[rincebrain]

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.

[GauntletWizard]

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.

[rincebrain]

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.)

[ziml77]

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

[blizz6272]

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...