Things that you’d think Blizzard would recognise as being outdated by the standards of 2020. After the fourth crash, I decided I’d seen enough, sick to death of losing upwards of thirty minutes of progress. Let me elaborate on that, Reforged crashed my PC several times throughout the base game which became doubly frustrating due to an inconsistent auto-save feature that often meant I had to start the game’s lengthy missions over from scratch. After finishing every campaign in the base game, without The Frozen Throne expansion, I experienced several audio bugs that saw characters repeating voice lines in and out of cutscenes, certain characters saying nothing despite them being imperative to the story and while I was fortunate enough to not experience any visual bugs, I was plagued by crashes. This isn’t taking into account the absolute technical mess that is Reforged. The flaunted dynamic camera that was meant to enhance the in-engine cinematics is so sparingly used that I hardly recognised its presence beyond a couple of short moments that felt designed to be shown off in trailers and while I can’t speculate on the changes to updates to the lore within Warcraft 3 better fit into the greater universe established by World of Warcraft, a cursory Google reveals that the changes are negligible at best and non-existent at worst. Character models and environments look far better than they’re blocky originals but beyond their replacement, there’s really not much else that’s been improved. There are objectively improved aspects to the game, that’s undeniable. One that is unfortunately soured by a remastering that feels like a half-baked attempt at cashing in on any relevancy left in the game and only obtainable through nostalgia. This is all to say that, unsurprisingly, Warcraft 3 is still a fantastic game. While there are excellent stories to tell in the more external campaigns, Arthas’ journey to become The Lich King set the standard for tragic drama in video games nearly twenty years ago and continues to be a compelling narrative. Beyond the actual mechanics of the game, Warcraft 3 still boasts one of the most intriguing and tragic stories as it expertly tells the tale of Price Arthas’ corruption and inevitable fall from grace. That being said, if that’s not what you’re looking for, throwing droves of units at the enemy is also immensely satisfying, helped by hero characters having a notable presence on the battlefield because of their skills and abilities. Warcraft 3 skirts this by placing rules and restrictions on the player rather than the enemy, forcing you to change your approach constantly. It’s difficult to make a captivating campaign in an RTS game because an enemy AI can only be made to do so many things in a strategic sense and ultimately becomes fairly predictable. ![]() The RTS mechanics are tight with single-player missions designed to expertly challenge players in a variety of scenarios that build on what the game first teaches you. I’ll freely admit to having been a bit too young to appreciate it when it initially launched, but playing through Reforged’s campaign made it abundantly clear why it became such an almost household name. You don’t need me to sit here and tell you that Warcraft 3 is a good game Eighteen years after release it holds up. Which is why, with genuine disappoint in my heart, it stings to write that Warcraft 3: Reforged is an incredible disappointment and an unfortunate stain on the legacy of something that deserved so much better. It’s a monumental game, inarguably iconic for everything it did not only for real-time strategy games but for the industry as a whole. It’s a game that personified a lot of what was thriving in gaming community back in 2002, keeping in touch with where the trends that were current at the time while also being so ahead of its time that it was able to spawn an entirely new genre within itself. It’s arguably the Blizzard game, the one looked back on with such fond memories by players who lost dozens of hours to the campaign and hundreds of hours further to the game’s multiplayer. ![]() I think nearly everyone who’s come within thirty centimetres of a personal computer has, at some point or another in their life, known that a remaster of Warcraft 3 was an inevitability.
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