Warcraft III: Rebroken – A Look at Patch 2.0
by
Mark Nielsen
, posted 16 hours ago / 630 Views
Last week, Blizzard celebrated the 30th anniversary of the Warcraft franchise with a slew of announcements and celebrations. These included the release of new remasters for Warcraft 1 and 2, but also a somewhat surprising nod to the game Blizzard’s been trying its hardest to sweep under the rug: Warcraft 3: Reforged. More than a nod, in fact, as the company brought us Patch 2.0, the first patch of such significant numbering not just for Reforged but for Warcraft III as a whole. Would this patch finally be the redemption this game has so badly needed?
Well… you read the title, I’m sure.
Warcraft III: Reforged was a game in need of changes. To those who haven’t followed the news of Reforged much since its disastrous launch, the long and short of is that it got better over time, but was never quite fixed. There were stability issues, lobby issues, small internet hiccups causing disconnections, a dozen minor bugs plaguing the main game, and hundreds of minor to major bugs plaguing the custom map scene. The game was far from unplayable, as I can bear witness to personally, but you played with the knowledge that something could go wrong any minute, and from the perspective of a map creator you had to learn the bugs and work around them (though to some extent that has always been the struggle of the Warcraft III modding scene). Despite this fact, the last many patches for the game that spread out over years were mainly focused on balancing the game for competitive play, so to call a major patch long overdue would be quite the understatement.
So let’s look at what Patch 2.0 brought to the table, starting with what it brought back, namely the UI and theme of the classic Frozen Throne. Nostalgic for sure for those who played the game in the old days, and a very shrewd move to play on the game’s old expansion to signify that this is a new Reforged (and I so wish it was). Functionally it’s not particularly better or worse than the previous UI; it does show that it was made 20 years ago, but that’s perhaps part of the charm.
Another major change, which was presented as the biggest selling-point of this historical patch, is the introduction of a new graphical mode (and in a way several new ones). Reforged has been playable with classic graphics or the new Reforged models since release, but now there’s Classic HD, an essentially upscaled version of the classic graphics, but which can be mixed and matched with Reforged graphics. So for example you can choose Classic HD environments but Reforged units and heroes. The idea is novel, but unfortunately that’s the extent of its positive qualities, since this extra split of the already split graphics has brought with it countless visual bugs where the graphics don’t match your choices and unit portraits & models have been messed around on all graphic modes (even pure classic, which should be unrelated to these new options). On the plus side, Reforged graphics have been given slightly better lightning, but when that’s one of the positive takeaways of a “revival” of a struggling game you know things are quite bleak.
Of course, this massive 2.0 patch has more to offer, including several optional quality-of-life changes to Melee play (an in-game timer, a goldmine worker count, and an in-game race indicator), and for all game modes hotkeys are shown directly on icons on the command card. There are even more similar changes or options, and this is perhaps the one positive area of this patch; it’s definitely minor stuff, and not every feature will interest every player, but having more options certainly doesn’t hurt. It is worth noting, however, that the majority of these features were already available in the fan-made ladder and matchmaking system W3Champions, so this is mostly Blizzard catching up to what dedicated fans had already made themselves.
Moving further down the list we must certainly be nearing some of the fixes to the game’s existing issues… right?
We have the addition of new skins and an XP system for ranked play. OK, that’s not it. There’s Warcraft 1 and 2 music added. Very nice, but not quite what I had in mind. You can search in your custom maps. This is actually amazing, but still not a bug fix. But there it is! Right at the tail end of the patch notes we do find a list of bug fixes. Looking at those fixes, the good news is that if you wanted to play Reforged on a Mac you finally can (something you were always supposed to be able to do). The bad news is that a) many people actually couldn’t play it on a Mac after the patch went live, and b) there are only three other bug fixes and they’re quite insignificant.
That about sums up the listed changes for Warcraft III: Reforged’s Patch 2.0. Though there are a few positive elements in there, it’s safe to say the patch is rather underwhelming for what was presented as a major overhaul and supposed to be the game’s big chance at a comeback. For a while, that’s was simply all I thought the patch was: underwhelming. It turns out that was too generous, for even though I’ve already mentioned the visual bugs introduced and I had already encountered a few new bugs in custom maps (where things that had no business being changed apparently had), that wasn’t all of it; the entire process of simply creating and joining multiplayer games suddenly started to fall apart at the seams yesterday. Quite simply, only a fraction of lobbies created were actually visible and trying to join through invites resulted in various errors time and time again – an issue that persisted for many hours before the servers were taken down for emergency maintenance, and which some people are still encountering even now.
It’s one thing to publish a major 2.0 patch with disappointingly few improvements and a handful of new bugs, but when it jeopardizes already shaky game stability it honestly shows a carelessness reminiscent of the original launch. And it’s not the only such example either, as Blizzard actually had to take down screenshots of the new patch from the game’s website when the more attentive fans noticed that they were AI generated and didn’t match the actual game.
It seems that Reforged’s development is cursed to always be like a bull in a china store: whenever the developers move to fix one thing, they knock down a dozen others. To be fair it’s not only the individual teams that are to blame for that, as the game has been passed around like a hacky sack with (as far as we know) literally no one left from the original team to offer guidance. That’s not an excuse as much as an explanation, but we’ve also seen a pattern ever since the game’s release of the developers focusing on the wrong areas and consistently releasing things too early without proper testing, and Patch 2.0 most definitely makes both of those mistakes. You quite simply do not make the main selling point of your revival patch a visual overhaul when core elements of the experience have been shaky or broken for years. That this visual overhaul then ends up breaking new elements is the icing on the irony cake and, worse than that, entirely predictable.
All in all, Patch 2.0 is disappointing to say the least; dressed up like the second coming of Thrall, it’s in fact another step in Reforged’s long history of every major patch breaking more than it fixes. The good news (or at least hopefully good news) is that the game now has an active team working on it and that means potential for a brighter future, but the hard truth is that they already wasted their big chance to truly revive the game when they once again sold us a false bill of goods. For those purely interested in the ladder and campaign then, sure, it can’t be called a significant upgrade, but now is as good a time as any to play if you can stand a few visual bugs. However, for those who also have an interest in custom games or simply playing with friends online, Reforged is quite frankly in a worse state now than two weeks ago. For my part, I’ll keep playing the game, as I never stopped during even the worst parts of this chaotic journey; Warcraft III is, after all, still a masterpiece underneath all the dirt and bad decisions, and that makes it hurt all the more that I quite simply can’t recommend this patch as it stands right now.
