In January 2023, Warcraft III: Reforged was released – a remaster of the same name RTS, which, just a few days after the release, became one of the most scandalous and discussed games of recent years. Cybersport.ru remembered how the Blizzard Entertainment strategy lived on for the last month, what mistakes the developers managed to fix and whether the remaster was able to revive the cult of Warcraft III as a competitive discipline.
Reforged had enough problems right from the start. – users complained the numerous bugs that have remained since the beta test, the lack of ladder and personal statistics in the profile, poor optimization of the game menu and hundreds of other things. It even got Lady Vashish’s ears, which turned out to be too similar to human ones (an unheard of thing for the naga!). Blizzard began to patch the game, barely invigorating after a tub of criticism. Over the course of a month, developers gradually began to correct crooked character models, fix bugs in story campaigns and user matches, modify the interface and do everything that – seemingly – was worth doing during testing. Even released a couple of patchesbut so far the edges of this work are not visible.
If the situation with the game itself was rather sad, but at least understandable, then the prospects for e-sports Reforged have been vague for a long time. Blizzard’s first official tournament was DreamHack Anaheim 2023which took place at the end of February. Several star players were called there, including Chan Moon Jae Ho and Dmitry Happy Kostin, and the rest of the participants planned to get from the open grid. However, as it turned out, the hopes of the organizers were too optimistic and poorly correlated with the number of fans of the game in the United States. As a result, most of the grids of the first group stage turned out to be half empty, almost all the participants in them received technical victories. In the second stage, the situation was similar due to too much difference in the level of players. And only in the third group stage did the tournament begin to resemble e-sports in the form in which the organizers had conceived.
Despite the official status, the tournament in Anaheim could not meet the expectations of fans. At first, the organizers did not call a single player from China, and it is precisely there that the main community of the game is concentrated. Without Huang TH000 Xiang and Xuyuan Wang Infi in principle, it is impossible to imagine a solid championship in Warcraft III. Secondly, during the tournament the participants arose many technical problems with a game that directly influenced the result. For example, as in replay situations in the playoffs between Marcus ThorZaIN Elklöf and moon.
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Herself broadcast was carried out using Reforged graphics, which has not yet been brought to mind. The developers seem to have forgotten about the numerous criticisms of users about the color scheme, the brightness of textures, the quality of shadows and other elements. But the main thing that was not in Anaheim was the atmosphere of the holiday. Neither the participants nor the audience even felt close that Blizzard had big plans for discipline. A modest prize pool of $ 25 thousand and the absence of any announcements only confirmed this.
According to Escharts, DreamHack Anaheim 2023 is at its peak 25 thousand people watched, and the average number of viewers on the broadcast was about 12 thousand. These indicators do not take into account several thousand users from unofficial streams, but, in general, the audience size is understandable. For comparison, at WGL Winter 2019 peak online exceeded 40 thousand viewers. The prize pool of that tournament was almost three times larger, and the pool of participants was much wider and better due to Chinese e-sportsmen. Blizzard had a great example of a quality tournament, which could and should have been equal. Unfortunately, the company missed this chance to regain user confidence.
The first official Reforged tournament left an alarming sediment in the hearts of fans. Obviously, Blizzard chose the wrong place and the wrong time to stimulate interest in her eSports RTS. The coronavirus epidemic in China may have interfered with the organizers’ plans, but the company has not made any official statements about this. In general, the situation with the virus to some extent plays into the hands of Blizzard. Now all mass events are banned in China, which means developers have a few more months to bring the game to mind and then arrange a second presentation to the largest audience. Exactly China should become the epicenter of esports Warcraft III: Reforged and the future of the game will depend on the successful launch of a remaster in this region. Now Blizzard does not even technically have the opportunity to take this second chance, but it would be better for the company to be ready when the time comes.
Reforged is unlikely to simplify the life of fans of the original game, because instead of the old but stable version of TFT, they now only have a remaster with a full clip of problems. As recently turned out, the developers were unable to change the binding of replays to a specific version of the patch, so after the release of update 1.32.2, replays from DreamHack Anaheim 2023 stopped working. The game is new, and the problems are old (although there are enough new ones). Fans can only be patient and hopethat Blizzard will correct its mistakes as soon as possible, otherwise you can forget about the e-sports future of Reforged.
