Enlarge / You can practically hear the opening film's orc screaming, "You should seriously reconsider spending $30, you human sacks of filth!" (credit: Blizzard Entertainment)
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.
Worse, between a new Terms of Service requirement and a number of features removed from the previous version, it looks like the game's online ecosystem—the very thing that kept the game afloat for decades and earned a glowing retrospective from us only days ago—may be gone for good. Pardon my English, but, what in the freaking world is going on, Blizzard?
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