Warcraft 3: Reforged
Which is more than anyone could say for Warcraft 3 Reforged. From the outset, it sounds like an amazing idea. Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos is one of the most beloved real-time strategy games of all time. One of its custom maps, Dota, would even become a huge sensation and led to the creation of Dota 2 by Valve, igniting popularity in the MOBA genre for years to come.
So the fact that Blizzard was remastering it with gorgeous new visuals and cutscenes sounded amazing. There weren’t a lot of details, especially leading up to release but it’s Warcraft 3. How do you mess up Warcraft 3?
As it turns out, quite easily. The opening was the only remade cinematic – everything else was simply remastered (and it didn’t help that screenshots for these were left on the game’s official store listing, essentially misleading players). Technical problems and bugs, broken matchmaking, lag, desyncs and disconnects. Iffy-looking visuals. Changes to the original’s UI. No profiles or win/loss records. No automated tournaments, ladder play, or LAN mode. And if all of that wasn’t bad enough, Blizzard declared that it owned all user-created content, pretty much killing any hope for the custom map scene.
But that’s not the worst part. The worst part is that all of these changes applied to the original Warcraft 3 as well. So you couldn’t just go back to the old game – you’re forced to download the 30 GB patch and essentially have a worse version of a beloved game. Eventually, reports emerged of how much Activision limited the budget of the Classic Games team (with layoffs in February 2019 not helping either). It also opted to release the game early because why not?
The Classic Games team would be disbanded several months after launch, leaving other teams to fix the game. Despite launching in January 2022, Warcraft 3: Reforged only recently received ranked play, player profiles and leaderboards in its latest PTR patch.
