So I went on the Blizzard website, found the downloads page, and picked up the download client.
Okay! Well, I got frustrated, but I’m sure that as a paying customer, I would be allowed some leeway to download the original. The first quirk I noticed was that I had no “install” button. (By the way, the world needs more standalone tower defense games like the ones in WC3 and Dota 2.) I had never played much back then, but it wasn’t hard to notice that I could no longer actually download the client. I’d bought WC3 legally through Activision-Blizzard’s BattleNet client years back to play some custom games with, ironically, some friends I’d met playing Dota 2. I personally noticed this just a few days ago, when I decided to casually play WC3 classic to actually see what the hype was about. Upon the release of Reforged, players on Blizzard forums noticed that WC3 had vanished from their computers.
And you can’t even utilize the Reforged graphics.īasically, WC3 owners get all the frustrations of Reforged - downloading the big update and being forced into the new client - without the positives of the RTS remaster. WC3 classic owners are now forced to download Reforged regardless. According to Blizzard, you can no longer download the classic client anymore, even if you’re a legal user. If you own the original Warcraft 3… Well, you don’t anymore.
Surprise! You can’t even install classic Warcraft 3 anymore - even if you bought the original game. But when I installed the thing, I didn’t expect to get entirely pushed out of my classic Warcraft 3 experience. Outcries escalated to the point where Blizzard is even offering near-instant refunds on the game. It’s buggy, under-delivers on promises, and forces custom game creators to abandon their intellectual property. Some of the maps have been altered anyway though, to match locations that are in World Of Warcraft, and most of the art assets are new.To say Warcraft 3: Reforged is “a bit of a disappointment” would be a massive understatement. Originally it was going to feature various story retcons and new cut scenes to bring it into line with modern World Of Warcaft, but somewhere along the way those plans were abandoned. There’s no doubting that Warcraft 3 is an important game that deserves to be remastered, and which remains very playable today, but Reforged is not a convincing celebration of its legacy. The game also introduced computer-controlled ‘creeps’ which attack any faction – another important building block for the creation of the MOBA genre. This in turn limited the number of units you can control at once to just 12, which is very different to the massive armies fielded by most other RTS games. Warcraft 3’s main additions to the formula were hero units with unique abilities, that can be levelled up like a role-playing game.
It’s certainly strange to think that turn-based games are now much more popular, as originally the real-time concept was seen as a way to modernise strategy games and make them more widely appealing. Given how long it’s been since the genre was popular there’ll no doubt be many, especially console gamers, who don’t even know what a real-time strategy game is. Since it only used 2D sprites that would’ve been a lot of work though and the one thing Warcraft 3: Reforged makes clear is that Blizzard don’t have that kind of patience when it comes to a remaster like this. They have been on a bit of a nostalgia drive for Warcraft lately, following the release of World Of Warcraft Classic, but we’re a little surprised they didn’t remaster Warcraft 2 first, as that was the one that really put the franchise, and Blizzard themselves, on the map.
Whether Blizzard ever intends to make a Warcraft 4 is a mystery, but it seems unlikely in the short term.
Its built-in map editor led to the creation of many Tower Defense style mods and maps, with Defense Of The Ancients (itself influenced by the Aeon Of Strife map for Starcraft) leading directly to League Of Legends and Dota 2 – still amongst the most popular video games in the world today. As one of the last great games of the real-time strategy (RTS) golden age, Warcraft 3 is notable enough in its own right but it’s also the game that helped popularise the MOBA genre, which makes it extremely relevant today.