Warcraft III Reforged: No Need to Hope for Blizzard Anymore

The old school was waiting for Warcraft 3: Reforged and hoping for Blizzard Entertainment, as it has been a long time since anyone should hope for this company. How long ago, everyone counts in their own way. Some – from the n-th expansion for World of Warcraft, some – all the way back to release of Diablo 3, personally I have been a Blizzard fan since that memorable day when Blizzard employees apologized for their actions. We got rid of the competitive scene of Heroes of the Storm. Truth be told, Blizzard has been doing well with remakes lately. Starcraft: Remastered was good; for some reason, the audience had to complain at first about World of Warcraft Classic, but in the end, the developers delivered a very satisfying version of the old adventures.

Here we have some kind of disgrace

Let’s separate the wheat from the chaff right away. The fantasy real-time strategy game called Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos with the expansion The Frozen Throne is a video game masterpiece. The old school Blizzard Entertainment has given gamers dozens of hours of captivating single-player campaign with an epic storyline, intense battles, memorable characters, and stunning cinematics. At the same time, they have given hardcore strategy fans years – and now decades – of intense online battles, esports tournaments, and the ability to create new maps and game genres with the built-in editor.

Back in 2002, few critics gave WC3 a solid 10 out of 10, but today it is clear that we are dealing with a benchmark strategy game. It is high-quality, well-thought-out, vibrant, memorable, and capable of captivating anyone. The stories of Prince Arthas’ fall, the Horde’s exodus to new lands, the invasion of demons, and the hard-fought victory of the united forces of Azeroth over universal evil can be replayed over and over again until the end of time.

All this joy is present in Warcraft 3: Reforged. Because it is exactly the same game with the same campaign, the same maps, the same units, the same tactics, and tricks. The strategic “Warcraft” has not lost its shine at all.

However, Reforged is a disgusting fake that is simply a waste of money. Whatever it may be. Price that Blizzard demands for the remake is better off buried in the ground. Just so that those people who sang us beautiful songs about the “most powerful reforge” of WC3, new features, and a second life for the strategy, don’t get a single penny from you.

That’s the paradox, you see. What’s wrong with the remake? The short answer is everything, from beginning to end and even beyond. The long answer is…

We need more gold

2018, BlizzCon. Blizzard Entertainment first shows the Reign of Chaos trailer with new cool graphics, and then the introductory video of the “Purging of Stratholme” mission. Everyone loves it. It’s clear that Arthas got a giraffe’s neck transplant, but it’s not a problem because the work is in full swing, and the remake will only be released in a year. And you know what, just imagine how great it will be to rewatch all the cutscenes with new direction and details.

More is yet to come. In multiplayer, complete happiness is coming: they will remove the unit limit for gamers and allow them to select as many units as they want at once, add a new interface with all the modern features, and finally create a convenient hotkey switching menu.

The advertisement turned out to be magnificent, magnificent. How much do you want for it? What? Oh well, I still fell for the rubber fighter groups and the interface. I paid for the key and I’m eagerly waiting.

Our days. Warcraft 3: Reforged with the version “1-something-something-January-2020” has been downloaded and is ready to launch. Out of all the cutscenes in the game, only the introductory one and the final fight from The Frozen Throne between the same Arthas and Illidan have been remade. The rest of the scenes and cinematics have remained practically untouched. The developers managed to explain halfway through: it turned out this way because the fans wanted old school. There are no infinitely large groups of selected units. The developers managed to explain halfway through: it turned out this way because the fans wanted old school. There is no new interface. The developers managed to explain halfway through: it turned out this way because the fans wanted old school. Hotkeys are changed in the old-fashioned way, through a.txt file hidden in the “My Documents” folder. The developers managed to explain halfway through…

I don’t understand, where is my remake? Besides jokes, what I wanted the most from Reforged was precisely the damn rubber frame and hotkeys. If they had added quick-cast, I would have cried rainbows. But some vague and poorly visible fans even surfaced somewhere in the big world of the internet in a couple of months with mind-boggling demands in announcements and news from Blizzard. The essence of these demands, for some reason, boiled down to the fact that the developers shouldn’t do anything at all, and we would gladly pay for it.

There is a suspicion that the aforementioned hardcore fans are sitting somewhere up high in Blizzard. And they are not fanatical about “Warcraft,” but about their wild management maneuvers and the maximum amount of money squeezed out with minimal expenses for anything and anyone.

Take it, buyers, the Malaysian graphics and don’t be bothered. It’s worth it.

The graphics… have definitely improved

Given that we measure the new model strictly by the number of polygons. There are a lot more of them now, which is noticeable at the first glance at the first frames of the game. The direct comparison of the models from 2002 and 2020 speaks for itself: childhood is long gone, nostalgia is for the weak, and today we have a war between the pale green biomass of orcs and the gray mass of the undead.

You immediately start missing the figurines of the fighters, glowing like Christmas lights. Not even the “classic” mode helps – the developers also broke half of the lighting fixtures and stole several tanks of paint, so everything in the world looks paler than before. Yes, with the low-polygon Thrall, the orcs were greener, the trees had higher quality textures, and individual units were much easier to spot in the overall picture.

It is particularly frustrating that the new graphics are very poorly optimized. 50-90 frames per second regardless of the hardware – that’s a failure. Warcraft 3, mind you, is a classic esports discipline. Why do strategy enthusiasts need a game client that essentially doesn’t change anything, but steals half of your frames per second – a huge mystery.

However, I don’t want to speculate about the subtle Warcraft soul that was hidden in the old graphics and either disappeared from Reforged or was simply covered with a thick layer of plaster. The Malaysian guest workers-designers did their best, and I like some of their creations no less than the original. For example, the Night Elf Tree of Life. The Tree of Life is beautiful, even when it’s not fully painted and even when a light bulb is missing in the sunlight. The Keeper of the Grove (a centaur hero) from the collector’s edition is also cute. I will definitely not buy any collector’s edition of WC3: Reforged in my life, but nevertheless.

Well, there are also some minor things. Overall – of course, it’s not on the level of classic Blizzard, but where can we escape from harsh reality now. Those who expected soul and childhood – waited in vain, it was clear back in 2018. The god of fresh strategic blood needed fresh blood, and at least they poured it into the visual aspect of Reforged.

New dubbing

Here, I would also add that the developers of WC3:R deserve nothing but praise for all the real innovations, but they also brought us a new voiceover.

I wish I had never heard this updated localization in my life.

The initial thought is clear. Blizzard promised to carefully adapt the story of Reign of Chaos and The Frozen Throne to the Santa Barbara of World of Warcraft. They will introduce a few statisticians from the future, showcase legendary artifacts, enhance missions with old-new details that only appeared in WoW but should have surfaced in WC3 according to the chronology. It is understandable that such an updated story requires new lines, dialogues, and all that stuff.

However, there was no plot adaptation in Reforged at all. One hundred percent of the dialogues remained from 2002. It seemed like a logical place to save some resources. The old localization was magnificent. So leave it alone, don’t fix what isn’t broken, especially if you’re not planning to rewrite the story. But no. There are no added decorations, but there is new voiceover, and compared to the classic, it is repulsive.

The voices are randomly chosen, the actors read their lines without any thought about the characters they are playing and the stories they are telling. Typical video game sloppiness, degradation, and moral decay that I have long been tired of complaining about.

But it used to be fine! If there is one thing in Warcraft 3 that should have been left untouched in the remake, it is the voice acting. And yet Blizzard completely changed it to a blatantly worse copy. Bravo. I have no more words to print here.

Battle.net

Happiness from the arrival of Reforged would be incomplete if Blizzard hadn’t also come up with some magic for the Battle.net service.

The state of the service at the end of January 2020 makes you want to howl, climb the walls, and gnaw on the wallpaper. The classic Bnet, frozen in time, holding its defense until the last dark hour, showing the world how awesome network clients for video games can be, fell. Then it was gutted. Then a web application that runs through Chromium took its place.

Everything was thrown away, except for two things without which multiplayer is impossible in principle. At the start of its second life in Warcraft 3, there is automatic matchmaking, broken custom games, and nothing more. Okay, fine, they also added an inconvenient chat with a scrolling issue.

There is definitely nothing else. There are no ranked matches! There is no player profile! There are no regular automatic tournaments! There are no clans! And now they are not only absent in the new raw Reforged client, but they are absent altogether. Owners of the classic version of the strategy, when logging into Battle.net, first of all, had to download the 30+ gigabytes of the WC3:R client, the delights of which they still cannot enjoy, and switch to the new Bnet. With all the resulting consequences.

Blizzard has promised to add ranked games in the nearest future, but even if we put the ruined matchmaking aside, the online functionality of the remake is perceived as a harsh punishment for gamers’ sins in our past lives. Obviously, somewhere in the company’s secret analytical centers, they calculated that WC3 fans used to cut off the legs, arms, and heads of plastic soldiers, eat “Monopoly” cards, and burn dollhouses. Now we pay for these atrocities first with a simple $20, and then with the unjust loss of an excellent, working online client.

And if some scoundrel manages to create a new “DotA” using the updated map editor, Blizzard will immediately crucify it on the cross of copyright. Everything you do in the Reforged editor, by default – according to the user agreement – belongs to Blizzard. Therefore, firstly, no more obscenities. Secondly, no more maps about characters from other copyrighted games/books/movies, and so on. Thirdly, it’s better not to approach the editor at all, because the new rules are nonsense and nonsense from a company that is still angry at the whole world for the existence of League of Legends comrades who do not pay tribute to it.

It seems that if there is a real strict court case regarding the intellectual property of a creation made with the Reforged editor, the cheerful user agreement from Blizzard Entertainment will first be carefully examined for compliance with the laws of some particular country, and then thrown out the window. But only after heavy, tedious, long sessions, familiar to corporate lawyers and very harmful to everyone else. So, I repeat, stay away from the Warcraft 3: Reforged editor as far as possible. Choose any other tool – it will be better.

Anyway, custom games don’t work properly, and local network games are now unavailable.

Warcraft fans naturally rallied against the remake, lowering its public rating to rock bottom, demanding a refund for the money spent on keys, and even succeeded in their demands. For several post-release days, Blizzard banned dissatisfied players on their forums and remained silent, but eventually allowed anyone who wanted to return to the original WC3:R and their currency to do so directly. Without dealing with customer support or counting hours played. Well, at least that.

Did the developers ruin my childhood? No. There it is, lying on the shelf in two boxes from the localizer Soft Club. In those days, clients were made with care. Installed, launched, everything works. There is good voice acting, there is local multiplayer, there are custom campaigns, there is even the possibility to add third-party matchmaking if desired. The classic models are also intact.

Warcraft 3 in any form – even when you eat a cactus and play its “reworked version” – is a 10 out of 10. You can’t suffocate it, you can’t kill it. Specifically, the remake remains, in fact, without a rating, because it is some kind of factory defect with subsequent divorce of gamers for the purchase of the resulting pile of digital junk from the developers. Formally, Warcraft 3: Reforged receives 1 point out of our 100 from me.

If you want to immerse yourself in the world of classic strategy, look for the old discs.