Why not? Why can't you believe anyone fell for it? To be honest, I believed it when I read it. When I read "legacy maps," I assumed that this referred to any file with .w3x extension instead of .SC2-Map or whatever.
As others pointed out, it is unrealistic for me to expect that this company employs anyone who understands the software within the SC2 engine. So, I should have thought of that.
But otherwise, what would prevent Microsoft from making a very similar post to this, but where they use some Xbox favorite game engine instead of SC2? I suppose the other accurate criticism is that Microsoft wouldn't consider it worthwhile to invest the sort of time and money necessary. But, this combined Microsoft Activision group did make "Age of Empires 4" and "Diablo 4," didn't they? (I have played neither one of those and from a distance assumed them to be late-stage profiteering off of the intellectual property rather than legitimate sequels made from the same humans responsible for the old lovable brands)
Is it perhaps much more likely that in order to encourage everyone to forget Reforged and Frozen Throne, that Microsoft Activision would make "Warcraft: Orcs and Humans: Remastered" and publish that old game with 3D graphics?
As others on this thread stated, the same folks who did Diablo 2 Resurrected could probably construct that all quite easily. And it might be heralded as a success; after all, my hefty criticism of D2R previously on this thread was due to issues with modding. But if Microsoft Activision doesn't want to care about modding, and prefers to make more PopcornFX-style overcomplex-but-easy-to-pay-for games, then they could easily do this. Maybe they could tie in the Warcraft Movie changes to the lore or something silly like that.
Warcraft III made the mistake of Reforging the game without the Reforging branding. Basically 1.31 gave us a solid foundation to grab our pitch forks and hate this company, and everything they stand for. Because they showed us that our game could become technologically better without the bad stupid DRM technology. But if anybody is still playing Warcraft 1, well, I have surely ignored it. And I doubt I am alone in doing so. Thus by offering Warcraft 1 Remake 3D, nobody would be likely to get upset because they can just say it's independent of Warcraft 1 and drop any pretense of mod support.
So, that's very nearly the same as War3 remade with Star2 engine, but it differs because it can be so without us complaining. Warcraft 3 has the problem for them that in some circles it didn't properly die, so Reforged showed us it's much harder in a case like that to sell people something they already have for a profit.
Sorry I'm just talking in circles but I think I totally convinced myself what I think these guys are going to do next...
Although I don't know what in the dickens the Reforged 2.0 version numbering is. That's more in line with making
@~El's parody post into a reality.
