Warcraft III: Reforged

Development

Blizzard set out to make Warcraft III: Reforged a less straightforward remake than StarCraft: Remastered, with plans to expand on the original game based on feedback from European and Chinese players. Lemon Sky Studios handled most of the new 3D art. The project ran into trouble from 2017 onward. The development team had ambitious ideas, but Activision management considered the remaster less valuable than new games and pushed Blizzard to prioritize those instead.

The Classic Games team never received enough funding to realize its vision. Layoffs in February 2019 cut many staff from that team, and a shift in management slowed production. Rob Bridenbecker, who led the Classic Games group, had a management style that also hurt the team's work. Other Blizzard projects were scrapped to focus on titles like Overwatch, but because pre-orders for the remaster were already open, canceling it was not an option.

Management chose to ship the game in an unfinished state rather than issue refunds, even though the team knew it was not ready. Near the end of 2019, the Classic Games team asked other Blizzard teams for help to get the game into a passable shape for its January 2020 launch. About eight months after release, the Classic Games team was dissolved, and responsibility for delivering promised updates fell to other groups within Blizzard.

Release

Warcraft III: Reforged was announced at BlizzCon 2018 on November 2, 2018, with a prospective 2019 release. The game's first balance changes in years were announced after its reveal. The beta began during BlizzCon 2019. Originally slated for 2019, the release was delayed to January 28, 2020, with Blizzard citing a need for extra development time for finishing touches.

Due to negative sentiment, a 2.0 update was released in 2024, adding the ability to switch between Reforged and Classic HD graphics, which uses original character models. The classic installer is now bundled with Reforged and supports all original mods and custom maps. On October 3, 2024, Blizzard disabled macOS support by remotely deleting the game's executable from Mac computers, citing an unspecified issue. macOS support was restored in the 2.0 patch on November 13.

Reception

Warcraft III: Reforged landed with a mixed critical reception. Fraser Brown of PC Gamer called it an exceptional game underneath, but one weighed down by bugs, missing features, and a clunky interface. GameStar noted the single-player campaign still held up, even without the promised upgrades, but found the multiplayer experience either degraded or completely absent. Players were far less forgiving.

On Metacritic, the game was hit with a wave of negative user scores, briefly making it the lowest-rated Blizzard title ever until Diablo Immortal took that spot in 2022, and the site's lowest-ranked game overall until Madden NFL 21 overtook it. The backlash focused on broken promises, removed features, technical glitches, a redesigned interface, and graphical updates that some thought were insufficient or even worse than the original. Blizzard drew fire for forcing all copies of the original Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos to update to the Reforged client, making its gameplay changes unavoidable.

Another point of outrage was the company's announcement that it would claim ownership of all user-created content made in Reforged. On February 3, 2020, Polygon reported that Blizzard was offering full refunds to anyone who asked, regardless of how long they had played. The following day, Blizzard promised future patches to fix some technical issues and missing features, but stood by its decision to omit the cutscenes shown at BlizzCon 2018, saying it wanted to keep the spirit of the original intact.