WARCRAFT III
Was reforging worth it?
This reborn RTS spins a yarn about a host of factions fighting over the course of several campaigns, and then again in multiplayer battles and skirmishes. But there’s also another conflict: the one between 2002 and 2020. This is not the remaster that Warcraft III deserves.
Blizzard hasn’t done a great job of communicating what Warcraft III: Reforged actually is. Initially, it sat somewhere between remaster and fullon remake. Not only was Blizzard going to add heaps of new art and modern graphics wizardry, it was going to go over the campaigns again, improving them, tinkering with the pace, and even bringing the lore and story in line with World of Warcraft. There were going to be new cutscenes, a new UI, and more. With the exception of the graphics improvements, Blizzard has walked most of these changes back.
For the purists, this might be good news. It’s still the Warcraft III you remember, but it looks a bit nicer. Impressively, two decades hasn’t dulled it at all. It helps that real-time strategy hasn’t made many leaps since 2002. While it features most of the traditional elements of the genre, like base building, resource gathering, and maps shrouded in a fog of war, it’s really driven by its heroes. These supercharged units are fancy specialists with powerful abilities that can be upgraded as they level up and then augmented with items purchased in shops or dropped by enemies. They’re RPG characters, essentially, around which you build a small army.
REBUILDING
I’ve once again fallen down the rabbit hole of obsessing over build orders, taking hastily-written notes and – something I didn’t do in 2002 – watching lots of talented players stream their experiments and battles. I want to get good again. I need to do my orc pals proud. With so many factions, monsters, and troops, there are countless ways to build your forces, and that’s before you even throw in mercenaries, which you can recruit from neutral buildings, usually after a fight. If you’ve already got a build order that’s tried and tested, you can hop right into Reforged with it and not miss a beat.
These things don’t need changing. The core of Warcraft III is as gripping as it’s always been. The most noticeable difference between the original and Reforged is, of course, the art and graphics. Unit models and buildings in particular have benefited from the upgrade. Your warriors are now considerably more detailed and have an aesthetic that mirrors the style of later Blizzard games like World of Warcraft and Heroes of the Storm, though not completely. Reforged still has its own look.
CRAFT WORK
All the Warcraft III campaigns and expansions are available, but after nearly 20 years I’d really like to see what Blizzard can still do with its fantasy RTS. The dialogue and voice acting can be uneven, but this is still the best RTS story out there – sorry, StarCraft fans. It’s also one I already know by heart.
Even if you’re in the camp who wants everything apart from the graphics to stay the same, you might still be disappointed by other omissions. The massive UI and text that covers the screen are two big pains in the arse, and there are no UI scaling options at all. It looks comically huge. The ability to zoom in is rendered more pointless because of the size of the UI, and you can’t zoom out far enough to really see your surroundings. More bizarre is the inability to rebind keys without some external faffing around. This is a hotkey heavy game, so it’s a huge oversight. Making a remaster in 2020 and skipping the accessibility options, aside from a new ‘story’ difficulty mode, is just a bit baffling.
Reforged was in beta for a while before launch, letting a large number of players test the multiplayer, and it was delayed to give the developers more time to polish it. It could have probably done with a bit more time. At launch, players started reporting authentication problems, not
being able to make custom games, and plenty of other issues. Some of them seem to have been resolved, while others that have been around since last year remain, like microstuttering that can occasionally reach unbearable levels.
Then there are the issues that aren’t bug-related. Despite Warcraft III already featuring competitive ladders, Blizzard has yet to introduce them in Reforged at time of writing, which isn’t an auspicious start for an RTS looking to revive its esport scene. Clans and automated tournaments are missing, too. Perhaps because it doesn’t want the next Dota to slip through its grasp, Blizzard has also changed its custom game policy. If you make a custom game in Warcraft III now, it belongs to Blizzard. It owns the copyright and can do what it wants with it, a policy that looks set to prevent any real resurgence of the original game’s thriving map editor community.
There’s a long list of disappointments, some of which may be sorted in time, but others we’re seemingly stuck with. I still can’t shake the itch to play more, though. There’s a real dearth of real-time strategy these days, and even with its issues, the core of Warcraft III: Reforged is exceptional.
If you’re just interested in the campaigns, which tends to be the case with most RTS players, then you may be more content with what Blizzard has released, even though you’ll still encounter some rough edges. This isn’t anything like a comeback, however, and with the rough launch and the community seeming to turn against Blizzard after it walked back improvements, I’m not at all confident about its future.
WHAT IS IT?
A remaster of the classic RTS