On January 29, one of the most expected Blizzard Entertainment projects went on sale – an updated version of the cult real-time strategy (RTS) of Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos (2002) and its continuation The Frozen Throne (2003). Immediately after the release of the video game, it received the lowest ratings from critics among all the projects created by Blizzard – 60 out of 100 according to the most popular review aggregator portal Metacritic. Typically, Blizzard games receive ratings above 85 on this site, moreover, each time they become an event in the gaming world and are recognized as the best or among the best ones of the year. For example, the original Warcraft 3: got 92 out of 100 among critics and the same 9.2 out of 10 among players. The remake turned out to be very upsetting: at the moment, the user rating of the product is 0.5 out of 10. This is the worst result among all the games that have ever been released. Gamers are unhappy and are massively demanding to return the money for the purchase. The game even got the nickname “Warcraft 3: Refund”.
The main reason for the audience’s dissatisfaction was unfulfilled promises: during the announcement of the game at the major game festival BlizzCon 2018, developers talked about completely redesigned in-game videos and graphics, a fundamentally new gameplay, an endless variety of user content, etc. At the output, the strategy turned out to be much worse than during the festival presentation. Almost everyone who bought the game reported a large number of bugs (errors in the game code, due to which it does not work correctly), inability to play normally in a co-op, and system requirements that are too harsh when graphics is outdated. Finally, original game fans noted that the new version has significantly less interactive elements. There are in-game tournaments and clans, which played an important role in the online component of the 2002 game. Moreover, it turned out that it was not Blizzard employees who developed the game: the creation was outsourced to an unknown Malaysian company Lemon Sky Studios. This fact convinced the gaming community that Blizzard took Reforged irresponsibly and did not care about its quality.
Almost a week after the release, Blizzard developers made the first announcement in their official forum regarding Reforged. They apologized to the players and promised to release several patches (files for the game that fix errors in the code) in the nearest future. In general, they will continue to improve the game. In any case, this scandal ruined the Blizzard reputation. It will be much more difficult for the company to advertise new projects in the future.
