Warcraft III: Reforged Might Have Ruined The Entire Franchise

Jorge Arenas |

Jan 31, 2020

Warcraft: III Reforged is shaping up to be a beautiful disaster for a studio that was once a titan in RTS games. Warcraft III: Reforged was released, months late, and filled with a whole host of bugs.

To make matters worse the game was missing quite a few features that made the original game so fun and long-lasting.

Here are a few missing features & new unwanted additions as detailed by Warcraft III player Baker on the official Blizzard forums:

Cross-region play gone
No more Clans
Anti-Spam protections
Custom Campaigns Are Gone
Ladder with ranked matchmaking, stats, and automated tournaments are gone
Players have no creative freedom if they use the world editor.
- New limitations to what can be done
- New report button to help Blizzard takedown wrong think maps.
- Now everything created using their map editor belongs to Blizzard, they reserve the copyright.
- No more third party custom maps; ending some of the most popular from old WC3 battle.net, such as DBZ War
Maps can be censored

If you think by simply not buying Reforged, that you’re safe, you’re wrong.

This isn’t limited to Warcraft III Reforged. Since the update, even the classic Warcraft III game will now have many of these limitations slapped on. The old game client was removed, forcing users to download gigabytes worth of data of supposed assets for Warcraft III, and having to use a sign in to get past the main menu.

Old battle.net servers are gone, so even if you do find a way to keep the game from updating with the new Reforged data, you’ll be limited to LAN games, unless you’re tech-savvy enough to get around battle.net.

This neuters the game. It forces users who want to play the game they paid for over seventeen years ago to keep their version of Warcraft away from Battle.net; unless they want to fight off a forced download in order to play the game.

Once you apply the new patch you are now required to continue to allow future patches of Warcraft III.

As you can imagine Blizzard ruining, not only Reforged, but classic Warcraft III left a nasty taste in many player’s mouths. They made their frustration and anger clear giving the game a 0.8 score on Metacritic.

But as with anything related to corporate America, there are plenty of shills in the access media. For example, VG247 said in their review: “If you’re already a Warcraft 3 fan, this is shaping up to be the absolute best version available.” This is astounding to read since the game has more bugs than an anthill.

For many players, they felt that they didn’t get what they were promised. Many of the complaints center around how buggy the game is and even how the game isn’t a remake at all, but instead, a low-quality HD remaster.

You can see this in how Blizzard promised the world at Blizzcon 2018 and delivered what was basically a 1080p update with worse graphics. Below is the side by side comparison from GyLala:

So it looks like Blizzard might have finally beat the golden goose one too many times.

I’m not sure how a once-beloved company can return from so many bad choices over the last two years. It seems that in their quest to satisfy shareholders they’re willing to sacrifice employees (even though profits were enormous) and the content they promised to deliver. It leaves fans with a company that keeps misstepping.