Warcraft III: Reforged revives the 2002 title for a new audience

Update: A lot of the changes that we were expecting did not appear in Warcraft III: Reforged. As a result the consensus has been that the game is reasonably good fun for new-comers to the series, but not fulfilling for returning Warcraft fans. Many of those fans have been thoroughly outraged. The game received the worst Metacritic reviews of any game, ever. Take a look at our article here. 

Remember Warcraft III from way back in 2002? Well now it’s back as Warcraft III: Reforged, a fully modernised version of the original game, with some fantastic additions. 

Cutscenes have been added, character models have been changed and most importantly the game’s art and visuals have been brought up to date with a major overhaul. It’s still not the most state-of-the-art game you’ll see in terms of visuals, but it looks nice.

This game has come along at a time when real-time strategy is far from fashionable as a genre. As a result, the developers have worked hard to make it accessible to players of every level of experience.

Producer, Kaeo Miller, told PC Gamer: “We looked at some of the early campaign missions, from the prologue to the very first human missions. We looked for ways to help a player who may not understand RTS as well [as returning players].”

Related: Age of Empires 4 — Everything we know about the long-awaited sequel

The return of Warcraft III may have been partially inspired by recent Age of Empires reboots, which released largely to critical success. Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition revived the series’ 1999 title, coming out in November 2019 and has gone down a storm with critics and with the Steam community, averaging a 9/10 rating on the platform.

The developers behind Warcraft may well have thought they could do something similar, but we will have to wait and see whether gamers greet this re-boot with similar praise.

Related: Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition sees the classic game revamped in stunning 4K

Miller continued: “It’s a really cool game for us, because it’s going to be an awesome combination of [players]. There were millions of players who experienced this game originally 17, 18 years ago, some of whom have never come back since the original launch. Maybe they literally haven’t touched it in a decade. Plus, I think there’s a really awesome opportunity here where we’ve had millions and millions of people come and play World of Warcraft over the years, and they now have relationships with these characters. It’s really kind of the origin story of World of Warcraft.”