https://www.cybersport.ru/warcraft-iii/articles/remaster-s-kostylyami-god-nazad-vyshla-warcraft-iii-reforged

Community replaced developers

Immediately after the release of the game, it became clear that the fate of Warcraft III: Reforged would be very difficult, because the fans of the series were shocked by the number of bugs. The game was criticized for literally everything – for problems with graphics, loss of sounds, freezing of the lobby and disconnects from the server. After that, Blizzard was dubbed almost traitors, who dashed the hopes of the community for a revival of interest in Warcraft III. The players were particularly shocked by the fact that the remaster did not have many features that seemed to be an integral part of the classic version of Warcraft III – a ladder with a rating, detailed profile statistics, clan management, etc. Many elements from this list were not implemented by the developers before so far.

The patches were a little better. Blizzard has indeed released several balanced updates over the past year, but there is no need to talk about some fine work on the meta. Often, developers simply dumped a bunch of changes on the heads of users, and then corrected or rolled back those that caused the most outrage among the community. A strange method, but in this case, some updates are better than a stagnant swamp. Perhaps this is one of the few things that Blizzard has relatively handled.

Closer to summer, even the most staunch optimists ran out of patience. The remaster deservedly received the memorial name Warcraft III: Refunded, and the community itself began to revive the game. A huge contribution to this was made by the enthusiastic programmer Pad, the creator of W3Arena. It was he who developed a service for ranked games called W3Champions, as well as the Flo system, which significantly improves ping for players on different continents. By the way, these are the basic things that Blizzard itself promised to do, but the company did not go beyond the announcements. But the developers have practically brought to mind the beautiful new graphics, which no self-respecting esports player uses. It’s amazing that a close-knit community can do so much more for the game than the developers themselves. The only pity is that the community has yet to create its own version of Warcraft, but training on custom maps is already in full swing.

Tournaments are back, but immediately quarantined

In terms of tournaments on the professional Warcraft III scene, there has been some progress, but this is more due to ESL than Blizzard. After the release of Reforged, the tournament operator was supposed to organize several LAN events, but only DreamHack Anaheim managed to take place before the widespread quarantine. Perhaps it’s for the best, considering how raw the game was at the time. As a result, the competitions were transformed into regional leagues and went online, where Dmitry unconditionally dominated all year Happy Kostin. The Russian has won victories at regional DreamHack Summer, DreamHack Fall and DreamHack Winter, as well as dozens of won ESL Open Cup and SCILL Play tournaments.

As always, China was ahead of everyone in the tournament plan. In 2023, two seasons of the Warcraft Gold League took place, with victories in which Infi was noted. The organizers of the WGL also held a team tournament for the first time – the champion trio recorded it at their own expense Zhi eer0 Xian Guo, Park Lyn Joon and Jo Zhu LawLiet Yong… Legendary Chan Moon Jae Ho he showed excellent shape all year, but at World Cyber ​​Games he was again left without gold. A more classic storyline on the professional Warcraft III scene is hard to imagine.

Even before the release of Warcraft III: Reforged, the excitement around the game caused an influx of new users and an increase in the number of community tournaments. There are definitely more streamers, teams and the transfer market have revived, and some stellar esports players of the past have returned from deep oblivion to take part in show matches. Now this “remaster fever” is almost gone, someone was disappointed in the quality of Reforged and changed their minds to return to the professional scene, others decided to wait until the developers bring the game to mind. Fortunately, ESL will not wait for anything or anyone, so it has already planned several international LAN qualifiers for 2023. In December, the strongest warcrafters will compete for $ 100,000 at the final event.

Blizzard Seeks New Curators for Warcraft III: Reforged

The future of Warcraft III: Reforged is now more hazy than ever. According to the latest rumors from the Blizzard office, in November 2023, the studio disbanded the remastering team due to criticism of the game. Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier suggested that now the support for Reforged will be outsourced to a third-party studio, but who exactly will deal with it is unknown. On the official website of the game, there is no news on this matter yet. The last post from developers related to the map editor was published back in August last year.

The Reforged forum is now inundated with topics with criticism and demands (sometimes pleading) to fix bugs, add new functionality, etc. A similar atmosphere of hopelessness and despondency reigns on the game’s subreddit. However, there are still “real people at the other end of the feedback” – in December a topic appeared on the forum with two lines of text about a small update. It says that Blizzard has fixed some bugs on the server side, but they have nothing to do with gameplay. After that, user comments became even more angry.

Summing up the year, we can safely say that Warcraft III: Reforged failed its mission. The game has definitely not become a symbol of the RTS resurgence, and it is unlikely that these hopes will ever come true. There are practically no people left in Blizzard who worked on the original trilogy about the war between orcs and humans, and without the ideological inspirers, the studio was able to release only a tasteless piece of work, which Reforged is in fact.