After almost 1.5 years of development, Warcraft III: Reforged is officially released today. Many were eagerly awaiting the finished game, especially since the beta version still had a lot of bugs and generally didn’t look rounded. However, others already guessed what actually happened at the launch: Even the supposedly finished game still looks like a beta. Hardly anything has changed.
The launch caused displeasure among many fans of the RTS classic
At the official release at 0:01 a.m. neither the ladder nor custom games worked, nor could you see your profile or implement your old Battle.net account. Only the campaign was available, so you could only test the finished game with it. According to several comments on Reddit, many of them did not run smoothly (see illustration below),
Also, bugs that have been known for a long time, such as the color bug (e.g. own buildings in wrong color), have not been addressed. Many fans criticized the squeaky colors of the game or that the shadows of the units are still too weak, but this also remained unchanged. A real shit storm broke out on reddit and in the Blizzard forum.
For many fans it is particularly annoying that with the release of Warcraft III: Reforged, the old client of Warcraft III: the frozen Throne has been closed. Anyone who opens the game via the client will be automatically redirected to the new game. Because the old Battle.net was closed, all players who want to play Warcraft online are now forced to play Reforged.
Blizzard was backtracking a lot in advance
Blizzard caused excitement in advance. After the official announcement in November 2018, there was complete radio silence for almost a year. Only a week before BlizzCon 2019, the beta surprisingly appeared. The developers then backtracked a lot, which was previously announced. So they decided not to redesign the cinematics, but only scaled them up to HD resolution. Blizzard also announced other redesigned cutscenes alongside the cinematics. The sequence that was shown at BlizzCon 2018 from the campaign “Eliminating Stratholme” raised a lot of hope and provided relatively positive feedback. But fans also have to do without this for the most part, because this too was reeled back.
Left – from Blizzard 2018 | Right – from the finished WC3: Reforged
Hope dies last
Conclusion: Warcraft III: Reforged is not yet a fully developed game, even after the official release on January 29th at 0:01 am.
One can only hope that Blizzard, also because of the investments in eSport this year (e.g. ESL Pro Tour), continues to respond to the feedback from the community regarding the known bugs, which means that new patches will follow in the near future.
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