Welcome to The Backlog, a new series in which we will take a look back at 12 games from 2020 that, in one way or another, had a lasting impact on the video game industry.
January 2020 was a simpler time. Election-year psychosis hadn't yet kicked into high gear; COVID-19 was already around, but most people didn't yet understand how deadly it was. I was mostly riding high from the in-ring return of Edge at the Royal Rumble. For the most part, January 2020 was a good month.
It wasn't a good month for Activision Blizzard. The company was reeling in the wake of two high-profile flops—Diablo Immortal's announcement was widely mocked at 2018 BlizzCon ("Do you guys not have phones?"); World of Warcraft released one of its worst-received expansions in that same year, Battle for Azeroth—and it needed a win to try and maintain its status as the best video game developer in the industry. These were not the best conditions under which to release Warcraft III: Reforged, a haphazard attempt at a nostalgic cash grab.
Reforged was a disaster upon release, thanks to many of the pitfalls that have come to define video game development over the last decade—poor design choices, a rushed development cycle, and, surprise surprise, a dash of corporate greed. To start The Backlog, a series looking back at the highs and lows of 2020, a year that would go on to radically change how the video game industry worked, there was no better choice than Warcraft III: Reforged.
What Is It?
Warcraft III released back in 2002, during Blizzard's (it hadn't yet merged with Activision) peak. From 1998 to 2004, the company released four games that changed the course of video games as a whole. From the 1998 release of StarCraft, through Diablo II in 2000, Warcraft III in 2002, and finally World of Warcraft in 2004, Blizzard had a 1.000 batting average on creating classics. Warcraft III might be the best game of them all, both for what it had in the box and what it inspired.
Warcraft III is a real-time strategy game that focused on four factions. Through a breakneck campaign, the game tells four different stories that sketch out even more of theWarcraft universe through small-scale strategic conflicts. Whereas StarCraft, its brother in the RTS series, focuses more on large-scale combat with massive armies, Warcraft III is more about the individuals, elevating the narrative stakes while also giving the player more of a connection with its little cartoon soldiers. The release a year later of its expansion, The Frozen Throne, added even more iconic cinematics and classic characters into the mix.
There is no World of Warcraft, the most successful MMORPG of all time, without the wild success of Warcraft III, and Blizzard has been cashing those monthly subscription checks for over 20 years now. But more importantly, Warcraft III almost single-handedly spawned the MOBA ("multiplayer online battle arena") genre, thanks to a custom game mode created by the community called Defense of the Ancients, or Dota. Dota went on to spawn a successful sequel of its own, and it's hard to say that League of Legends would exist, never mind become the biggest game in the world for a long time, if not for Warcraft III giving players so much freedom to create their own experiences.
So how did Blizzard, 18 years after the release of the original game, one that was so good and so important, fuck up Reforged so badly?
What Went Wrong?
Just about everything! It's rare that a remastered version of a game is so inferior to the original, but Reforged is in a class of its own.
It's hard to start anywhere else but with the visuals. In its infinite wisdom, Blizzard decided to overhaul the original game's charming, albeit aged, graphical style and replace it with a more more detailed, colorful, and modern look. You know how digital remastering can suck some of the soul out of a classic movie? It can do much worse things to a video game.
The new visuals were more detailed, sure, but they felt simultaneously washed-out and garish. You could zoom in on one of the game's characters and appreciate the bold new design choices, but the more people looked at this game, the more uncanny and out of place everything felt. Instead of adhering to the original game's retro style, or full embracing the more modern look found in WoW, the developers tried to split the difference. The result was the game featuring realistic looking models that also looked like cheap plastic action figures.
The visuals were so bad that they created trickle-down gameplay problems: It was really fucking hard to tell which units are which in the heat of battle. Every unit ends up looking like a blob of color and shine, to the detriment of the actual gameplay. Want to grab a Spell Breaker? Oops, you just clicked on a Priest instead because they look almost exactly the same. Combine this with the smoothness of the models, which made them look blurry when in motion, and what you end up with is just a big gloop of pixels that make it difficult to discern what's actually happening on the screen.
Reforged was also a mess of bugs and glitches. The game would crash often during the campaign, multiplayer lagged, and the custom maps that people had worked on for over a decade stopped working in the new version of the game. Elsewhere, there were downgrades galore from the original, from the removal of basic stat tracking, to the total absence of a competitive matchmaking and ranking system. The UI, already one of the weaker parts of the original game, was somehow more sluggish and cumbersome in Reforged, making the player battle against enemies and the game itself in order to have some semblance of fun. I could go on and on—I have a high-end modern computer and still get crazy amounts of visual stutter, which should not be a thing for a game old enough to vote—but the bottom line is that Reforged was a rushed cash grab that tarnished the reputation of one of the best games of the 21st century.
It was rushed because of Activision. The executives of that company, which had merged with Blizzard to create Activision Blizzard in 2008, felt that a remaster of an old game, even one as popular as Warcraft III, should not be a priority over new games, leaving the team behind Reforged understaffed and underfunded. The pernicious effects of understaffing and development crunch would explode into the mainstream almost a year later, thanks to the historically botched release of Cyberpunk 2077 (we'll get there later in this series), but here in January of 2020, Activision Blizzard was showing us how bad things had already gotten. If corporate greed and mismanagement could ruin a game that was already a classic, what else might it do to the industry?
What Went Right?
Nothing, really. It's hard to say that Reforged got anything right, given that everything good about the game already existed in the original version. So, yeah, nothing went right.
Were People Normal About This Game?
Nope! Activision Blizzard fans, and I count myself as one, are very attached to their games of choice, and Warcraft fans were irate about Reforged. There are plenty of YouTube videos and articles that try to dissect what went wrong with Reforged, and Reddit threads from 2020 offer up funny time capsules. Even reviewers dumped on the game; Metacritic has Reforged sitting at a 59 score, which seems mediocre-but-passable, until one realizes how hard it is for a high-profile game to get less than a 70 without some truly game-breaking fuck-ups. The noise against the game grew so loud that Blizzard actually offered instant refunds for anyone who bought the game.
What's Happened Since?
Oh boy. Let's start with Activision Blizzard as a whole. Given that it was on a downward trajectory even before Reforged came out, the botched release did nothing to help matters. In August of 2021, a lawsuit alleging widespread sexual harassment and abuse was filed against the company, leading to the firing and departure of many top executives and developers.
Activision Blizzard has mostly failed to regain its reputation as one of the industry's guaranteed hit makers. The next WoW expansion, Shadowlands, had a terrible launch of its own, alienating players with an asinine storyline that tanked the game's long-established canon while making some questionable gameplay decisions. The release of Diablo Immortal in the summer of 2022 was defined by its predatory micro-transactions. And the less said about the Overwatch 2 rug-pull, the better. The failure of Reforged led to the shelving of any plans for a potential sequel, as detailed by Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier in his must-read history of Activision Blizzard, Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment. In Play Nice, Schreier reports that, "[f]or the StarCraft team, the failure of Warcraft III: Reforged came with another tangible consequence: if it had been successful, they might have had a better shot at making Warcraft IV." Activision Blizzard would somewhat stabilize the ship with the November 2022 release of Dragonflight, the ninth WoW expansion, and then with Diablo IV in 2023, though both of those had their own issues. At least they weren't catastrophic failures.
Despite all of its issues, Reforged trucked along with little support and fewer fixes. Eight months after the release of the game, layoffs hit the team behind the project, further minimizing the amount of support it would get. It would take almost five years since release for the company to do something substantial but, finally, in November of 2024, Activision Blizzard tried to clean up its mess. With the release of Patch 2.0, the company tried to fix some, though not all, of the issues with the original remaster. The biggest addition was a "Classic HD" graphical style, which essentially took the models from the original game and upscaled their resolution for 2024 standards. It looks great! Really! When I thought of Reforged before it launched, this is what I hoped it would look like.
Reforged now has leveling and experience in ranked multiplayer play, better matchmaking, and there were a variety of UI updates that make the game a bit more playable. Not everything went well with the update, however, as the game does still crash more than it should, and the revamped graphics still aren't quite there yet. Blizzard has deployed a few hotfixes since 2.0, but for a game that is so beloved, the level of support has been minimal, and even now, three months after the big update, it still has enough issues that it can't be called the definitive way to play Warcraft III.
Is It Worth Playing In 2025?
This is a difficult question to answer, because Reforged no longer "exists," in that Patch 2.0 has revamped the game enough to feel different from the disastrous version at launch. For this reason, Warcraft III: Reforged grades at a 7.7 on the Defector Replayability Ability Scale. Warcraft III: Reforged 2.0 however, gets a 51.1 on the Defector Replayability Ability Scale. For the sake of clarity, the original game gets a 93.3 on the Defector Replayability Ability Scale, so search that one out if you want the true Warcraft III experience.
