balancing will continue to happen post-Reforged (confirmed),
• System requirement can't be said yet, due to the game still being in dev. (confirmed),
• Ingame cinematic-mode footage : http://puu.sh/BVgiY/af1c94eccd.jpg,
  
• Ingame cinematic-mode footage : http://puu.sh/BVgkd/0b359fd72b.jpg,
  
• No subtitle / textbox in cinematic-mode ?
• Game runs at 30-40 fps, unoptimized and streamed from a laptop,
• Inventory size being looked at (more than 6) (confirmed).
• Heal confusion from "old" questline, ex: reworked Arthas Vs Illidan fight.
• Modding tools used to make the new models will be given to the community.

This is a really promising wish list. And definitely we hope to get more from this company.

At last: the eyecandy:
This news can't be a good news if we don't offer the mandatory eyecandy. Enjoy 




Comparison from the classic trailer vs new trailer
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