I think it's even more likely we get a remaster now. All these changes to the original such as the widescreen support sounds more like updates to make a crossplay between it and the remaster a smoother experience, kinda like how SC does it.
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Warcraft III Invitational announced by Blizzard, new patch incoming
- Thread starter Deleted member 1378
- Start date
I sincerely doubt that Blizzard is calling old pros out of the woodwork for a one off tourney just to push a fucking patch. Blizzard ran a similar event for the release of SC:R. I expect something to drop at the end of day one.
Well the hope/belief is that the invitational itself exists in order to reveal some type of remaster, rather than Blizz just deciding to patch the existing game up a bit in the hopes it will become a major competitive game again or something. The latter would seem like a pretty weird choice, especially given how the Starcraft remaster reveal happened. If there is going to be some type of remaster reveal, it will likely be later today.
Thinking a remaster is likely due to the patch
The remaster might even come with additional heroes to become more moba rts game, think that would be a hit
Just hoping for cross play between the original wc3 and "remaster"
4.5 hours to go until the event starts, imagine grubby crushing the active pro's xD
The remaster might even come with additional heroes to become more moba rts game, think that would be a hit
Just hoping for cross play between the original wc3 and "remaster"
4.5 hours to go until the event starts, imagine grubby crushing the active pro's xD
Is there a reason why Blizzard officially wouldn't go out and deny the rumors of a remaster sooner if there were no plans in announcing it for this event? The rumors are so big they even made it international and was highlighted in pretty much every gaming news outlet in Norway. With all this tease and hinting a lot of people who are tuning in to this event are going to become very disappointed if we see no remaster. So if that happens I think Blizzard should have come clean earlier and confirm the remaster rumors as false, cause by keeping us hyped and in suspense like this for so long we're about to have another Hashimoto moment on our hands if they don't deliver.
I'm not betting on a remaster announcement. This isn't the first time they've made an event out of a major late patch to WC3; they were patching steadily in 2016 (1.27) and 2017 (1.28), sussing out some OS compatibility and adding options for windowed fullscreen, although much of the attention surrounding these patches was directed at the Chinese market. Back then, people were speculating about a remaster as well—and it's true that active support for the game lays the groundwork for the SC:R model where the remaster was really a fresh graphical coat of paint with modern Battle.net integration, totally interoperable on the fly with the base release.
But native widescreen support has been such a large and longstanding request that, along with all the unexpected UMS improvements, I can absolutely see Blizzard deciding that an exhibition event like this one is a proportionate marketing push for 1.29 and only 1.29. We'll get a remaster Soon, I'm sure, but I'm not convinced this patch and exhibition provide the grounds for an announcement.
For comparison, leading up to SC:R there was considerably more activity in the air among veteran players, specialist sites like Team Liquid, and e-sports organizers, all flying out to Blizzard or being briefed under embargo. WC3's scene is smaller than BW's even now, but if a remaster announcement were imminent, I'd still expect more of a background hum leading up to it, reaching out to more of the Blizzardsphere than just the remaining WC3 community. I really think this may just be a 1.29 showcase and would advise against expecting more.
I'd love to be wrong. (But I also don't see a WC3 remaster as all that urgent once widescreen is in; this game has aged very well, and the kind of work that the classics/remasters team was assembled to do—recover original code and artwork and spruce them up for HD—is something you'd sooner expect to be directed at D2.)
But native widescreen support has been such a large and longstanding request that, along with all the unexpected UMS improvements, I can absolutely see Blizzard deciding that an exhibition event like this one is a proportionate marketing push for 1.29 and only 1.29. We'll get a remaster Soon, I'm sure, but I'm not convinced this patch and exhibition provide the grounds for an announcement.
For comparison, leading up to SC:R there was considerably more activity in the air among veteran players, specialist sites like Team Liquid, and e-sports organizers, all flying out to Blizzard or being briefed under embargo. WC3's scene is smaller than BW's even now, but if a remaster announcement were imminent, I'd still expect more of a background hum leading up to it, reaching out to more of the Blizzardsphere than just the remaining WC3 community. I really think this may just be a 1.29 showcase and would advise against expecting more.
I'd love to be wrong. (But I also don't see a WC3 remaster as all that urgent once widescreen is in; this game has aged very well, and the kind of work that the classics/remasters team was assembled to do—recover original code and artwork and spruce them up for HD—is something you'd sooner expect to be directed at D2.)
Quite. :D
Blizzard in 2018 doesn't care about offline. Rightly so.
Well, the big news is that this means WC3 will run on modern MacOS operating systems... for that alone I'm down.
That was actually patched in some time last year, I've been running the game on my mac since.
If they didn't care they wouldn't update it tbh. But ofcourse its fanservice, their priority is with Overwatch, WoW and Hearthstone.
The Mac situation has been a bit weird ever since the PowerPC-to-Intel transition a dozen years ago. For a long while, the game itself was updated to work with Intel Macs but the installer wasn't. Then somewhere around 10.10 or 10.11, they got the installer working again only for the next OS update to break the game. As far as I'm aware, it's only now with 1.29 that you can finally both install and play on the current OS without a fuss.
SC1/BW, meanwhile, broke when Carbon (backward compatibility with pre-OS X Mac software) was deprecated sometime around 10.7, I think, only to be fixed in the systems patches that came in with SC:R last year. So the short of it is that for Mac users, everything works again except D2.
Yeah there was this weird period of time where my WCIII install grandfathered from a previous OS would boot and play, but couldn't patch or connect to bnet.
1.28 patch notes seem to be 404-ed, but I'm quite confident 1.28 added OSX 10.11-10.13 support. You should be able to download and install the live version on a mac right now. FWIW I launched it on my 10.13 machine just now to prove I wasn't remembering wrong.
EDIT: I may be making it sound simpler than it actually is, can't remember how smoothly the install went for me.
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If SC1/BW is any precedent, no, there won't be any integration with the Battle.net client/launcher until the game fully supports interaction with the current Battle.net and its feature set (like managing friends or chatting across different games while inside the game). And for SC1/BW, that only came in last year as a feature exclusive to the remaster. But you should be able to just download/install the game once from your account page on Blizzard's website, and just launch it independently whenever you want to play, unless you're so tight on space that you uninstall it every time.
I mean what story would they even put in it?
Retread stuff the MMO has already done?
Unless they do, idk...the war of the ancients?
I doubt that will happen since there are already books about that event.
All the senior figures in Team 1 (RTS) who were the leadership in putting together SC2 and Heroes of the Storm moved on to something new and unannounced over the past two years or so. WC4 is one of the likelier possibilities, although people who have been monitoring Blizzard's postings for new hires have said there are clues it might be a non-RTS project like an FPS.
I do fear it's unlikely we'll ever get an RTS on the scale and ambition of SC2 ever again, though, as the business model for a multi-expansion campaign on that scale was already a little out of date when WoL was out the door, with Blizzard visibly struggling to adapt. A lot of what's going on with SC2 now (F2P multiplayer, low-cost paid campaigns, tons of cosmetic microtransactions, multiplayer redesigns on a totally separate cycle) is probably serving as an experimental playground for what a future service model would have to be in order to support the kind of huge multi-factional classic campaign experience we all want from WC4. And it's telling that the "episodic mini-campaign" approach to new single-player content for SC2 was killed off after one attempt, even though the content itself was superb. I honestly can't guess what the future of Blizzard single-player RTS campaign design will be.
Personally, I think there's a lot of room for WC4 to show up and follow WC3's lead in treating Warcraft as an experimental, shake-up-the-genre branch of RTS design, not redundant with either SC2 or the MOBA scene. But it's anyone's guess whether Blizzard sees things the same way, and whether they think there is a meaningful design space to explore between SC2 and Heroes. Because the reality is that even back in WC3's prime, the base game occupied a weird middle ground that most players vacated quickly for modes that were all-micro (DotA) or all-macro (tower defence), while the mantle of "pure" army-mashing RTS remained with StarCraft in both the BW and SC2 eras.
Booted up the PTR last night and ended up playing like 8 missions of the campaign. Still a lot of fun.
I'm looking forward to doing this myself without the stretched aspect ratio. The last time I ran all of WC3/TFT a few years ago, I think I did it with the stretched UI, and even then it was nice to see how well the campaigns have aged. Much, much easier than I remembered, too, but I think that was just a result of living in a post-SC2 world where the general level of RTS player knowledge is way higher than it used to be, even at low levels. You can really tell, going back to SC1 or WC3, that these campaigns were not really designed around the expectation of knowing basic principles of macro and micro. And it's really in TFT that Blizzard makes a huge leap towards making nearly every mission mechanically distinct, a school of design that continued into SC2. You can see signs of this direction early on in WC3, though, which is one of the reasons an objective-based map like The Culling is so fondly remembered as a landmark.
Yeah, Hard Difficulty was unimaginable for me back in 2002/3, but I replayed the WC3 missions on Hard after beating most of SC2 on Brutal and I was just swarming over the AI without much difficulty. The final mission of the RoC campaign (Defending the World Tree) turned from a nailbiter to a walk through the park.
Still live: https://www.twitch.tv/back2warcraft
And Grubby interviewed the Classic Game lead:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwlWWToFnJo
And Grubby interviewed the Classic Game lead:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwlWWToFnJo
Every time the stream hits a reliable 1080p without compression artifacts, it's such a stunning reminder of how well the graphics have aged (textures in particular). I just can't see the need for a remaster.
Just hope they patch legacy bnet to not be so dependent on port forwarding, if they haven't already. I have friends who simply don't know how to set that stuff up.
Just hope they patch legacy bnet to not be so dependent on port forwarding, if they haven't already. I have friends who simply don't know how to set that stuff up.
is it going into the blizzard client or should I keep my installer from the account page at the ready?
