Warcraft III was a record breaking game that helped define the RTS genre on its way to becoming one of the most classically beloved games in gaming. On top of that, it helped spawn World of Warcraft, one of the most prolific and popular MMORPGs to this day that was arguably even more influential.
So to live up to the legacy of Warcraft III, Blizzard made sure that the release of Warcraft III: Reforged was about as bad as it could possibly be.
We’ve written about this a few times before, but it stands to mention exactly how bad it is. It’s difficult to quantify, because so much of the issue has been how horribly the “reforge” stands up to the original Warcraft III. It’s gotten so bad that, as our Chris Miller pointed out, the game has even managed to sink to the lowest Metacritic score of any Blizzard game. That score as of writing this is a 0.7/10 – and still dropping.
How bad is it that one of the smallest issues is the game lagging to the point of being nearly unplayable? Even IGN pointed out that the Reforged that gamers were delivered looks significantly different (read: worse) than the version that was shown at BlizzCon.
Then, of course, there was the delay of release that we saw up until now. Blizzard promised the game in 2019 before pushing it back to the release of January 28th. Worse than that was the fact that they remained almost completely silent through 2019, not announcing the delay until the last minute and giving very few updates on development.
Graphically, the game has certainly improved – how could it not when its predecessor came in 2004? However, the graphical improvements are useless when you realize that you have to switch the graphics back to the original 2004 aesthetic to make the game run better. And once you’ve done that, the game because arguably even more unplayable, as now certain unit models won’t load.
At the end of the day, it’s a shockingly disappointing release that doesn’t surprise people. It’s no secret to Blizzard fans (or anyone else in the gaming community) that Blizzard has been steadily declining in the last few years. Many give the blame to Activision, and that could certainly be true, especially given the somewhat-rapid increase in microtransaction content pushed since then. Given the strong launch of World of Warcraft: Classic recently, fans were probably hoping that Blizzard could ride the momentum into a solid 2020.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like that’ll be the case. Even if Blizzard manages to fix their game, they probably won’t be able to win back the goodwill of the fans that have been waiting for this launch for years.
