![]() ![]() In July of 2021, Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier published a detailed report that shed light on the troubled development of Warcraft 3: Reforged, which, more than anything else, made it clear that right from the get go, the game was fighting an uphill battle- and as I mentioned earlier, directives passed down to Blizzard by Activision were almost singularly responsible for that. And really, even a cursory glance at the details of the game’s messy development will tell you that its rapid post-launch failure was not much of a surprise- even to Blizzard, really. So again, the words “unmitigated disaster” seem like a pretty apt description for the whole situation. Not long after Warcraft 3: Reforged’s launch, Blizzard started accepting refund requests from players with a no-questions-asked policy, and within a few months of the remaster’s release, its development team was disbanded. In fact, for a few good months until Madden NFL 21’s launch in August 2020, Reforged had the lowest user-score for any game on Metacritic, while its Metacritic user score was also the lowest ever for a Blizzard game until Diablo Immortal came along earlier this year (which was another big mess- but that’s a different story entirely). User scores aren’t necessarily perfectly reflective of a game’s quality all the time, but they are often reflective of how a game’s community is feeling about that particular product- and Warcraft 3: Reforged’s user reviews painted an ugly picture. Warcraft 3: Reforged was widely critcized by players as well. Of course, it wasn’t just the reviews that slammed the game. ![]() Most significantly, Warcraft 3: Reforged’s client completely replaced the original game, rendering it inaccessible, which meant that not only was Reforged a bad remaster, it somehow managed to actively make the original game – an unabashed masterpiece in its own right – worse. It was a failure on all fronts, and it didn’t help at all that Blizzard made some other questionable decisions related to the game as well that only served to frustrate the community more. Reviews were surprisingly negative by and large, with criticism being focused on a number of factors, including the poor technical state the game had launched in, it’s cumbersome UI, the fact that many features that Blizzard had promised before launch were missing (like updated cutscenes and re-recorded voice overs), and the fact that even some key features from the original game were missing (like clans and the ladder system). Warcraft 3: Reforged launched in January 2020, and it was instantly clear upon its release that the game was something of an unmitigated disaster. Rather than going all out with the remaster and delivering a truly definitive version of an all-time classic, Blizzard Entertainment made one wrong decision after another – enforced by directives from Activision, which we’ll get to in a bit – and that led to, quite simply, a disastrous game. You’d think that a remaster of a project with that kind of legacy would warrant proper care and attention from Blizzard, but things, of course, turned out very differently. BLIZZARD DIABLO 2 RESURRECTED PCWarcraft 3 is, of course, a special game- widely regarded as one of the greatest strategy games ever made, it holds a special place in the hearts of millions and is often seen as a landmark PC title. Recent years, however, have brought a few blemishes to Blizzard’s pristine record- and probably the biggest blemish of the lot is Warcraft 3: Reforged. When Blizzard put out a new game, the entire industry would pause and take notice, and almost as a rule, these new games would shatter expectations and be met with rapturous critical and commercial reception. Until not too long ago, Blizzard Entertainment still had all the prestige that the developer had typically been associated with over the years. ![]()
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