As you might know Warcraft III: Reforged was released this week. Original game from 2002 is one of my all-time favorites, also I am a huge Blizzard fanboy, so obviously I had to check it.

WC3: Reforged logo

I remember my first playthrough of the original WC3 campaign, I managed to finish the game in three 10 hours+ sittings. After that came hours of multiplayer (although I never was never very good at it). So when Reforged was announced it instantly caught my eye. After seeing the early demos I was even more interested. I preordered the game and patiently waited for the release. Yes, I know pre-orders are bad, but I was never disappointed by Blizzard title…

So how is it? Well, to be perfectly honest, Reforged is unfinished. I am quite surprised that Blizz allowed the game to be released in current form. There are multiple problems with Reforged right now. What is more worrying is that some of those are not small problems, which can be patched over time, but rather big design issues and will require tremendous amount of work to fix.

For me the biggest problems of this release are:

  1. It feels very “lazy”. Original WC3 was an epic game (I think pretty much everyone agrees with this statement), it deserves a epic remake. Reforged is not epic. Graphics update while nice, could be better. UI is not up to the 2020 standards (configuring keybinds via txt file, really?). The list can go on… The game is not polished up to the standards Blizzard always had. It seems to be rushed, very rushed.

  2. Performance. I am playing on Ryzen 9 3900X with GTX1080. At 2560x1440 with everything maxed out my system dips to like 30-40 FPS. Normally the game stays around 60-70 FPS. I did not yet have time to fully investigate the issue, but let’s be honest, this game should not run below 100 FPS on such HW, when it looks how it looks.

  3. Regress from original. This was quite a disappointed to me. When Reforged was released, Blizz made the old client obsolete. This means people are forced to use Reforged client to play WC3 online. If someone did not purchase the Reforged version, she/he just cannot enable the graphics upgrade in the game. However the new client is missing a lot of features from the old one, like profile view, automated tournaments, chat support was better in original client, etc.

There is many more issues present. You can easily find a lot of “what’s broken” type of lists on official forums. At the moment of writing this piece, overall user score on Metacritic is under 11, that clearly shows that I am not the only person disappointed with Reforged.

If anyone is still interested in Warcraft III: Reforged and did not buy it yet I would suggest waiting a bit to see how Blizz will handle this situation. They need to do at least some damage control, as this is another time their reputation takes a massive blow in the past few months. Till this moment there was no blue post or statement from Blizzard regarding this launch. I think there is a big chance there will be some major changes coming to this game or at least huge price reduction.

In its current form, this game is not worth the asking price in my opinion.

[11.02.2020] Update: game seems to run better with “Reduce Mouse Lag” option unchecked. I am getting over 140 FPS now, however it still can dip below 100.

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  1. Warcraft III: Reforged@Metacritic ↩