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.
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.