Milker: It’s actually a different kind of game because we had to rebuild this game from the ground up. So is has a place in history, and for Reforged we felt like we had to leave it there.Ĭomparing the new art assets to the original. But as it is, it became one of the iconic things in Warcraft III and made us focus on the heroes and gave us more RPG elements. Of course, if I was going to make a new Warcraft game now and the sky was the limit, that mechanic would go away. Upkeep is a mechanic that keeps your unit count down. We had a limited amount of memory and performance was really a problem, so we came up with a game design mechanic that is integral to Warcraft III now, and that is upkeep. Warcraft III was our first 3D game, and computers were pretty sluggish at the time. Since you worked on the original game, were there things that you wished you could have done differently? Was this an opportunity to go back and fix things that had been bothering you for decades? McNaughton: I started working at Blizzard on Diablo, the first one, and then I worked on StarCraft and then I became lead technical artist on Warcraft III. It was like, “What can you do? Alright, go do it and make the game better.” Since then, I worked on StarCraft II and Heroes of the Storm, and now I'm circling back around to Warcraft III, so this has been a fun journey. There's were a lot more opportunities back then. But as a game tester back then, I got to do multiplayer map design. Milker: This has been an interesting journey because my very first game that I worked on at Blizzard was Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos as a game tester, back in 2001.

Did you get to work on the original Warcraft III? You guys have been with Blizzard for a long time. A lot can change in a year of development, so we sat down to chat with production director Kaeo Milker and lead artist Rob McNaughton to talk about how Reforged is different from that last time we saw it, and why the team decided to remain so faithful to the original game. In November of 2018, we gave you an extensive look at the development of Blizzard’s Warcraft III: Reforged, the remake of Blizzard’s beloved real-time strategy game that set the stage for the World of Warcraft phenomenon.

Warcraft iii reforged vs original