Warcraft 3 Reforged Mac M2

[Roy Dassow]

I should clarify one thing: The campaign is somewhat different with reforged enabled vs not, and progress is tracked seperately for both. The Reforged campaign applied significant revisions including making hard mode harder and adding checkpoints and revising the appearance and balance.

The more I look at this week's launch of WarCraft III: Reforged, the more I shake my head. I've grown up playing Blizzard games for a majority of my life, and while I can think of Blizzard game launches with technical issues or critical shoulder-shrugs, I can't recall a retail launch for a product that, quite simply, wasn't finished. WC3:R changes that.

What's more, the uneven and problematic changes to this "reforged" 2002 game come with a bold, new step for Blizzard: the official sunsetting of a classic game's client. The original code base, which has remained roughly 1.3GB in size after an expansion pack launch and years of patches, has been pushed aside. Anyone who already owned an official WC3 license is prompted by Blizzard's default game launcher to download the new 26+ GB version to play online, whether or not they pay an additional $30 for its GBs of "reforged" content.

A surface-level review of WC3:R may make you wonder what all the grousing is about, especially if you just want to play the game's single-player campaign. It's easy to grab screens of the game's original 2002 characters, then place them directly next to their updated, higher-polygon versions, and give the "Blizzard Classic" dev team an unadulterated high-five. As a zoomed-out real-time strategy (RTS) game, 2002's WC3 could get away with some decidedly rough 3D designs, particularly for Blizzard's first foray into fully rendered 3D characters. But in 2020, we're well past the original game's resolution maximum of 1280x1024, and that means Blizzard had serious work to do for one of WC3:R's selling points: scaling up to arbitrary monitor resolutions and looking good when doing so.

Alas, the updated EXE launched with a forehead-smack of a failure on that sales pitch: broken ultra-wide monitor support. In the immediate aftermath of the WC3:R patch going live, forum posters cobbled together a makeshift solution to get ultra-wide resolutions working, albeit with unoptimized results. On launch day, Blizzard customer service reps posted statements of disbelief about this ultra-wide issue in the technical support forum, which implies that the company intended to roll the feature out (and may very well fix it).

Anyway, back to the updated graphics. The problem with WC3:R's visuals comes less from individually updated assets; it's all but impossible to compare individual 3D models between the old and new versions and state that the older ones are superior. Rather, the issue boils down to how all of these new assets come together on the battlefield.

You can toggle the game's "original" graphics in this new version if you want, but the newer version of the old visuals currently includes glitched shadow and spell effects. I confirmed this by installing an older build onto a wholly offline PC (more on that later), which let me compare the two builds. In the game's early missions, I found that the "fog of war" effect has some issues on WC3:R's "classic" mode, both in how it awkwardly bubbles up in square-shaped blobs upon leaving and re-entering zones and in the fog's new unsightly blue-green tint. Even with all "classic" graphic settings cranked to "high," shadows no longer appear on any enemies, and if they're attached to player units, they've become a (cough) shadow of their former selves.

Blizzard shared a bunch of tantalizing plans during WC3:R's first announcement, made during BlizzCon 2018, only to walk some of them back more quietly during the following year's BlizzCon. Weirdly, the features advertised in 2018 were never removed from the developer's official social media and YouTube channels, which may have fueled the sense of buyer's remorse that littered this week's forums and social media channels.

These included pledges to touch up the game's cinematic narrative sequences and modify its original user interface (UI). You can't type the word "Reforged" into a search engine this week without stumbling upon this fan-made comparison of the results:

Having played a few hours of WC3:R's campaign, it looks like the 2018 demo video and the final version align somewhat. Characters are posed in similar places as they speak between missions, and their bodies and mouths all have updated animations (and richly detailed ones, at that). The catch is, Blizzard has chosen to pull its in-game camera back from showcasing any of these changes. Blizzard's official answer during BlizzCon 2019 was to better resemble the original game. But I can't help but wonder if this was due to too many required models and environments needed to fill out the rest of these real-time cut scenes' backgrounds, since they dramatically moved the camera and exposed the game world's horizon.

Whatever the reason, it's a crying shame that the narrative sequences' updates have been so stymied. WC3, after all, saw the studio ramp up its storytelling ambition with full voice acting built into the game world in ways that set the tone for what World of WarCraft would deliver only a few years later. With that in mind, it's arguably better that Blizzard walked back its original plan to re-record and even rewrite the original game's dialogue in order to retcon WoW plot elements; of all the things I'd hoped for in a refreshed WC3, newly bolted plot elements weren't high on my list.

A tidier UI, on the other hand, would have been quite welcome, and I'm still puzzled as to why that system, which was demonstrated in 2018, wasn't included as an option. In particular, I would have loved for the game's inventory system, a first in a WarCraft game, to have been shifted to a more mouse-accessible position on the UI's far-right edge, and for various icons to shrink and shuffle around as might befit a default 1080p presentation.

A public pledge to remake the game's pre-rendered CGI sequences also fell through. It's a shame, but one that's arguably forgivable, since most of the game's narrative portions are built into the engine. That being said, the developer went to the trouble of remaking one of the original pre-rendered sequences, and... well... it's a spoiler if you've never played the campaign, but I've embedded it below. Watch it, if you dare.

Somehow, this looks cheaper and cheesier than the original in-game cinematic sequence, perhaps owing to the surprisingly low-budget look of this "new" pre-rendered video. Blizzard's reputation for high-end pre-rendered sequences takes a serious shot with this one.

As far as the rest of the changes we'd like to see, or a return of the 1.3GB-sized executable of old... well, that's a massive boat of speculation, and it's uneasily sailing west to the lands of Kalimdor. We held this report an extra day in hopes that Blizzard would answer or address my questions about the aforementioned bugs and missing features, but as of press time, the Blizzard reps who connected us to the game's launch have yet to respond.

Until then, there's one glimmer of hope for anyone clinging to the game's original community of maps, campaigns, and modes: sneaky ways to get the original files running. I have managed to get a non-Reforged build of the game working and connecting online with at least one method that didn't require hacks or skipping authentication. I'm leaving the details out, though, just in case that omission preserves the original working version for a little while longer.

For now, the game's previous versions have been wiped from Blizzard's Battle.net interface, and all online-connected owners of the original game are currently being redirected to WC3:R's failings and problems. That's in addition to the people who paid $30 expecting more in their new version of WarCraft III, not less. We don't know what Blizzard's next steps are at this point, but we sure hope it addresses at least one of these rightfully angry pools of customers, and soon.

It appears that Warcraft III reforged installed itself onto my system after release. it appears to have overwritten my classic Warcraft III install and my saved progress in the game. The new game is now unusable on my laptop because it does not meet the requirements for the new game.

You can still play the pre-Reforged versions, you just need to have/find copies of them. Once installed, all features will be available except for multiplayer. This is because if you connect to Battlenet, it will require an update to Reforged.

To clarify, your Warcraft III install updated to 1.32. This has raised the minimum requirements to play to fall in line with all modern Blizzard games. Specifically the GPU must support D3D11 and the OS must be 64bit.

Most do not really care however. Since with exception of the change of main menu the latest update works about the same as Warcraft III always has. For example one can still play using a RoC CD key attached to a battlenet account and with classic graphics performance is still very good (300-400 FPS if uncapped).

The reforged cinematics are identical to the originals, but using the new portraits and graphics. However, it should be noted that the stand-alone cinematics, usually related to the start of a campaign, are accessible to watch from the main menu and both versions of the game appear to use the same ones, which have been upgraded.

If you are new to the game, then there are some things that you may not notice that veteran players are up in arms about. The main one is that when the Reforged game was launched, it combined the Classic version into the same interface, changed using a toggle switch in the options menu, and included a few changes, not all of which are welcome.

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