Review more for what it represents than the actual quality of the release itself, though at launch, this game was a glitchy, unplayable mess. All this could have been forgiven if Blizzard had left the original version alone, but they didn't do that. It is now impossible to play the original version through Battle.net. This says to me Blizzard actually hates you. So for making one of the all-time greatest PC games worse, it's about the worst remaster ever made. And I'm even saying that as someone who played the Silent Hill HD Collection.

So Warcraft 3 (RoC + FT) is one of my all-time favorite games, but I didn't keep up with news of the remaster. I knew it was happening, and I just expected updated graphics, which is exactly what the remaster is.

I enjoyed playing this again with better visuals, and I've been playing a lot of multiplayer lately. It's still as fun as it was when it was first released.

I get that a lot of people are upset because what Blizzard promised was so much more, and we've all been lied to. If I had kept up with the news and been invested in the remaster, I would be upset too.

But I just wanted the same old Warcraft 3 with a fresh skin, so I'm not complaining much.

Probably, in the dimensions, the worst product ever released in gaming. Not only have the promised graphics changes, such as new cutscenes and more detailed gestures and facial expressions, not been delivered, with the excuse that fans think that you shouldn't change too much (which is just a blatant lie in the context of new scenes and cutscenes, as pretty much everyone has been in favour of such changes as they were shown at Blizzcon), but the graphics changes are even a disadvantage for players! There are colour problems, own units are hard to distinguish with enemy units, which was one of the aspects of WC3, which was superb, the units are overdesigned and don't fit the world and on top of that there are all the glitches and bugs. This whole "graphics update" is even just a button you can move. So players who already owned WC3 before, if they also want to buy WC3 Reforged, with all the Reforged disadvantages, why should they do so, spend 30 Euros just to own a button that makes the game worse. If this is only optional, why not just igonise it and not buy it?
Simple:
With WC3 Reforged we have lost several features that made classic WC3. WC3 Reforged is not just a new product, but a patch that downgrades classic WC3 to WC3 Reforged, by force. So we have lost the old battle-net launcher with all its advantages, i.e. clans, ranking, lobbies, bots and got a non-functioning spectator mode, no test mode etc. etc.. Means that WC3 Reforged cannot be ignored, unfortunately.
On top of that, we've lost iconic sayings, as Blizzard's identity policy has such a fat stick up its arse that it's probably already sticking out of their mouths (which they probably even enjoy, which is why, this isn't even really a front). Just sad. Just shows you what Blizzard cares about their own history and IPs. Nothing! WC3 Reforged has motivated me to boycott Blizzard products, and I hope more gamers become aware of this so Blizzard doesn't get away with such acts anymore. The last hope Blizzard has is a Microsoft takeover (in which case Microsoft is the lesser of two evils) and if that doesn't happen, Blizzard dies (self-inflicted and deserved!).

One of the worst remakes to ever have existed.
Why? It made the original worse, it actually removed features from the original, filesize went 2gb -> 30gb (no graphics for you though, just bloat), and increased the needed specs you need to play a 20 year old game. I am not even talking about if you were playing reforged, I am talking about if you download and install the original Warcraft 3 latest version you will get a genuinely worse experience. You also can't play online if you don't go for the latest version so going for an earlier version needs workarounds! Whats even more disappointing is they released some patches with potential to the old game to allow old players to play with new ones, like increasing map player limit to 24, it became garbage on release. They removed ladder/ranked and took 2 extra years to reintroduce it, IT WAS FUNCTIONALITY THAT HAD EXISTED FOR 18 YEARS AND THEN REMOVED FROM THE ORIGINAL. They also now tightened control of custom maps so they don't lose the next DOTA and also restricted the use of copyrighted or inappropriate content in them. Bye bye all the wacky anime maps and all other cool fan maps that got made. Also bye maps like go fish who don't want to update because of the stricter control over IP and all that. I haven't even mentioned everything that was removed, there are several lists if you are curious.

Now for actual complaints about the remake itself :)
The new graphics also look horribly generic and cluttered. No consistent art design. So much of the promised new cutscenes, new voice acting, and all that new stuff was just not there. They added a few of those but couldn't be bothered to finish it. No new promised campaigns or story. Menu is worse, its html/web browser crap and it was released laggy and clumsy. Performance is better now 3 years later but holy shit it was garbage for so long. Still cant rejoin games, which sucks because desyncs happen regularly. Engine limitations still are a problem, didnt really bother to do anything about that. Incredibly unoptimized and completely garbage all around.

Even if this game didnt destroy the original game it would still be an absolutely atrocious remake full of problems and straight up lies about what it would contain.

At least I could refund it

Warcraft 3 was a massive part of my childhood, hell, my life in general, and I am proud of that. Be it the memorable story campaigns, all the fucking around in melee, or at least a thousand hours spent in the editor, it's a game that has stuck with me ever since dad first showed it to me when I was barely even five. It's the whole damn reason I begged for my first PC. As a kid, it took me a while to actually find out about the World Editor, and once I did, it was fucking mind-blowing. A few years later, I found out about all the different maps, models, spells, campaigns by other people online, and I was even more awestruck. I made my own maps too, most of them sucked and were never finished, but I didn't care. I even remember once making a bot match with all the opponents named after my school bullies to vent my frustrations.
Yeah, I'm reminiscing about myself here, but I think a great game should provide either a strong and captivating world/narrative, a deep gameplay loop with hours upon hours worth of fun, or a solid amount of ways for player expression in ways the developers may not even predict. Warcraft 3 managed to excellently achieve all of the above, and has an active community even two decades after it's release. If that doesn't earn it its place as one of the greatest videogames of all time, I don't know what else can.

And with all that said, Reforged is sadly the biggest middlefinger such a game could ever receive. Almost any credit I can give to it is solely due to the fact it's on top of a fantastic game, but that too is gimped, because Reforged actually removed features that were there for ages. Extremely slow patching has somewhat fixed this, but that's no excuse.
Old Battle.net? Gone. All your ranks and levels from there? Promised to be ported over, has yet to actually happen.
Custom Campaigns? Gone, not brought back until three years later. These tend to be massive projects that can easily require up to hundreds of hours to make, and here Reforged makes them unplayable for three whole years.
Tournaments? Ranks? Ladder? Absolutely absent at launch, patched in years later.
Certain voice lines? Gone. That dryad line was too offensive, I guess. Or even better, because "Grom" is apparently a copyrighted word, how about some absolutely terrible splicing of original lines? (Thrall is voiced by fucking Chris Metzen, could they really not ask him for a few lines?)
Reign of Chaos balance? Gone. Everything is bound by TFT rules only, including the campaign.

If the biggest appeal of a remake is a visual upgrade, then this is a travesty in its own right. The lighting leaves much to be desired, the terrain is ugly, various effects look like a fart gas, and the original artstyle is almost completely replaced by this semi-realistic, mobile game looking mix that is generally lame and unpleasant to look at. The individual models may have some nice standouts, but this means litte in gameplay. This is an RTS, you're gonna spend most of it from a top-down perspective, and once combat starts, visual clarity and consistency is more important than ever. Reforged absolutely fails at this, it's extremely easy to get confused and lost while playing, everything easily ends up as a big blur, and not even a pretty one. Or a smooth one, because the performance is subpar too.
The original graphics are thankfully available, but there are plenty of things that have been irreversibly changed, like the menu. A menu that fucking lags all the time, because for some goddamn reason it runs on Chromium. It also often disconnects me from Battle.net even when I'm playing single-player, and I bet the seeming instability of the game is at least partly responsible.

All of this, however, isn't the biggest issue. If a shitty remake drops, people just keep with the original. Well, you (legally) cannot now. Reforged has been introduced as a patch, and due to this, all existing copies of the original are now forced to update to the Reforged edition, even if they don't actually own Reforged, so not only your original CD copy is now too downgraded by Reforged, but you are forced to download 25+ GB of graphics you cannot even use (then again, why would you...). This is the real reason Reforged deserves to be forever remembered as likely the worst remake of a video game in history. It's an insult to both preservation and fans of the original in the worst possible way.

And I'm not even mentioning all the new things Reforged promised to add, and then never did.

Reforged should be only remembered as a perfect embodiment of what is possibly the worst era in video game history so far. Not only is it an insult to the whole medium, but it's a disgusting embodiment of the treatment companies give to this industry. The fact the project was basically cut in half because some rich cunt didn't find it profitable, the fact it shits on the legacy of one of the most important games in video game history, the fact that it has lied to, mistreated and scammed not only it's current customers, but also the ones that had stuck with it for over twenty years. And somehow, even this utter pile of shit on a silver platter did little as a wake-up call to anyone. Pre-orders that lie to your face, disgusting mistreatment of developers, zero respect for video games as an art form, all is still at large with no real change in sight. And as long as the shareholders profit from it, they have no reason to stop, until even your favorite childhood game has been wrecked and milked dry of money.

Fuck you, Bobby Kotnick, the current state of Blizzard may not be entirely your fault, but you nevertheless are one of the people most responsible for it. I sincerely hope the ghost of that employee who killed herself will haunt you until the end of your miserable life.

Warcraft III has been fully functional for 19 years. All they have to do is replace the models, something that the custom game scene has more than proven over the years is possible. Sounds like a simple task, right?

Then Blizzard took a fat shit on every shining accomplishment the original game had boasted, and joyously declared “Job’s done!”

In true modern Blizzard fashion, the company decided to take a game that was designed entirely around the art style itself, throw all of it out the window, outsource their models to some literal-who Malaysian company, and turn on fullbright like it’s some kind of unholy Half-Life mod. As a quick reminder, they advertised the re-release with a completely updated cutscene from the classic game. That wasn’t in the final release. They remade the intro CG cinematic. And just that one. Hell, they even fucked up the menus.

We’re focusing on aesthetics here, so you’d think gameplay would stay out of this discussion, but even that’s not the case, since even the classic graphics got fucked up in the update.

Do yourself a favor; install an old version of the game, and never update it. Even the original copies aren’t safe from this trainwreck of a remaster. The Warcraft 3 you’ve known and loved for 20 years is gone, best to cast it aside and Frostmourne its loss.

i make the argument that i've technically played this game
not because i actually bought this game
but because blizzard updated the OLD games to use this game's mechanics
and that is BULLSHIT you dont take a game that is nearly two decades old and update it LONG after you've dropped support for it
that just fucks up years of strategy, familiarity, and expectations for the game
and not only that it wasn't like a "oh theres a new update! would you like to install?" it was more of a "oh shit you opened the game QUICK UPDATE!!! UPDATE BEFORE THEY FIND OUT!!!"
anyways i was gonna write all the bad shit blizzard has done in the past like
6 years but i honestly cant remember it all
so instead i had chatGPT write a list for me!

May 2016: Activision Blizzard acquires King, the developer of mobile game Candy Crush Saga, for $5.9 billion. (i don't know why chatGPT considers this a controversy)

October 2016: Activision Blizzard announces that it will launch a new esports league for its game Overwatch, with the goal of creating a sustainable ecosystem for professional gaming. (or this)

March 2017: Activision Blizzard announces that it will lay off 5% of its workforce, or around 650 employees, despite reporting record profits the previous year. (this actually happened around february)

November 2018: Activision Blizzard announces that it will lay off 8% of its workforce, or around 800 employees, citing a need to focus on its core franchises and reduce costs. (this actually happened around february 2019 i think, also they had record profits again)

October 2019: Blizzard Entertainment, a subsidiary of Activision Blizzard, bans a professional Hearthstone player from competing and strips him of his prize money after he expresses support for the Hong Kong protests during a post-game interview. (man remember this?)

January 2020: Activision Blizzard announces that it has reached a settlement with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) over allegations of sexual harassment and discrimination at the company's Santa Monica office, agreeing to pay $18 million in damages to affected employees. (i'm actually not sure if this one is real, all the sources chatGPT provides dont work and i cant find any mention of it online, so i think chatGPT confused this with the 2021 settlement)

January 2020: Activision Blizzard releases Warcraft III Reforged, a remastered version of the classic RTS game, to a negative reception from fans who criticized the game for being incomplete, buggy, and not delivering on promised features. (also the retroactive mechanic changing, thats the part that really pisses me off)

July-December 2021: Activision Blizzard faces multiple controversies related to allegations of a "pervasive frat boy workplace culture" that discriminates against women, resulting in an SEC investigation, an NLRB complaint, and an expanded DFEH lawsuit. Activision Blizzard also agrees to pay a $18 million penalty to settle the SEC investigation. (i actually had it condense this all into one bullet point, worth noting that they also got accused of destroying evidence related to the suit)

and then of course the stuff after 2021, namely overwatch 2 coming out (and them just kinda removing overwatch 1 from existence), a diablo II remaster coming out which honestly i didn't even know happened, an employee apparently committing suicide just from the sheer harassment that happens in the company, and also of course all the stuff surrounding the microsoft acquisition
also more expansion into china, hooray! (this is sarcasm, i am being sarcastic)

honestly the only activision blizzard games i would be willing to play are games that specifically they do not or cannot profit off of anymore
so basically old CoD games (not that i'm particularly interested in CoD) and frozen throne (yknow, after downgrading it and spoofing a key for it)
it's kind of a shame to see so many people play diablo IV, truly the internet has the memory of a goldfish (that or the commitment of someone with an ashley madison account) (that or theres just that many shitty people who are fans of activision blizzard)
i remember there were several months where like once a week i would be talking to my dad and be like "oh by the way new activision blizzard news" and he'd be like "oh no" because it was always bad

As back in the day I was neither clever nor patient enough to clear the "Warcraft III" story campaign, I gave it one more try with this remake. Too bad that this time I had to give up again due to the bugs. The Mac version keeps freezing while saving every now and then. Other than that, I can’t understand all the hate as this is a carbon copy remake of the original (you can even switch back to the original graphics). The graphic overhaul is alright, even though a little cartooney for my taste. As with the original, I loved the wide variety of civilizations you can choose from, as well as the narrative world created by Blizzard for this title. The bigger focus on the story and expansion of the game contents was a big deal and a huge upgrade from "Warcraft II", and despite the not too friendly user interface the game still holds pretty well.

Played from – to: (2022-07-28 – 2022-08-13) – PC keyboard.
‣ 5/10 – Just one of Blizzards pimp slaps to the fans.
‣ Thoughts: After a few years since the disastrous release of Warcraft III: Reforged I decided to give it a go. Since I am a huge fan of these games, I knew that the base gameplay will still excite me, but where I really hoped to be impressed was in the graphical overhaul and those new cutscenes. Did I get what I hoped for? No, nobody did. Warcraft III: Reforged is a fucking scam in marketing. Almost nothing showed in the trailers were present in the game. Now with all that, I still tried to go in with an open mind. And to my surprise there were still things that felt remade. Animations and graphics were definitely improved upon and felt like they were those type of graphics you remember as a kid even though the game always looked worse. Some missions surprisingly were also touched up. They had little areas added or removed and I’m pretty sure there were even some new enemy types. And then there’s the remade cutscenes that in most cases felt worse. There are effects missing, camera angles that feel even more stagnant than the base game etc. All in all, the only reason why I’m not giving this a horrible score is because, I still love the base game that Warcraft is. The story is fun, the gameplay is good and the overall vibe of what made me enjoy these two games is, in a way, still there. I just don’t think this is a worthy improvement. They could’ve improved the horseshit troop AI, cutscenes, mission layouts, but they slacked off hard. The game deservers way more love than this.