Warcraft III Reforged is presented and announced as an ambitious product that aims to remake the classic game, improve it, and revive it. There seems to be ambition.But two years later, what is presented has nothing to do with what was intended. It is broken, incomplete, and even cut from what is shown.

I wonder, has there been a change of focus? I don't think it's a tactic to sell garbage. It can't go well. People are not going to buy the game.

Is it possible that there have been problems in the direction of the game and they have released what they could? Maybe at first it was managed by someone who cared and then was changed by another person?

Warning: This is a personal opinion, take it with a grain of salt.

The situation in Blizzard is … sad … but well deserved. Blizzard has lost any creativity and aims only to get as much money as possible, by destroying their well established brands more than 2 decades back.

Starcraft 2 - The only thing that kept it afloat was multi player (because it is so well established especially in South Korea). Campaign was boring, heavily copied Mass Effect, and story line was absolutely predictable. I played this one through myself (nostalogia from old Starcraft) - for me, there are no really memorable moments in it (that is, of course, my subjective view - others may differ - I was quite disappointed, but there were others who were happy with Starcraft 2).

World of Warcraft - I personally never played this one, large parts of community criticized how it went after The Burning Crusade, and slowly left. World of Warcraft: Classic … was quite successful attempt to get more money from original fans, for very little investment. It did work to some extent (yet the amount of players and activity went down fast in first months, it will be somewhat stable now).

Diablo Immortal - Diablo somewhat missed me - but I believe I don't need to say how much it showed how detached Blizzard from their fans is. The question “Is this some kind of April fools joke?” speaks for itself.

Warcraft 3: Rebirth - Game was developed in Malaysia if I'm not mistaken (from my point of view - it looks like Blizzard wanted to rip off older fans, as it gained a lot of revenue in case of WoW: Classic - and, well … blatantly failed it). They didn't deliver pretty much anything out of promised features, and cancelled majority of what promised was. They also didn't deliver on time (the game was once delayed) … and the result, is by far worse than original Warcraft 3. Initial release not having playable Prologue without patch, is one of the worst launches I have ever seen.

What is behind this? I don't know, is Blizzard having problems with low revenue and being desperate? Did their talents left? Is their management that dumb? Etc. It can be anything, or combination.

Main thing is - they're not the company they used to be anymore.

Vilem Otte said:
World of Warcraft: Classic … was quite successful attempt to get more money from original fans, for very little investment.

This is not true. Blizzard people themselves had to reverse engeneer the old code from the ground up because something got wrong and the original source code was lost. So they reinvented the whole game to stay as close to the original as possible.

Vilem Otte said:
Warcraft 3: Rebirth - Game was developed in Malaysia if I'm not mistaken (from my point of view - it looks like Blizzard wanted to rip off older fans, as it gained a lot of revenue in case of WoW: Classic - and, well … blatantly failed it). They didn't deliver pretty much anything out of promised features, and cancelled majority of what promised was. They also didn't deliver on time (the game was once delayed) … and the result, is by far worse than original Warcraft 3. Initial release not having playable Prologue without patch, is one of the worst launches I have ever seen.

I didn't ever know the game is out now, is it? When running my Blizzard Launcher, anything I see was a preorder button but nothing really released so I need to have another view on it.

Vilem Otte said:
What is behind this? I don't know, is Blizzard having problems with low revenue and being desperate? Did their talents left?

It is not just Blizzard but the owning company Activision who is managing the company. Activision made some “questionable decisions” in the past, closing some studios in US as same as giving a lot of employees the final handshake. I think those big failures with Diablo Immortal instead of D4, the loveless ending of the current WoW Expansion and some other decision they made have errupted the fanbase and events like BlizzCon don't run as successfull as they expected. Missing Gamescom in 2019 also caused some doubts at the company

It's possible that, at the time they annouced the game, Blizzard still have nothing but ideas (or may be early prototyping stage). They then make a mock up using DCC tools, and present it the the crowd in the annoucement.

If this is true, then it's very similar to the diaster Bioware had with Anthem last year.

Shaarigan said:
This is not true. Blizzard people themselves had to reverse engeneer the old code from the ground up because something got wrong and the original source code was lost. So they reinvented the whole game to stay as close to the original as possible.

Then my mistake, from company perspective this was more costly.

Yet I do know players were actually calling for this for years (as I have quite a bunch of friends who were playing it during the Fall and Winter of last year). So it seemed Blizzard had actually did something players wanted with WoW: Classic.

Shaarigan said:
I didn't ever know the game is out now, is it?

Sadly, yes. Metacritic user score is now at 1.0 (was at 1.3 yesterday).

Over promising and then under delivering does have a major backslash, especially with well established companies.

Shaarigan said:
Blizzard people themselves had to reverse engeneer the old code from the ground up because something got wrong and the original source code was lost.

Rather than call you out on this, I'm just going to request you post a link for more info.

Many players expect perfection in everything and if something does not top their greatest expectations they get mad. They don't think about what it took to actually make the game. Blizzard probably did a great job (I have not tried it yet) considering the circumstances. Try replicating that 2003 (or 1993) "feel" today, but with all the modern required specs. The project probably got broken, some source code got lost, etc and they had to cut some things. But try to get all that through the whiny "critics'" heads. It is what it is. Players expect perfection and don't care about budget, tech or business issues.

@voxycdev The debacle that is Warcraft 3 “Reforged” goes further than “whiny critics”. Activision-Blizzard pulled the wool over their fans eyes and mislead everyone from a garbage release to using cut scenes in the promos that look nothing like the what is in the game. bugs and glitches, connection problems, custom maps bricked, graphics, and on and on… I've personally gave up giving them any of my money, and those that want their money back are being denied (at least prior I know). Those assisting other people in getting a refund are ending up banned on their forums as well.

Oh and that agreement as part of their ToS about giving them perpetual licenses to all custom maps is a complete joke. They cannot even offer the map makers a job or a payout deal. I guess they got pretty hurt over the whole Dota thing, but they missed the boat as Valve hired the person who did the Dota custom map (IceFrog) to lead the team for their development. Now you can develop great game ideas and Activision-Blizzard will be ready to capitalize it at any time while kicking you to the curb. At least Valve had the decency to hire IceFrog.

Activision-Blizzard has lost touch and can only see short term cash and not the long term benefit in maintaining a loyal community. They've hit a new low, even lower than Bethesda after their Fallout 76.

I leave you all with the famous words of Todd Howard “It's not how you launch, it's what it becomes”

fleabay said:
Rather than call you out on this, I'm just going to request you post a link for more info.

Shaarigan said:
This is not true. Blizzard people themselves had to reverse engeneer the old code from the ground up because something got wrong and the original source code was lost. So they reinvented the whole game to stay as close to the original as possible.

Well blizzard did actually find their old files, and they have a working reference client/server for testing how things compare (see ie. https://www.reddit.com/r/classicwow/comments/buq2xe/question_about_blizzards_112_reference_client/).

That doesn't mean they didn't have to invest a lot of time. They ported the old game files to their new client. There's a good talk from tech-quys at blizzard:

VoxycDev said:

Many players expect perfection in everything and if something does not top their greatest expectations they get mad. They don't think about what it took to actually make the game. Blizzard probably did a great job (I have not tried it yet) considering the circumstances. Try replicating that 2003 (or 1993) "feel" today, but with all the modern required specs. The project probably got broken, some source code got lost, etc and they had to cut some things. But try to get all that through the whiny "critics'" heads. It is what it is. Players expect perfection and don't care about budget, tech or business issues.

I think it's entirely reasonable to expect a remake to be at least as good as the original. Otherwise why would anybody play the remake instead of the original? It's not like the original code stopped working.

I quite like Warcraft 3. I still install it and play it every few years. But Blizzard is fighting an uphill battle trying to convince me to buy a remake of Warcraft 3, because I'm satisfied with the original Warcraft 3 as it is. This is one case where I do expect something pretty close to perfection, because only only something pretty close to perfection can convince me to pay again for a game that I already have.