But if they wanted to make it look really pretty, theyd want Reforged.

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.

But as a game tester back then, I got to do multiplayer map design.

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 Im circling back around to Warcraft III, so this has been a fun journey.

Warcraft III was our first 3D game, and computers were pretty sluggish at the time.

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.

Of course, if I was going to make a new Warcraft game now and the sky was the limit, that mechanic would go away.

So is has a place in history, and for Reforged we felt like we had to leave it there.

Every piece of art has been redone, all of the underlying technologies and engines have been fully updated.

Weve added battle.net integration and more, so this has been like making an entirely new game, but weve been true to the original.

Its a different kind of challenge, but its something thats been really fun.

It still feels like the old game, but it has a higher level of polish.

A lot of that focus, though, was trying not to change the nostalgia and the flow, but more in streamlining them.

We did Warcraft III before World of Warcraft, and once WoW came out, we fleshed out some of these locales in ways that diverge from Warcraft III, so we went back and redid the art on a bunch of maps so that Warcraft III now looks like it does in WoW.

We did a lot of visual changes to make sure that the two of them are aligned.

Originally, the team had rewritten the entirety of the campaign.

Warcraft III is the origin story that feeds into World of Warcraft, and the WoW team has taken that and run with it in such a huge way over the last 15 years, so that was the original intention.

But as we went through that process, we got a lot of feedback both internally and externally that while we were trying to make sure that some of those pivotal moments were as big as they deserved, it was actually more important for us to stay true to Warcraft III.

Warcraft III.

Did you ever consider resurrecting one of those races for Reforged.

Ive heard some other crazy ideas, so I could just go on forever, but at the end of the day, those arent Warcraft III.

Warcraft III was four races that all feel really different, so thats what we had to go back to.

New Maps Warcraft 3