Warcraft III Reforged
Strategy from the days before WoW
THERE HAS BEEN, it seems, a little controversy. WarcraftIIIReforged was meant to be much more than a graphical update of an 18-year-old RTS. It was meant to bring things into line with the events of WorldofWarcraft, upgrade the world editor and UI, completely remaster the maps and campaigns, plus fully support 4K resolution.
Whether it succeeds by the time you read this, we couldn’t say. At the time of writing, a patch had just arrived to fix some of the more egregious errors in Classic mode, such as loading into a mission only to be faced with the “Defeat” banner. It hasn’t, however, returned the missing online leaderboards and clans. The opening cinematic has been remade, but the others haven’t. The minimap is a pixelated mess. Hopefully, more patches are to come, as Blizzard is doing the right thing, albeit slowly.
If you’re a veteran of the war between orcs and humans, there is, or should be, much to enjoy about Reforged. It does indeed run very nicely in 4K, although the viewpoint doesn’t zoom out nearly far enough. This is probably a design choice, because you can only have 12 units selected at once, in order to make it a game about small units, small bases, and small skirmishes, but the urge to spin the mouse wheel back remains nonetheless. The new-look units are colorful and detailed, the wolf pelts of orc shamen now look much more realistic, while humans’ cloaks fold naturally from their shoulders. There’s a strange sort of scale effect, where units are much too large for the buildings they’re meant to be constructing or entering, which reaches its peak with the watchtowers that appear like giant chess pieces littering the landscape, but it’s a pleasing sort of aesthetic, even if it does look more like a cartoon than ever.
HERO WORSHIP
For many players, however, this will be their first brush with the RTS flavor of
Warcraft. Forget the large-scale battles of TotalWar and the massed tank rushes of StarCraft, this is completely driven by heroes, with maybe a few backup units and vehicles. You can build units of specialized warriors and upgrade them before sending them off to raze the enemy village. You produce villagers who mine gold and lumber to create buildings to support your armies. Everything you’ve played in an RTS is here in WarcraftIII, and while in 2002 it was the leader of the pack, today it feels familiar rather than behind the times.
That familiarity could work against it, especially with the problems at launch. Why get this when there are other RTSes out there that learned from Warcraft and built on its foundations? WarcraftIII was the greatest RTS of all, and being able to play it again, with its new coat of paint, is almost a fresh experience as you rediscover the game you loved rather than wallow in nostalgia. If you’ve never played it, this is precisely the place to dive in, as we don’t seem to be getting a WarcraftIV.
Poised uncomfortably halfway between a remaster and a port, Reforged needs a few more patches to regain its old glories, but when it gets there, there will be nothing to touch it.