The highly anticipated Warcraft III: Reforged finally released earlier this year and enraged a lot of fans. A laundry list of issues caused a mass of players to take to Metacritic, garnering the remake almost 25,000 user reviews in under a week. That number alone is stunning, considering games only rarely crack 15,000 reviews. But what should really be discussed is how those almost 25,000 reviews were overwhelmingly negative, and a large majority of those ratings gave the game a zero out of ten. While some of those reviews are obviously trolls, many of them have a list of legitimate complaints about the game.
The primary issue is mostly the rampant bugs and technical issues, everything from performance issues tanking FPS to hard crashes to the game outright refusing to launch. The online netcode also seems to have considerable problems, with multiplayer matches failing to launch, chat failing to work and matches dropping players for no discernible reason.
Another major complaint is the graphics. While the units received new models, the buildings and terrain itself seems to just be upscaled models and textures from the original version of the game, leading to a jarring mismatch. Most reviewers that mention the graphics also find the new models rather ugly. Further, the game was advertised as having remastered or remade CGI cutscenes, but it becomes immediately apparent that only the Arthas vs. Illidan cutscene was redone, with every other cutscene being simply an upscaled version of the original one. The UI itself received no visual update, but for some reason runs worse than the original game.
The user agreement also raised some consternation among those who bothered to read it. Warcraft III was famous for its custom maps and game modes. One of them, Defense of the Ancients, went on to become its own full standalone game, and one of the most popular and successful games of all time. Blizzard turned down the opportunity to make what would become DotA 2, causing the developer to move on to Valve. Almost certainly as a result of that missed opportunity, Reforged includes a clause in the user agreement that states all mods, custom maps and game modes belong entirely to Activision-Blizzard. Unfortunately, the update to Reforged seems to have broken most custom maps and game modes, leaving any potential map makers with little incentive to remake old maps or create new ones.
But let's talk about that update. With the release of Reforged, any owner of the original Warcraft III that tried to launch the game online was forced to download the 30 gigabyte Reforged update (the original game is only 2GB), and could no longer play the original Warcraft III. This, in turn, cuts these players off from old custom maps and other community features, including the multiplayer leaderboards and user profiles. Another small but important removal with this update is the LAN mode, making it impossible to do those true nostalgia trips this remake was aiming for.
The main throughline of the negative reviews, at the end of it all, is anger over Blizzard's broken promises. Many promised features, like an updated UI, custom campaigns and updated cutscenes, were not delivered. Add on breaking the original game, delivering an unfinished, buggy product and generally being uncommunicative about issues, and Blizzard set themselves up for another round of bad PR in a string of goofs and fumbles. Maybe the game will get fixed at some point later on down the road, but for a lot of the reviewers, it seems like this was the final straw.