But Blizzard's shitty business practices directly ruin the game (TOS bullshit). They are related and its completely fair to ding the game for blizzard being shitty.
-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
-
We have made minor adjustments to how the search bar works on ResetEra. You can read about the changes here.
Warcraft 3 Reforged Reviews (63 on metacritic)
- Thread starter CenturionNami
- Start date
wait, was this confirmed anywhere? it was something that i noticed immediately and pointed out in the other thread.
Again, yes it's fair to significantly lower the score. Again, that doesn't make the game 0.8/10. They could replace every unit model with a picture of Donald Trumps face and it would still deserve a higher score than that because Warcraft 3 is good.
It's real, I'm not sure if the reason is that it's a quirk of the original Warcraft 3 engine or if somehow changing it would make units feel different to move, which would change competitive which was something they didn't want to do.
I didn't finish this write-up as a "review" because Blizzard didn't appear to finish the game.
My piece includes some comparison screenshots not only between "classic" and "reforged" but also with the game's classic graphics having issues with fog of war and with shadows, which I compared to the game's previous build (installed on a backup, offline PC). I hate tooting my own horn (seriously, look at my post history), but I'd say this is about as measured a take on WC3:R as you're likely to find in this week's coverage, which is how we try to do things at Ars.
My piece includes some comparison screenshots not only between "classic" and "reforged" but also with the game's classic graphics having issues with fog of war and with shadows, which I compared to the game's previous build (installed on a backup, offline PC). I hate tooting my own horn (seriously, look at my post history), but I'd say this is about as measured a take on WC3:R as you're likely to find in this week's coverage, which is how we try to do things at Ars.
In theory you are correct. But in this particular situation, think of a great movie released on a shoddy blu-ray. Like they took a DVD scan (or worse, a laserdisc scan) and put it on a blu-ray disc. Sure, they put it through a rudimentary filter thinking that would fix it, but all it did was make it look almost worse that the prior SD release. Add to that, no special features, and they still expect you to pay $30 for it. This, despite hyping a full restoration and other extra goodies.
Sure, the movie is still good, but why bother shelling out for a bad blu-ray when you can just get what already was released before? Not to mention fans of said movie feeling disappointed and hurt that so little care was put into the blu-ray.
A straight up re-release of the OG Warcraft 3 would undoubtedly review and be received better than this.
The negative Blizzard perception only makes the failure stand out more.
I mean I guess it depends on how you tackle reviewing a remaster. Are you reviewing it against the older released version or viewing it as a totally new game release. I don't think it's unreasonable some reviewers giving this 4/10-6/10 because in many aspects it can be seen as inferior to the original.
I don't think that's unreasonable either, I'm only arguing against the user critic score - which some people were arguing is more accurate. I think it's important to remember that alot of people who weren't around for the original release, especially wow players, were interested in playing the modernized version for the first time. For them, it will still be a great experience.
For anyone who played it before or was a long term player of the original... Well it's a massive dissapoinment and a bad look for Blizzard.
This is a really mean-spirited thing to post. He gave it a 75, no need to lynch him and make posts about how he's having a "meltdown".So the person who wrote the only positive review for the game got a huge backlash for it (despite HIS MANY problems with the game) and no he's kinda having a meltdown because people are accusing him of being paid off. I've never seen something more defensive and rambly.
Ahhh I see, didn't realize you were talking about user score.
OP
OP
I think giving such a broken product a 7.5 is the equivlent of when that news outlet gave Sonic 06 a 9 and all the backlash that follow.
I have just heard it from multiple people. I refundwd the game myself.
The thing is, this Reforged update fucked up people who didn't buy Reforged. Right now, only way to get the old client back is to still have the discs and install Warcraft 3 from there, and then update to a pre-Reforged version. Despite not being able to play in BNet, you still can play custom campaigns and LAN.
Man, shitty remakes are the fucking worst. All this takes me back to what happened with Silent Hill 2 HD. This might even be a worse situation because of its impact on the original game.
Please stay the fuck away from Diablo II, Blizz.
Please stay the fuck away from Diablo II, Blizz.
Deleted member 7373
Guest
This is worse than Silent Hill 2 HD, at least it was pretty trivial to play the original Silent Hill 2 after that came out (just get the ps2 version). Now the only way to play the real Warcraft 3 is to resort to piracy.
Yeah I'm gonna have to neg on that potential D2 remake, I'd rather keep the memory than play the diablo equivalent of this shitshow.
Again, if you have the discs, no need to do that.
If you don't, well, you are kind of fucked up.
Can't you install the original WC3 without bnet? I still have it installed on my PC.
Edit: Oh. Without discs. Gotcha.
I think this is the first time that a remaster was a worse outcome than the developer literally doing nothing (largely because they patched in the two biggest downgrades, namely Battle.net 2.0 and the new custom map terms into the "classic" version of the game).
The pronunciation of this locution means (exclamation) in arabic 😜
The users scores wooow...
I agree that the Ars Technica article is the best summary of all the issues I've seen:
I am probably the easiest sell in the world for this game. I just want to play the campaigns. I don't really care about the multiplayer. I would've been pretty much happy with just a basic HD remaster. I actually breathed a sigh of relief when it came out that they were not rewriting any of the story, because I sure as hell don't want the WoW writers reaching back and retroactively ruining Silvanas and Jaina, or destroying the pathos of the human campaign by keeping Muradin alive.
But this product... what an absolute disaster. This is one of the giantest middle fingers I've ever seen a publisher give its fans. When you read about some of the changes, it becomes impossible to avoid the conclusion that this isn't just a failure of execution. They had to put in real work to make a product this bad. In particular:
I am probably the easiest sell in the world for this game. I just want to play the campaigns. I don't really care about the multiplayer. I would've been pretty much happy with just a basic HD remaster. I actually breathed a sigh of relief when it came out that they were not rewriting any of the story, because I sure as hell don't want the WoW writers reaching back and retroactively ruining Silvanas and Jaina, or destroying the pathos of the human campaign by keeping Muradin alive.
But this product... what an absolute disaster. This is one of the giantest middle fingers I've ever seen a publisher give its fans. When you read about some of the changes, it becomes impossible to avoid the conclusion that this isn't just a failure of execution. They had to put in real work to make a product this bad. In particular:
- Completely replacing the original game with all its features with the new version (and its 26 gb download), whether you want the new version or not.
- Extraordinarily grasping and greedy update to the ToS, giving Blizzard the right to completely appropriate other people's creative work for free.
- Completely eliminating access to custom campaigns.
- Launching a product in which you literally have to manually edit a .txt file in order to employ a basic feature that's been in PC games since the '80s.
- Remaking the famously lousy climactic fight between Illidan and Arthas, but farming it out to the most incompetent animators they could find and somehow, impossibly, making it look even worse. The new cinematic literally looks like two rigid plastic action figures clacking together. It makes the first season of RWBY look like Pixar.
- Being forced into a live chat that you can't disable.
- The game not saving your progress in the single-player campaigns if you aren't connected to Blizzard's server.
I mean, I understand that, and I also think this is horrible and a major fuck up.
However (and this is totally debatable and maybe something that REALLY should be talked about):
If you review a game, you review that game alone. In the context of a single game review, should it be taken into account if the release of this game "fucks up" another game? Said other game is not part of the review that is being done. So I am honestly not sure if this should be taken into account, because I think it shouldn't affect the score.
This case is so special, you can probably argue back and forth for pages and pages and still don't come to a satisfiying conclusion.
Thanks, y'all. Now I'm just waiting alongside the rest of you for whatever jschreier might be cooking.......
Agree about this. Think this is the first 'remaster' that takes away the option to play the original release.
Criticizing the review is not my issue here. Leave the man alone.
I don't think W3R is particularly broken from a typical game review standpoint. It basically works and is still a pretty good game, and the selling point (redone graphics) is kind of mediocre but not awful. The fact that it makes a 17-year-old game functionally worse in specific ways (i.e. removing offline play and some ancillary online features, and adding some gross verbiage to an EULA) is not something that is captured by the traditional game review rubric.
I could easily see this slide into the low 70s on metacritic.
I could easily see this slide into the low 70s on metacritic.
Damn, that's super fucked up that this replaces the old game. It's basically just a trojan horse for peoples' machines at this point so they can assert a new TOS without causing too much furor, and yet they fucked that last part up by somehow making this worse than the original. What's shocking is, while I don't love Blizzard, I've always thought of their creative output as high-quality and their company as one that has high standards for what they're willing to put out there. This game kind of single-handedly disturbs that identity. They should have canned it; it wasn't worth throwing their reputation in the toilet.
They had been taking preorders for 18 months, Activision wasn't going to refund anyone's money if they could help it.
This should have never been released. Such a massive stain on Blizzard's almost entirely excellent track record.
Yes. 100%. We're in unprecedented territory here. Never before has a game release been bad on its own merits while also COMPLETELY RUINING the original game that was fine for 15 years prior to this insidiously awful release.
I hope you can at least understand why other people feel differently. In your hypothetical case, I'd rate the game a 0 for enabling white supremacy. Blizzard's business practices do deserve to be called out and every review is subjective anyway, it really is up to each reviewer to make a call as to what affects a score and the written component. If you feel otherwise, that's fine, it isn't your review though.
So the person who wrote the only positive review for the game got a huge backlash for it (despite HIS MANY problems with the game) and no he's kinda having a meltdown because people are accusing him of being paid off. I've never seen something more defensive and rambly.
On the one hand I kind of get his point. If you haven't played WC3 and don't know what you're missing and the utter downgrade, you've still got a top tier strategy game. It's a game which is comparatively terrible compared to the original, but as a standalone game it's still WC3 at it's core. But I'm not sure how anyone could review it in a vacuum as if WC3 didn't previously exist.