Warcraft 3: Reforged Outrage Explained: It’s a Disaster

When everyone was looking forward to a glorious return of Warcraft. We had no idea that it would become such a big disaster. Something that broke the trust of the Warcraft community forever. What was supposed to be the biggest revival of the game is starting to look like a nail in the coffin instead.
Now you might think that is an overstatement. Well, just take a look at the blizzard forums and Warcraft 3: Reforged review. A simple google search will show you the disaster that took place on 28th January 2020.

So, what went wrong with Warcraft 3: Reforged?

Well, for starters they gave the wrong idea about what they meant by remastered maps and cinematics. By not clarifying what they were going to do in the remastered version, they ended up setting the wrong expectations for the fans of the Warcraft 3 franchise.

Not to mention, it was a really cheap move to outsource the work to external sources.

To better understand why the Warcraft 3 gaming community was outraged,
let us show you what they said vs what actually happened:

What Did Blizzard Promised for Warcraft 3: Reforged

  • Remastered and upgraded visuals
  • Rebalanced online play for multiplayer matchmaking
  • Remastered Cinematics and Storyline Visuals
  • Unique dialogues and character interactions.
  • and much more

What was ACTUALLY Delivered:

  • Half-Baked Remastered Visuals:

Well, they did remaster it but not exactly how they showed it in the trailers. The visuals look good only if you go with a closer angle. From the top, the changes are not really noticeable. Also, the maps felt scaled rather than actual remasters.

Many gamers felt that there was no dramatic difference between the two. For all the hype that was created the game felt less satisfying. Especially for the price.

The textures are bland and hardly looks like anything “remastered”. It’s as if they force rendered the game in a higher resolution.

  • Rebalanced Online Play for Multiplayer Matchmaking

The multiplayer system was flawed in more ways than one. Not to mention, there were way too many connection issues and connection drops. This resulted in a horrible experience for gamers.

Many people were looking forward to it on a large scale. What could have been an easy home run turned out to be a complete strikeout.

Features like tournaments, clans, ranking, etc were taken away…

  • Remastered Cinematics and Storyline Visuals

Now, this was one of the key factors that got the gaming community riled up. The visuals shown in BlizzCon were completely different from the ones seen in the actual game. The BlizzCon visuals were truly breathtaking whereas the actual visuals were only So-so.

Credits: LeystTV

Not only that, many of the game content was broken and full of bugs! Now for a game that made so much hype and commitments to the gaming community, this felt like a slap to the face.

  • Too Many Bugs

You would think a remastered game to be bugfree as opposed to a beta or something completely brand new.

Well, you would be wrong. The game was obviously not tested as properly as it should have. It crashes a lot while playing. Many of the bugs that were reported in the beta version were not fixed according to the complaints of the beta testers.

Lag and connection drops are now a common occurence for Warcraft Reforged players. Not to mention instead of adding new features, existing features were taken away!

This is not what gamers wanted. With the current competition from new games going on, Blizzard has taken a complete step back. They could have followed the Age of Empires‘ example and did a seemly easy transition. They tried to make the game completely online instead. It’s not PUBG, Blizzard…

Now you need to be online just to access the game screen and menu.

  • Missing Content and Voice-Overs

Many players have complained about missing voiceovers and certain missing content in the game. The number of players that have been reporting similar issues on forums suggests the complaints to be true.

The developers have hinted that they will issue a bug fix, though, it remains to be seen to what extent. And, they also haven’t announced which features they’ll restored.

Features like clans, automated tournaments, LAN and offline play, ranked ladder play, etc. were also removed and chances are they won’t be coming back anytime soon. However, nothing’s confirmed yet, so let’s keep our fingers crossed!

  • Removed LAN Gameplay

The ability to play on LAN was removed which has lead to outrage from the gaming community. The LAN parties for Warcraft 3 were its main attraction. However, it seems to be removed in the Warcraft 3: Reforged.

Latest update: LAN option still exists, however, it’s kind of hidden and is still somewhat buggy. Check out How to Host LAN Games in Warcraft 3 Reforged for more details. And yes, you have to jump through a lot of loops for a feature that should have been easy to access in the first place.

  • Removed Custom Maps and Custom Campaigns

The main selling point of Warcraft was its custom maps and custom campaigns option. But it turns out that is has been completely removed. Custom maps still exist but now with a lot of copyright restrictions. Read the next point for more info.

The Blizzard community is probably the longest active community for map building and custom campaigns. Now, Blizzard seems to have put profits before players.

  • A Greedy EULA and Copyright Agreement

Unlike before, now, everything made with the world editor and call custom maps are property of Blizzard. This means Warcraft 3: Reforged’s new custom games EULA gives Blizzard ownership over everything you make.

That’s right, no more freedom for mods and maps. Everything now has Blizzard’s copyright. No more private servers guys.

  • The Price Was Absurd (For a half baked buggy game)

The game was priced quite high. Starting at 30$ for the regular edition and 40$ for the Spoils of War. Now for a remaster, that price was quite high since nothing extra was added no DLCs no extra campaigns etc. This really disappointed the community. Not to mention the fact that they actually removed some features instead.

Who would have thought that this would happen?

Also, no offers were given to existing customers. Not only did Blizzard went so far as to force update the clients of existing warcraft 3 players. (Almost forcing them to buy Reforged).

You can read the next point where I have covered the issue in greater detail.

  • Forced update for older clients

Now, those who did not buy the Reforged version were still forced to update to the Reforged client. This basically added fuel to the fire. Many of the core settings and functionality were forcefully taken away. They now need to download a 25gb+ bloatware just to play the old 1.5gb game.

Yes, you read that right you need to download Reforged just to play the original game. Even if you have not bought Reforged. Now I really wonder what the company was hoping to accomplish when they came up with this ridiculous idea.

Its as if Blizzard wanted to purposely end the original game and force Reforged on users, whether they wanted to or not. (I really hope that’s not the case, otherwise the comments and hate posts will turn out to be true).

Blizzard Official Statement On This Whole Disaster:

This was blizzards official statement before:

Producer Rob Bridenbecker: “The version of Warcraft 3 players have for the past 16 years, that needs to continue to be able to be played with this new version. We don’t want to break the community. We don’t want to break the game. We want to allow players to continue to coalesce together. That has some hang-ups. Like the fact that you cannot go hog wild with animations means that you have to actually make it look as high fidelity as possible while at the same time adhering to some of those original time constraints.”

Well, they did the exact opposite by breaking the existing community. Now I don’t know what Blizzard was thinking, but it seems we will be seeing a disaster similar to Diablo Immortal. If not a more extreme one.

Now they recently apologized in a way that didn’t really seem like an apology. Not to mention they have missed the point of why the Warcraft 3 gamer community is outraged.

Here is what they said (Community manager Kaivax): Official forum link

Hail War3 Players,

We’ve been following the discussions the past couple days and want to thank you for your feedback as well as your support. First off, we want to say we’re sorry to those of you who didn’t have the experience you wanted, and we’d like to share our plans for what’s coming next.

There were a few hours during launch day where we experienced server-load issues that impacted players’ ability to jump right in, but we were able to resolve those later in the day. Separate from that, we’ve seen community feedback about different aspects of Reforged that we wanted to take some time to address.

Before we go on: the team is excited that Warcraft III: Reforged is finally upon us and we’re fully committed to supporting the game for a long time to come. The next few patches and updates we’ll discuss below are just part of our ongoing plans. This game is an integral part of the Blizzard DNA, with a team that loves Warcraft III, and we’re looking forward to pouring our hearts into Reforged and the Warcraft III community for the long term.

One of the concerns with Reforged that we’ve seen are the visuals when selecting Classic Mode. We’ve identified the bug causing the colors and shading to look different from the original Warcraft III, and we’re testing a fix that will be incorporated in a larger patch addressing this issue and others. We expect to release that late this week. The patch will also address many other known issues, such as fixing some portrait animations and audio bugs, implementing some UI fixes, and more. Please keep an eye out for the patch notes for a detailed list of all the bug fixes.

Another area of concern we’re seeing is regarding online features such as leaderboards and clans, which applies to all Warcraft III players, including those who haven’t purchased Reforged. At BlizzCon we talked a lot about how the team is actively working on standing up the back-end to ensure a smooth transition to this new MMR system, much like we did with StarCraft: Remastered. As with Remastered, these and other features will be included in a major patch for Reforged, which will also address the issue for players of the original game. We’ll share release plans as work progresses in the coming weeks—please be assured that the team is hard at work on standing these features up.

There are some individual concerns we’ve seen that we’re not currently planning to address and we wanted to give the community a heads-up. As of Version 1.30 of the original game, we saw very low usage of tournaments and of the Reign of Chaos ruleset, so we removed both in mid-2019 (in Version 1.31). Eliminating the maintenance for underused elements has helped us streamline our overall support of the game and focus on areas impacting the most players. That said, we do anticipate that players who prefer Reign of Chaos will find custom games with similar rulesets, which we hope will help satisfy that concern.

Related to that, as we talked about last year at BlizzCon, we did not want the in-game cutscenes to steer too far from the original game. We went a little deeper into the thought process behind that at the show, but the main takeaway is that the campaigns tell one of the classic stories in Warcraft history, and we want to preserve the true spirit of Warcraft III and allow players to relive these unforgettable moments as they were (albeit rebuilt with new animations and the higher fidelity art).

We know this update doesn’t address all questions, but we’re committed to the development and support of this game. We hope you’ll keep an eye out for this week’s patch and future updates and let us know what you think as we continue fine-tuning things. Until then, thank you as always for your support and passion for Warcraft III. We appreciate all your feedback and will continue to keep the Warcraft III community updated on everything we’re working on.

Sincerely,

The Warcraft III: Reforged Team

What the Warcraft 3 Community had to say about it:

Even the Blizzard forums are swamped with hate comments and posts. Now I cannot show you all the posts since there are enough swear words to make a new dictionary. I ain’t kidding.

“Daddy Activision killed this company some time ago.”

“False advertising of a broken game that killed a classic. Warcraft 3 Refunded is the latest embarrassment from ACTIVISION blizzard.”

“Another disappointment from Blizzard, Activision has definitely ruined them.”

” Warcraft reforged its more like warcraft refunded”

And the list goes on. I have never known a company to get so much hate. The game even received the lowest Metacritic score ever. Breaking all the previous records in a bad way.

If Blizzard does not fix the game soon I’m afraid that even Blizzard will have to pack its bags and leave. Even the company’s response to the whole situation seems to be negligible at best. They seemed to be completely missing the point as to why the gamer community is outraged.

Sad to see such a great company digging its own grave and burying itself.

Hopefully, in the coming months, the game will receive the much-needed fixes and fast. Otherwise, the Warcraft franchise is sure to collapse.

Do let us know your thoughts about Warcraft 3: Reforged.

Otherwise, you can download the old version with the ptr method.

See you in-game.

1 Comment

  • Exact reasons man…!!
    Game was supposed to be great..
    Not anymore..!!
    Great article btw..

    Ryder
    Posted February 6, 2020

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