There has been so much criticism on Reforged even since its released and in my humble opinion, the tide of hatred that some players are having dumped down several aspects of the game which I deemed to be worthy of praise. The most notable one is the graphical recreation of the game which I believed to be the one thing which Reforged team undoubtedly put the most effort in.
To put it short, I am extremely pleased with the graphic that was delivered. Not only that it is VERY beautiful but I can see clearly that the team tried to keep the spirit and the world of Warcraft 3 intact. It takes me almost no time at all to recognize all the models in Reforged and almost everything looks clean and authentic. Even in 4v4 crowded battles, things are easily distinguishable and great to look at.
This comes to me as a surprise truly, considering how some of the games that Blizzard made recently didn’t strike me as much, aesthetically speaking. Heroes of the Storm, for example, had good individual models but the overall tone of the game was a bit messy in my opinion. It’s somewhat understandable since it tried to mix all the Blizzard universes together; mismatch is hard to avoid. World of Warcraft is a game that I never played but I watched a bit of it in some streams on Twitch. The graphic was understandably dated which makes me refrain from trying it out in the first place. Overwatch seemingly had a more “modern style” of graphic yet I’m not quite fond of; most likely due to taste more than anything.
If we go back a bit further and address game like StarCraft 2 and all its expansions, there are even more to discuss. The graphical transformation from SC1 to SC2 is overall decent in my judgement. However, some people pointed out that by abandoning this realism theme of StarCraft universe, Blizzard missed an opportunity to realize the game to its fullest potential. I agreed with this view. If I’m not mistaken, there was a trend back then in the RTS genre to make things more cartoonish. Blizzard chose to follow this direction and they successfully created the graphical version of SC2 as we see today. Some of the famous RTS of the time also tried to pursue this direction but I remembered games with much lesser success in this regard. I’m thinking of the transformation of Red Alert 2 to Red Alert 3 and the transformation of Command and Conquer 3 to 4 (the later was a huge failure to many and to me). Yet I deem the graphical transformation from Warcraft 3 Classic to Reforged an even greater success compared to the transformation of SC1 to SC2. Not only that Reforged looks overall more beautiful than StarCraft 2 (perhaps also due to the gap in graphic design technology then and now), but everything was kept a lot more authentic and true to its original version. StarCraft Remastered to me is just a higher resolution of Starcraft 1 so I don’t address it.
Therefore, from my point of view, Warcraft3: Reforged is perhaps the most beautiful game that Blizzard has been making in the last decade and one of the most beautiful RTS out there. This is of course my personal opinion. Others may disagree and I hope they do so respectfully.
Reforged currently has many issues especially regarding its multiplayer as many players pointed out but some people go as far as to claim that Reforged graphic is worse than Classic graphic. It’s quite insane to me how this thought is processed. I only ask them to open their eyes and judge with their honest heart and mind. How is that possible that Reforged graphic is worse than Classic graphic? Warcraft 3 Classic graphic may have been revolutionized for its time but it’s undeniably dated now. If you zoom into each model you see that they don’t have many textures. Compared to Classic, Reforged is mile away aesthetically. Now I’m aware of the very strong mentality in the West that adhere to the “good old days” values but this degree of self-delusion is absurd.
I’m motivated to write all this after browsing though thousands of Reforged models in World Editor. I’m relating this to a game like League of Legends to give you a better view. Back when I played it, with every patch they release a few skins (models for your hero) and many of them are quite great. League of Legends must have had a much bigger budget compared to the Reforged project. Yet with a single release, they have thousands of new models, the vast majority are very well made and polished. Is this not something to be acknowledged at the very least? I played many RTS and even games release nowadays can be very timid when it comes to total unit models. I see many games that are made in 2D, they barely have much texture and yet with some decent gameplay they were praised and hyped for. In my eyes it’s unfair for the people that made all these thousands of models in Reforged just to be dumped down like this. The artists and designers that work on the Reforged project did a wonderful job at recreating the Warcraft 3 universe. Browsing through the models in WorldEditor, I’m happy to know that the creative power of Blizzard is still there and the people that worked hard on this need to be acknowledged for their effort.
With that said, Reforged is still a game that needed much improvement, especially regarding its multiplayer aspect. I’m a 4v4 RT player from Asia so the online experience has never been good for me. Just as with Classic, around 50% of the games either I or my teammates or opponents had connection issues and is kicked from the game. Of course a lot of the time players just quit the game out of rage but I already take that into consideration to factor this 50% number. The game now with a reporting system seemingly has a lot less trolls compared to what it used to be. That is certainly an improvement.
The latest patch is also a very odd patch which makes me doubt the current effort being put into the game. While I see some new icons and supposedly some quality of life upgrades, the new map that was brought back (Banewood Bog LV) uses the old game data hence is currently getting vetoed nearly 100% in online play. Was the patch tested at all?
The game is having improvement but at such a slow pace. The patches are scarce. Please maintain and reinforce the effort towards this game. It is still the best RTS existing in the market.
Yours sincerely.