Warcraft 3 Suddenly Gets Large Improvement Patch After 7 Years

Warcraft 1.29 Is Now Live

When a great game hasn’t seen support in years, it’s a cause for celebration when the devs return to make adjustments. But the latest Warcraft 3 adjustments seem unprecedentedly large, considering the amount of time that has passed since the last.

Warcraft 3 has received a new patch that adds wide-screen compatibility, along with a variety of balances changes and gameplay tweaks. Very interestingly, Blizzard has even increased the size of lobbies from 12 to 24 players. Additional changes make the game virtually unrecognizable from what it was back in the stone age, and everything is for the better. You’d think the devs were suddenly anticipating a new playerbase. Thus, there’s one question: is Warcraft 3 going to witness a remaster?

Back in the day, Warcraft 3 was the definitive Fantasy RTS for fans of the genre. Alongside Starcraft, it garnered so great praise and benefited from an extended lifespan thanks to the work of fan creators. 16 years later, the game is witnessing additional improvements for a much better experience. Since World of Warcraft is still a thing, a fourth installment of the RTS franchise isn’t even on the horizon, which is why a remaster makes plenty of sense.

You can find a small piece of the patch changes below, brought to us by developer Pete Stilwell.

Specific Changes & Improvements

Widescreen support added. To prevent stretching there have been changes to the interfaces:

  • Added bookends to the in-game interface
  • Added black pillars in menus

Game lobbies expanded to support 24 players. We’ve added 12 new team colors. Thanks to Erkan and others for contributing to the new palette:

  • Player 13 – Maroon
  • Player 14 – Navy
  • Player 15 – Turquoise
  • Player 16 – Violet
  • Player 17 – Wheat
  • Player 18 – Peach
  • Player 19 – Mint
  • Player 20 – Lavender
  • Player 21 – Coal
  • Player 22 – Snow
  • Player 23 – Emerald
  • Player 24 – Peanut

Notes

  • Ladder standings have been reset; good luck and have fun on the climb
  • Replays are incompatible between major game versions
  • This will be the last version to support Windows XP
  • Automated tournaments will resume next week

Bug Fixes

  • Clans can be created
  • Mac launches
  • Korean locale launches
  • Various missing textures located (Thanks to TriggerHappy for the test map)
  • Default resolution no longer resembles Felwood
  • Ladder maps cleansed of sneaky tower locations near starting mines

Known Issues

  • Temporarily disabled Fixed Aspect Ratio in Video Options
  • Chaos Kodo Beasts are showing as idle workers in campaign missions
  • Unable to input text while keyboard settings are under different languages in zhCN and koKR locales
  • Certain elements in World Editor overlap
  • Set/GetAbilityOnXXXX functions are renamed to Set/GetAbilityActivatedXXXX
  • SetUnitNameAll is disabled for now
  • PlaySpecialEffect is disabled for now
  • PlaySpecialEffectWithTimeScale is disabled for now
  • Crash: With an ability that has “Disabled”=false, attempting to set “Disabled” to false again will crash the World Editor
  • UnitDisableAbility does not hide an ability with Hide=true and Disabled=false
  • Default map directory is for from maps when creating custom games
  • Resolution does not change properly when switching between windowed and full screen
  • Tooltips for hero abilities may not be updated

Do you believe a Warcraft 3 remaster is in the works. What are your thoughts on the changes? Feel free to comment down below.

SOURCE: Blizzard