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.
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.
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 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.)
Now I just wish I could get it on Steam since it's very annoying using battle.net for just a game or two...
Update: the trailer shows the old and the new version at ~26s, direct link: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_iWMpW_C7Z0&t=26
* Warcraft I: https://youtu.be/lhZL1zZTj74?si=95Fkue4cWWivJ7cf
* Warcraft II: https://youtu.be/KZ9Ac4WVW6Q
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.
