Warcraft 3 is a legendary real-time strategy whose comeback through a Reforged version has left many fans disappointed and with a hope that things would get better. Dissatisfactions sprang from not only Warcraft 3 Reforged having a lot of bugs and clearly unfinished parts of the game, but from the decision that Blizzard made to intertwine this new game with the old Warcraft 3, thus disabling people from just going back and replaying the old Warcraft 3 Reign of Chaos and Frozen Throne if they disliked the remastered version.
What was going on for the past two years with Warcraft 3 Reforged?
Metacritic website recorded one of the lowest-ever user scores for a game (the current average is 0.6/10 from around 31 000 users) when Reforged first came out in January 2020. To be honest, the whole release of the game caused a major uproar in the W3 community and my guess would be that the number of ratings given there and then was greater than the number of people trying out the game. The critics were a bit more balanced and noticed that game had its flaws but had advantages as well, and pointed out that problems in the game were fixable.
Nevertheless, the fanbase of Warcraft 3 wasn’t optimistic about future patches Blizzard would issue for Reforged. However, Blizzard has had an unsteady stream of updates to the game with some originally missing features and bug fixes. But can we say that Warcraft 3 is fixed?
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Is Warcraft 3 Reforged actually fixed?
The path of Reforged patches hasn’t been a steady one. Once the game was released, it saw a couple of patches throughout 2020, then not a single patch in 2021, and now we saw two of them in 2022; one in August and one in December. Still, fans were dissatisfied with some longstanding bugs that are yet to be fixed, mainly in regard to online multiplayer and single-player campaigns that, as it was reported, would often crash.
Since the game hasn’t seen any updates in 2021 some players took it upon themselves to update the game and that’s how the Re-Reforged got made. InsaneMonster, or Luca Pasqualini, an Italian software engineer recrafted some of the single-player campaigns and, judging by the rating on HiveWorkshop, his work was praised by the fans.
The lack of Blizzard’s involvement in fixing the game’s multiplayer (matchmaking system, ladder, tournaments, etc.) also lead to the creation of Warcraft 3 Champions, a community-created multiplayer system that allowed those still wanting to play a steady and balanced system with sophisticated matchmaking. With December 2022 patch, when W3 developers have started to address the matchmaking issues it will be interesting to see how the community will behave. Currently, it seems they are split between people giving the official game the chance and playing multiplayer there while some others are still placing their trust in the Warcraft 3 Champions for their multiplayer matches.
As you can see, the answer to whether the Warcraft 3 Reforged is fixed is a complex and blurry one. For a while we could say that it wasn’t being fixed, then it was getting unofficial fixes by the fans and finally, Blizzard decided to jumpstart the project with some much-needed required patches. The most accurate description of Warcraft 3 Reforged now is: “(still) Work in progress”, but at least this time with visible workers and cranes on the construction site. Whether that will last and produce a completely refreshed game, we don’t know. What we do know is that we will follow the further development of this legendary RTS and report on it as it evolves.
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