Blizzard-made Warcraft 1&2 remasters look like Zynga games made by blind duck
rockpapershotgun.comIn some places it looks almost as though they've taken the old tiles and fed them individually through some neural upscale/img2img diffusion.
The rocky coast[0] seems to change style slightly from tile-to-tile without much regard for how they fit together. The wall[1] has random artifacts, and equal trouble with tiling properly.
I think you could potentially avoid the tiling problem if you feed in a valid arrangements of tiles rather than each tile individually, and switch around the arrangement each diffusion step.
We're about 30 years too late to complain about the art style.
I don't disagree with the comparison of the visuals to flash games, but that's more or less all you can get to without a lot of backlash over completely changing the game's appearance, since the originals were very low-resolution highly cartoony things.
You could certainly have redone 1 and 2 in 3's engine, but that's a different market, in a lot of ways.
It's not the art style, it's the poor execution of the art style, and the
The remaster re-rendered the original cutscenes pretty much intact, but at higher resolution. They look terrible. Why? Because they're higher resolution, but no higher detail. A low resolution video, your brain fills in the details. "There's cracks and crevices in that wall" you think, looking at the blurry image of a stone texture. When it's high res without any filtering or texture improvements, it looks terrible.
The character motion is limited by number of frames. In the original, the characters moved smoothly, pixel to pixel. The low detail art and the low resolution that it was presented at worked because they fit smoothly together. The remaster? High resolution low detail sprites look like they're gliding across the landscape, even though they've got more frames than before.
I follow that argument, and I certainly think I've seen cases where it's been true in various remasters in the past, but not having played it, but looking at the comparisons, I don't have the same perception of the sprites not fitting that way.
I think it looks more bland in some ways because it's no longer nostalgia filtered so you don't notice the fact that the ground has no little details randomly permuting over 50 copies of the same tile, but I'm not sure that would have significantly improved the final result, to me personally.
The original cutscenes, I agree, look terrible, but I don't think you were getting around that short of redoing them entirely in modern detail, which wouldn't have fit and also would have been obscenely expensive and time-intensive. (Doing them in the WC3 engine or the like would have been a funny option, perhaps.)
I was hoping they'd do a complete remake of 1 & 2 in the WC3 engine. Modernize the gameplay and have them run with what is now the canonical storyline. Realistically I knew it wasn't going to happen and I'm perfectly fine with how they simply redid the assets to be more than 8x8px each
Yup. I can't wait to play these. When I saw a rumor about a WC2 remaster I was ambivalent because without WC1 it would not be anything. But they pulled through and having a remaster, even if lightweight, is a win.
Now I just wish I could get it on Steam since it's very annoying using battle.net for just a game or two...
Is there a comparison image? I’d like to see screenshots of the original and the corresponding screenshots of the remastered version.
Update: the trailer shows the old and the new version at ~26s, direct link: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_iWMpW_C7Z0&t=26
I think the comparison would ruin the author’s argument.
The trailer they embed for the release announcement shows them swapping, since like the Diablo remaster, I believe you can realtime toggle the changes on and off.
Thanks, I wasn’t able to view the trailer on safari mobile in private mode (asks to sign it but I don’t have an account). But it worked fine on youtube - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_iWMpW_C7Z0 if anyone else needs a link.
Comparison videos:
* Warcraft I: https://youtu.be/lhZL1zZTj74?si=95Fkue4cWWivJ7cf
* Warcraft II: https://youtu.be/KZ9Ac4WVW6Q
> brightened up with an MS paint tool meant to emulate crayons made of the sun
I’m old, but if you want to describe the graphics of the original Warcraft 1 & 2 that is a pretty fitting description.
It does seem a little disingenuous to not include any comparison images in the article. From the looks of it I’d say it’s pretty close to the original. Warcraft didn’t really get its modern distinguishing style before Warcraft 3. I’d be more curious about whether or not they kept the maximum unit selection at 4… which at least was 3 more than in dune 2, but probably not a great fit for 2024.
They increased the unit selection limit to 12.
It would be adorable if it was made by an actual blind duck.
Eh I mean it’s not that bad - this article is super short on details too, I need a unit-by-unit comparison describing an overall approach to the art style that changed between the original release and this one. This post is a glorified xitter rant basically. If I want three whiney paragraphs on a subject I’ll ask ChatGPT about it.
Skip to around 0:36 in the launch trailer, they swap from the classic to the new graphics on the same scene.
I mean yeah, but that’s a trailer, it’s just marketing. I want the author to actually put some time into exploring and explaining to the audience, if they think they’ve got a point to make. This could just have been a headline and a link to the trailer.