Warcraft 3 Forsaken Kingdom: Warcraft abandoned, Blizzard betrayed

It’s no surprise to anyone anymore that Blizzard has become a corporate overlord interested only in profit, money, and world domination (hey, it fits). We are moving ever faster toward that near future Mike Pondsmith wrote about in Cyberpunk – a future where megacorporations control… everything around us. Given how Blizzard has been behaving in recent years, I wouldn’t be surprised if they renamed themselves Arasaka or Militech one day.

From legend to Reforged

But this article isn't about that. It’s about a new addition to one of my favorite real-time strategy series of all time – Warcraft III. Yes, this is the game that came out in 2002 and received the critically acclaimed expansion The Frozen Throne a year later.

In 2020, the same game received a new release called Reforged, which essentially wiped out the original version and replaced all its assets with those created by the external Chinese mobile game studio Lemon Sky. The new assets didn't look that bad – after all, I made a cosplay based on one of these models – but they also interfered with the original game, and many players perceived the whole move as a betrayal and a revisionist attempt to tarnish the beautiful legacy of this beloved RTS.

A surprise from BlizzCon

Anyway, BlizzCon took place in the USA at the beginning of this month, during which Blizzard announced and simultaneously released a brand-new campaign for Warcraft III without any prior warning.

It also included several free updates, among which appeared a new graphics option that promised a more faithful look to the original game. One of the problems with Reforged is that while the new graphics look great up close, they look quite bad from a bird's-eye view, and individual elements are difficult to distinguish from one another. And yet, this top-down view is very important in an RTS game.

So now we can choose from three options: Original, Reforged, and the latest variant called Definitive.

Definitive: Sylvanas shines, Arthas terrifies

Definitive doesn't look that bad, but personally, it reminds me too much of Warcraft Rumble, a Chinese mobile game for kids, and, how should I put it… I don't think WARcraft should actually look like that. However, I can't deny that some characters look really good. For example Sylvanas. Who would have thought…

At the same time, however, some characters look downright ridiculous. I understand the need to push Sylvanas even more; I'm already used to it. Damn, I played Shadowlands (and I still have PTSD from it). But what they did to Arthas is absolutely disgusting. Seriously, look at that thing. What the hell is that?

The catch that wasn't mentioned

Whether you like the new graphics or not, Blizzard didn't mention in their BlizzCon presentation that they can only be used in the new campaign called Forsaken Kingdom and in custom battles. You can't use them in the original campaign or in TFT. That is… wrong in my opinion. Overall, I think some things about the new graphics worked out and some didn't at all.

What is Forsaken Kingdom about

SO, what is this new campaign actually about? It was supposed to show what happened to the Forsaken after the events of TFT, how Sylvanas built the Undercity, what the immediate impact of the Scourge invasion of Lordaeron looked like, as well as later years, the rebirth of the Scarlet Crusade (wait, hello? Amazing??), and some other events related to the Scourge who remained in the Eastern Kingdoms along with Kel'thuzad in Naxxramas.

Compared to the latest WoW Forever release, Blizzard also promoted one major novelty – undead paladins. They have been part of the game and its lore since the original WoW release, even though they weren't playable.

Love for Azeroth won

Even though we are still talking about Blizzard… my love for this series and its world eventually overcame me. Scarlet Crusade? Lordaeron? Undead paladins? Damn it, okay, they got me. I love RTS games (I still play Age of Empires II like a madman) and I love gathering resources, building bases, upgrading heroes, exploring the map, completing optional quests, and of course, the world, stories, and mythology of Azeroth.

So, I bought the game.

Prologue: The Last Days of Lordaeron

The prologue campaign takes place during the last days of Lordaeron. You play as two new characters, Garek and Landen, ordinary Lordaeron guards who help people, keep the streets safe, rescue kittens from trees, and so on.

All this happens just a few hours before Arthas returns from Northrend with Frostmourne and sets in motion the events that eventually shape the world of WoW. I quite enjoyed the prologue and finished it, even though it was really hard (or maybe I'm just bad at RTS games).

Then I started the Forsaken Kingdom campaign itself. And I have to say that the story, presentation, and characters looked amazing. Everything was really good, and I was enjoying the game immensely.

No bases, just RPG

After about five hours of the first act of the campaign (there are three in total), I started to get a bit restless because up to that point, it was exclusively an RPG. No base building or resource gathering; you only controlled your heroes and clicked to send them across the map, which, by the way, was huge and took an eternity to traverse. So I paused the game, opened Brave, and looked it up.

THERE IS NO BASE BUILDING! THIS IS JUST AN RPG!

What??

It cost 30 euros and promised 30 hours of gameplay. Such a long campaign without a single RTS element!

Refund and mandatory connection

Of course, no one mentioned this during BlizzCon, and I didn't find a clear warning anywhere on Battle.net either. I was furious. I felt cheated. I felt disappointed. I refunded the game.

Later, I found out that this new free update also completely removed the ability to play offline. So if you want to play the original single-player campaign now, you have to be online at all times.

Return, completion, and the paladin at the very end

A few days passed, and I gave in. I really enjoyed the story and characters, and I felt the need to finish the campaign. I bought the WoW Forever pack, which gave me various trinkets and also included the Forsaken Kingdom campaign. I finished it, and I really liked the story, but the complete absence of any RTS elements still annoyed me.

As for the balance, it felt too uneven. At the beginning, the campaign was too hard, but the further I got, the more of a walk in the park it became. And you know what else really annoyed me? Throughout the entire campaign, you don't get an undead paladin – the hero unit that was promoted as one of the main draws of the whole project. You only get him at the very end, when you have less than an hour of gameplay left. Another disappointment.

Verdict

Overall, it's very hard for me to form an objective opinion on this game. On one hand, the stories, characters, and world are really well crafted, and I love them. On the other hand, the whole product feels very mediocre, and I felt cheated and disappointed.

5/10. Completely average. Buy at your own risk.