- Joined
- Aug 12, 2025
- Messages
- 12
Warcraft 3 Classic Remastered
Did you know that, With Reforged released, blizzard has been taking little care of classic graphics?
You might think that, they didn't touch it at all. But in reality, blizzard has been downgraded classic graphics for years.
Blizzard choose an ancient BC3 format for Reforged compression.
There is BLP format, which is what the original game is made of.
During the conversation from BLP to BC3, image quality gets butchered.
The less pixel a image has, the worse it gets. So for icons, it only has 64*64 pixels. They became a total nightmare. Other textures are affected too.
This is not what people think: Warcraft 3 Classic is 25 years old, should it look blurry on a modern display?
It's been intentionally hurt by Reforged team.
So here goes Classic HD (blizzard's HD) ?
What blizzard tring to do,is using a terribly trained AI model, to do a terribly 4x or 8x upscale.
Which means 93.75% and 98.44% information is "fabricated" by AI.
that kind of AI model can only restore information it learned from its training data. Most fantasy texture in Warcraft 3 can not be recognized by such model at all. What we need is a restoration model that learn image degradation and revert the process so It can handle any image it never "saw" before.
The unit and building texture are just another mess. Reforged team use a soft and denoising AI model, likely realESR family. Because they don't resolve any real details at all. The night elf buildings take a hit and become cartoon style. It's not that realESR models are all bad, but Blizzard choose a worse one.
So, Warcraft 3 Classic Remastered took a total different approach. At first it seems impossible to restore all Warcraft 3 textures. As there are so many of them.
The files is organized as these types:
Unit and buildings
Terrain
Tree
Icon and UI
VFXs
VFXs with alpha channel
There are 5000 to 6000 of them. It takes very long to sort them out.
We use a faithful and rich in detail AI model to upscale the RGB channel.
Then for every transparent texture, we use different models to restore the alpha channel. Or maybe use simple cubic filter to preserve the looks.
After the initial upscale process, I check the results in game, tested some maps, build every units to see if it was right.
Some textures were not well upscale by one model, so I choose another. Luckily, there's only few of them. They were fixed manually.
When all textures are finished.
It's now possible to play the original classic graphics at 4K display without any blurry and artifacts.
Left: Classic Remastered Right: Reforged UI with AI HD icons
Top: Classic Remastered icons
Down: Classic icons
Building comparison (Actually no need to zooming in this close....)
Then I take a look of the UI.
Warcraft 3 2.0 patch remove the side panels for classic HUD. So I took a step further, remove the top side bar too.
A new selection circle is added.
I also make upresed cursors, HUD.
The menu cursor is reverted to classic too. Why not?
Then I noticed that poorly compressed screenshots of campaign background is used in classic graphics.
As you already have 3d rendered campaign background. Why look at a low res screenshot? Let's fix this.
There's a iconic human vs orc background when you load credits from RoC and TFT.
It was changed to Trall and tauren chieftain artwork. Let's fix that too.
Speaking of RoC and TFT, many players remember the game as it's TFT. So let's make the score screen more familiar. The classic spellbreaker, warden, crypt lord and shadow hunter maybe?
So I took as many looks as possible. I hope you enjoyed the improved Warcraft 3 Classic. I will learn from any feedback too.
You might think that, they didn't touch it at all. But in reality, blizzard has been downgraded classic graphics for years.
Blizzard choose an ancient BC3 format for Reforged compression.
There is BLP format, which is what the original game is made of.
During the conversation from BLP to BC3, image quality gets butchered.
The less pixel a image has, the worse it gets. So for icons, it only has 64*64 pixels. They became a total nightmare. Other textures are affected too.
This is not what people think: Warcraft 3 Classic is 25 years old, should it look blurry on a modern display?
It's been intentionally hurt by Reforged team.
So here goes Classic HD (blizzard's HD) ?
What blizzard tring to do,is using a terribly trained AI model, to do a terribly 4x or 8x upscale.
Which means 93.75% and 98.44% information is "fabricated" by AI.
that kind of AI model can only restore information it learned from its training data. Most fantasy texture in Warcraft 3 can not be recognized by such model at all. What we need is a restoration model that learn image degradation and revert the process so It can handle any image it never "saw" before.
The unit and building texture are just another mess. Reforged team use a soft and denoising AI model, likely realESR family. Because they don't resolve any real details at all. The night elf buildings take a hit and become cartoon style. It's not that realESR models are all bad, but Blizzard choose a worse one.
So, Warcraft 3 Classic Remastered took a total different approach. At first it seems impossible to restore all Warcraft 3 textures. As there are so many of them.
The files is organized as these types:
Unit and buildings
Terrain
Tree
Icon and UI
VFXs
VFXs with alpha channel
There are 5000 to 6000 of them. It takes very long to sort them out.
We use a faithful and rich in detail AI model to upscale the RGB channel.
Then for every transparent texture, we use different models to restore the alpha channel. Or maybe use simple cubic filter to preserve the looks.
After the initial upscale process, I check the results in game, tested some maps, build every units to see if it was right.
Some textures were not well upscale by one model, so I choose another. Luckily, there's only few of them. They were fixed manually.
When all textures are finished.
It's now possible to play the original classic graphics at 4K display without any blurry and artifacts.
Left: Classic Remastered Right: Reforged UI with AI HD icons
Top: Classic Remastered icons
Down: Classic icons
Building comparison (Actually no need to zooming in this close....)
Then I take a look of the UI.
Warcraft 3 2.0 patch remove the side panels for classic HUD. So I took a step further, remove the top side bar too.
A new selection circle is added.
I also make upresed cursors, HUD.
The menu cursor is reverted to classic too. Why not?
Then I noticed that poorly compressed screenshots of campaign background is used in classic graphics.
As you already have 3d rendered campaign background. Why look at a low res screenshot? Let's fix this.
There's a iconic human vs orc background when you load credits from RoC and TFT.
It was changed to Trall and tauren chieftain artwork. Let's fix that too.
Speaking of RoC and TFT, many players remember the game as it's TFT. So let's make the score screen more familiar. The classic spellbreaker, warden, crypt lord and shadow hunter maybe?
So I took as many looks as possible. I hope you enjoyed the improved Warcraft 3 Classic. I will learn from any feedback too.
Last edited:
