Blizzard’s Newest Fiasco — Reforged
BlizzCon 2018 was a largely miserable time for Blizzard fans, thanks to the announcements made at the event. The reveal of Diablo Immortal generated the biggest heat from the fanbase, a mobile title announced at a time when they were expecting the first peek at a new PC and console title. This didn’t get any better when principal designer Wyatt Cheng made the now-memetic quip asking the audience whether they all had phones.
The convention’s biggest saving grace was the announcement of Warcraft III: Reforged, confirmed to be a full remake of fan-favorite 2002 real-time strategy title Warcraft III, and the last Warcraft RTS title made before the still-running MMORPG World of Warcraft. We’re talking about modern Blizzard here, a company that just cannot stop leaping into trouble between incidents like the aforementioned Diablo Immortal reveal and especially the Blitzchung incident during the Hearthstone tournament last year. BlizzCon 2019 also came off as an extended letter from Blizzard asking fans not to give up on them, but it wasn’t an apology.
We’re only in early February in what’s bound to be a long, long year — inside and outside the video game world. Yet Reforged, released this week, is reportedly so subpar a package that it will easily qualify as one of the most disappointing gaming-related releases of 2020.
Its presentation isn’t on par with what Blizzard promised and showed back in 2018. The quality of the in-game graphics and cutscenes has been reduced compared to the initial trailer and gameplay video, to dramatic degrees. The environmental geometry isn’t as pretty even on the most powerful PCs, the cutscenes weren’t given the dramatic reworking originally promised, and music previously present in certain scenes is now missing. It still looks better than the original, but it’s not the “complete reimagining” they claimed it would be.
The bugs it launched with isn’t helping. Foreground and background assets, for instance, will either load late or refuse to load at all. The music issue above could be part of the glitches, but there’s also a chance it could be a deliberate decision. Users are also having issues connecting to Blizzard’s servers, or staying connected after successfully doing so. The team might have underestimated demand and the incoming traffic is too big a load to handle with so many players logging in nearly simultaneously, but the announcement was so celebrated over a year ago that it’s tough to imagine they didn’t expect this big of an audience.
The above issues alone qualify it as a sloppy release, but can you believe that this gets worse? Features have been removed from the remake remaster, including automated tournaments, support for clans, player profiles, and other smaller options pertaining to the presentation. Custom campaigns from the old game can no longer be loaded, meaning that maps made by players over the last several years are lost in a sort of void. This was one of the biggest reasons why players were still addicted to WC3 after so many years, so they’re taking this as well as you think.
It’s still possible to create custom games, but the new user agreement explains how all the content will belong to Blizzard. If anyone wondered whether Blizzard was happy about how DOTA 2 and League of Legends were essentially created through the original WC3’s custom games, they couldn’t have made their answer clearer here. They don’t want anything like that to happen again — assuming they can prevent it. There’s a question about whether this kind of agreement is actually legally binding, which we might find out if anyone tries to make a game out of this.
If you can believe it, this still gets worse. Anyone who doesn’t like the remaster (or doesn’t like what they’re hearing about it) and wants to play the original version will have a hell of a time trying to do that. The changes made to the updated version have also been applied to the original on Blizzard’s servers, making the original inaccessible digitally. The only way to play it legally is through a physical copy. Anyone who kept their discs future-proofed themselves, since it’s long out of print at retail. If it doesn’t go for high prices on bidding sites now, that could happen soon. The other option is piracy. You’d think they would have estimated that players of the original wouldn’t want the redone version surprisingly foisted upon them, but this is just to be expected from modern Blizzard now, apparently.
There’s still time for them to fix all these issues, but it shouldn’t have been released in this state in the first place. There’s nothing wrong with delaying a game to ensure that it launches without too many bothersome issues (as long as it doesn’t force developers to crunch). The other changes would have been unavoidable thanks to Blizzard just not understanding what their fanbase wanted from this package.
Blizzard seems to enjoy wandering from one disaster to another these days, and doesn’t seem interested in breaking out of this pattern. It’s enough to breed pessimism for upcoming products like Overwatch 2 and Diablo 4, and they have no one but themselves to blame. Well, them and Activision.
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Geoff
News Editor | Geoff is some nerd who writes for a blog and thinks he's knowledgeable. He write a lot about video games, but is capable of writing about other subjects, too. Twitter
