One could point to a variety of examples of Blizzard's decline since their Activision merger many moons ago, but I think it's easy to hold up Warcraft III: Reforged as the final sign that Blizzard as we once knew them is well and truly dead. Back when the Reforged debacle was initially playing out, I made a thread polling people here on how they felt about it. These were the results:
Since then the game appears to have hardly been improved, and any hope of them fixing most of the game's most glaring issues and/or feature regressions is essentially lost. Blizzard has since fired the Classic Games Team, and most of the key talent from within the company has seen a mass exodus to either join or start other studios. Without a doubt WC3: Reforged was the final straw for this once-great company, both in my eyes and I'm sure in the eyes of many of you.
The game still holds the lowest-ever Metacritic User score, and while oftentimes I'd give little to no credence to user scores this is a case where it's completely valid. This wasn't review bombing. That's legitimately how tens of thousands of people felt about the quality of the game.
This video did a good job summarizing the game's most glaring issues shortly after its disastrous release.
As someone who holds the original StarCraft and Brood War very near and dear to my gaming heart, I was ecstatic when SC: Remastered was announced. And while that game got off to a bit of a rocky start too, it was nowhere near as bad as Reforged and eventually got to a place where it is a worthy update/replacement for the original. I am very thankful that I have a good remaster for SC1 that also reignited both the pro scene for the game as well as the Custom Maps population on Bnet (to a lesser extent). While I never played much WC3, I fully understood that for a lot of people that game was to them what SC1/Brood War were to me. It was the game that they spent countless hours over years playing custom games with friends late into the night, seeing entire genres spawned from the creations of fans working within the game's flexible editor. The fact that those fans were not only robbed of a potentially great revival but also lost the original client and tons of features with it is just heartbreaking.
Playing SC1 in 4K with an active online community in 2021 is amazing. WC3 fans should've been able to say the same.
And that's really my only goal with this thread. To express condolences to those of you who were hoping that WC3:R would revitalize an all-time classic game but instead saw it be destroyed by a callously neglectful version of the company that birthed it. Nobody should forget WC3:R. It is, in my view, still the most egregious "fuck you" to a passionate fanbase I've ever seen within the realm of gaming. It's the only bad remaster in history that actually killed the original game. Unforgivable.
If you were out of the loop on the whole Reforged saga when it happened, here is a decent rundown of the debacle:
Since then the game appears to have hardly been improved, and any hope of them fixing most of the game's most glaring issues and/or feature regressions is essentially lost. Blizzard has since fired the Classic Games Team, and most of the key talent from within the company has seen a mass exodus to either join or start other studios. Without a doubt WC3: Reforged was the final straw for this once-great company, both in my eyes and I'm sure in the eyes of many of you.
The game still holds the lowest-ever Metacritic User score, and while oftentimes I'd give little to no credence to user scores this is a case where it's completely valid. This wasn't review bombing. That's legitimately how tens of thousands of people felt about the quality of the game.
This video did a good job summarizing the game's most glaring issues shortly after its disastrous release.
As someone who holds the original StarCraft and Brood War very near and dear to my gaming heart, I was ecstatic when SC: Remastered was announced. And while that game got off to a bit of a rocky start too, it was nowhere near as bad as Reforged and eventually got to a place where it is a worthy update/replacement for the original. I am very thankful that I have a good remaster for SC1 that also reignited both the pro scene for the game as well as the Custom Maps population on Bnet (to a lesser extent). While I never played much WC3, I fully understood that for a lot of people that game was to them what SC1/Brood War were to me. It was the game that they spent countless hours over years playing custom games with friends late into the night, seeing entire genres spawned from the creations of fans working within the game's flexible editor. The fact that those fans were not only robbed of a potentially great revival but also lost the original client and tons of features with it is just heartbreaking.
Playing SC1 in 4K with an active online community in 2021 is amazing. WC3 fans should've been able to say the same.
And that's really my only goal with this thread. To express condolences to those of you who were hoping that WC3:R would revitalize an all-time classic game but instead saw it be destroyed by a callously neglectful version of the company that birthed it. Nobody should forget WC3:R. It is, in my view, still the most egregious "fuck you" to a passionate fanbase I've ever seen within the realm of gaming. It's the only bad remaster in history that actually killed the original game. Unforgivable.
If you were out of the loop on the whole Reforged saga when it happened, here is a decent rundown of the debacle:
