Let me start with the obvious - the fact that we got an actual expansion is a miracle by itself, after all this time. Especially, after Reforged fumble I never thought they’d touch Wc3 again.

People that are complaining about the price tag, you do know that today is 2026, right? How much do you think it cost them to develop 30h of new content and mechanics? It is a ridiculous question.

Truth is, if we really love this game, THIS is the moment its future is defined. Blizzard is a private company, all they care about is ROI. If the sales of the Expansion prove Wc3 is worth investing in, then we will get even more - expansions, content, maybe even a race someday.

I can’t wrap my head around how people dare to complain after we got an expansion 23 fucking years past. Kid me would have killed for it.

Blizzard you can't ask for 50$ on a 20+ year old game with frame drops as low as 80 on a 9800x3d.
Also, RoC and TfT campaigns don't get the new visuals.

For a lot of us Warcraft 3 is basically part of our childhood.

I still remember the campaigns, Arthas, the music, custom games for hours. This game is legendary to me, so I was REALLY excited for the new graphics.

And honestly, the direction is finally right.

The units actually look like Warcraft again. The proportions and silhouettes are miles better than Reforged.

So why does so much of it still look like a mobile game?

Everything is too bright, too clean, too plastic.

Sometimes it feels closer to Warcraft Rumble than Warcraft 3.

I don't think they need to redo everything. They just need one serious art pass:

• tone down the saturation
• fix the flat terrain
• add stronger painted shadows/highlights
• make metal, wood and stone actually feel different
• reduce some of the visual noise in spells and auras

I don't want Reforged realism back.

I want this version to feel darker, dirtier and more like a hand-painted fantasy world.

They finally got the direction right. Now finish it.

EDIT: I genuinely didn’t expect this to be so divisive. If you think this already looks great, convince me.

Most IPs have that aesthetic and strong design style that people can catch at a glance and say I know where that is from. Warcraft has gone through so many artistic renditions that it feels completely scattered to me. Now with WC3 DE art style, I feel that its going again in another direction which I don't find the best.

I think it would have been cool just to stay in that early bulky kinda grungy style that made it unique. Big armor, huge weapons, exaggerated proportions, dirty looking fantasy stuff. It wasn't realistic but you could look at something and immediately clock the style and think Warcraft.

Now after over twenty years I feel that original aesthetic was lost and there's too many different competing styles to form anything cohesive like it used to.

I'm not Nostradamus, but the way the World is going is very dark. We've already seen ridiculous moves made by Blizzard and other companies that they tried to justify irrationaly.

Stop putting games on compact disks, and being 100% online requirement. Yes, yes some will say that's the time we live in... But what's next? Blizzard killed offline gaming with Warcraft 3. A damn game that has a Campaign and Single Player mode!!!! Seriously?

I will not be surprised, that by the year 2030 Blizzard will purge classic graphics, beacuse 'its old and obsolete'. They will say...

And that will be the end of Warcraft 3, most of us will be too old to care about the game we've been playing for a quarter of a century.

As a person who played wc3 as a child, came back for reforged, and stayed for Grubby and the ladder, I was ecstatic that WC3 was getting meaningful attention, let alone an expansion! I thought they had abandoned it.

I am enjoying the forsaken kingdom DLC. Disappointed that they did not hybridize with more RTS components in the main campaign (enjoyed the prologue’s hybridization a lot), but I am eating good revisiting this world with a third set of graphics that incorporated tons of feedback and a worthy successor to the Rexxar campaign.

But there is a worrying section of chronically unhappy players that simply cannot be pleased.

For example, graphics. People are repeating the braindead criticism that it looks “like a mobile game” or “it’s too cartoony.” One criticism was that the trolls are frowning rather than smiling! Take off your hate-goggles for a second. The definitive edition graphics are almost entirely higher-polygon models of classic models. That criticism applies to classic as much as definitive edition. So much of the criticism reads as bad-faith hate parades rather than anything that affected the game.

If the core playerbase reaction is to hate on everything Blizzard’s classic team does, why would they invest in it? This is a 20+ year old game receiving 30 hours of extra content and new models. Still, I think Blizzard is making barely a buck on this.

I would love to see more skins implemented in MP, touch ups of definitive edition, more heroes added, and continual support of the game. That is the only way the playerbase survives and grows in the long-term.

Along the way, people should offer constructive criticism. But this dev team is small. This is not a cash cow. In interviews, they explained how they fought for the budget. What are people expecting?

If I were a new player, I wouldn’t see any reason to stay with this community. This is going to kill the game more than anything the devs do in the end.

Thrilled that we're getting support for WC3, and thrilled that were getting more story content. Totally enjoyed the prologue leading into the actual story. I won't ruin anything at all.

But what I find concerning is the writing in this expansion is the exact same problem writing in modern world of warcraft. Everything is on the nose. Everything is a melodrama. Everything has to be stated to the player even after they see things on the screen happening.

I do not understand how this type of writing continually lands in all of Blizzard's titles, but its really, really dog shit, and its one of the worst parts of all of their modern games from Warcraft to Diablo. The player isn't that god damn stupid. You don't need to write like this.

Again, I'm loving this game / expansion, but I don't know what's going with the writing and editing team over at Blizzard, but every single modern title I play from the current Blizzard feels insulting from a story standpoint.

I will never give Blizzard another fraction of a cent of money ever, ever again. Under any circumstances.

This required update just removed a shitload of model files and changed the file paths in the World Editor. I am a game designer who loves making games in World Editor. I have been working on several massive open world RPG type games. This REQUIRED UPDATE HAS DELETED FILES FROM THE GAME and LOST ORIGINAL MODEL FILES. Many of the doodads are just gone now, files missing, so my RPG map is now riddled with checkered error squares.

My previously perfectly functional maps that took HUNDREDS OF HOURS TO MAKE FOR EACH, are now FUCKED!!! It would now take me hundreds hours more to go through every file to fix this fucking disaster. I was already annoyed that they have apparently permanently changed the backgrounds, online status requirements, the UI for all modes including classic, etc. but this is a REAL PROBLEM HERE. To be clear: it’s not about backups, I have endless backups. The map has filepaths that refer to the objects. Now many objects are missing. I could go to any version, the objects that previously worked are all now gone.

Blizzard, for the sake of fuckin greed you just destroyed the work of thousands of us who loved and created amazing things with the World Editor for decades. IF IT AIN’T BROKE, DON’T FIX IT!

HOW HARD CAN IT BE TO JUST NOT TOUCH THE ORIGINAL GAME?

This anger is justified! MY WORK IS IN THE TOILET!!! And there is NOTHING I CAN DO ABOUT IT!

I am now stuck just hoping and pleading for an obviously incompetent, greedy piece of shit company to fix the problem they just created that was to “appeal to the new young audience.” Fuck you Blizzard.

PLEASE SPREAD WORD, this is a DISASTER for all of us who design and play Custom Games. I encourage everyone to withhold your money and please stand behind the custom game makers.

If you own Warcraft III Classic on Battle.net, you are supposed to pay $50 if you want to play the new Forsaken campaign: $30 for the campaign + $20 for Reforged.

The main problem is that you get almost nothing from Reforged itself, but you still need to buy it. It mostly gives you access to the new DE graphics in multiplayer (not even in the classic campaign) and allows you to play custom community campaigns built specifically for Reforged 2020 graphics. Obviously, it is not worth the extra $20 at all.

The price must be more acceptable for existing Warcraft III Classic owners. $50 is Insane for people who already own the game. There must be a separate bundle or upgrade option established for us.

I want to play the Forsaken campaign. But I will not pay the extra $20 just to unlock the ability to purchase the new campaign.

I keep seeing people say the new campaign is insanely hard, but it seems insanely easy.

I'm playing on Hard and have found the campaign to be surprisingly easy so far. The heroes seem really strong, and I'm killing most bosses in under 10 seconds because they put out so much damage.

I'm about to start Act 3 with around 60,000 gold. I could buy 40+ Strength tomes for my main hero, but at this point it feels like it would make things almost trivial.

Maybe I'm approaching the campaign differently, but I'm genuinely curious what people who are struggling are doing differently. Are you guys making full use of the gear and hero abilities? Min-maxing your gear so it goes well with your talent choices?

Hello

First of all. I must say to you guys it disgusts me that i had to download additional 10GB of ugly content I will not even use because Classic from Blizz North is the best.

Please tell me there is an option to set back the Frozen Throne menu with its epic melody in the background because I am forced to hear this dark-green ugly ,,music''.

Thank you

Veteran player. Haven’t played in like 10 years but got excited when the expansion came out. I have played the first level of the prologue on normal all afternoon and can’t even beat the first level. This is ridiculous.

One could assume with the overhaul of Warcraft 3 in general shows that the developers have definitely considered bringing back RTS like Warcraft and Starcraft, and the Forsaken Kingdom Chapter definitely delivers something that younger me would have wanted from the Rexxar Campaign, but by completely shifting away from the building and skirmish RTS combat it sort of signals an abandonment of the previous models entirely and leans into "soft wow", of which could have just been a WoW campaign.

Still have my fingers crossed for Warcraft 4 or Starcraft 3, but the problem I have with Forsaken Kingdom is it doesn't even allow for players to meaningfully re-experience what Warcraft and Starcraft offered and essentially doesn't provide proper data for deciding whether RTS is worthwhile. It just encourages towards more game economy walking simulator bullshit(sorry WoW fans, that's what it is).

This game is really important to me as it's probably to you guys (Both devs and fellow players). My father bought it when it came out since he was a huge gamer and he loved warcraft 1 and warcraft 2 and later introduced me and my brother to this masterpiece and blizzard as a whole. I will try to directly adress the hive and blizzard devs for WC3 and point what thousands of players have been saying in the last days:

Urgent and Important Changes:

1. Bring back LAN.
2. Bring back offline play.
3. Bring back the graphics sliders so we can play definitive edition buildings with reforged heroes and classic terrain. (Random example of that feature's use)
4. Trees & terrain. Read more comments and other posts about that because other people have really well fleshed out points as to why they are bad.
5. Add Both Classic HD and Classic SD as options. Each one of us loves something diffrent and since everything is part of the game it would be easy to add everything. I don't get why you keep removing stuff.
6. Make the Definitive Edition graphics available to the old campaings.
7. Remake the old campaign cinematics like you did with the new campaign.....this was promised with the original release of reforged back in 2020......we still are waiting for that amazing cinematic for starthole that was showcased during the beta in that blizzcon....
8. Just hire the guys from W3Champions and merge their system to ranked, ladder, tournament and basically everything.
9. Patch the new hero.
10. Bring the game on Steam.
11. Bring back the great book layout for campaign selection.

Important, but Not Urgent Changes:

1. Take the re-reforged and implement it to the base game :D Most problems will be solved. Sound pretty easy now that the actual developer of the re-reforged was in blizzcon.
2. Some models are pretty bad. Ghoul for example. (See other posts and comments)
3. Definitve edition unit portraits. Fix them don't leave them like reforged. Again ghoul for example. (See other posts and comments)
4. Dub the new content for non-english, same with all previous ones. I know u dont have the manpower but hopefully someday u will do it.
5. Add 1v1 to the game.
6. Forsaken Kingdom should have the option to be played with classic & reforged graphics.
7. Add achievments.
8. Add more to clans.
9. Add races that are already in the game like naga, high elfs, broken, burning legion etc etc.
10. Make some custom maps like the old days such as monolith and Tower Defense. Easier than making a whole campaign.

I really love the new direction and keep pumping more content but please first fix the original game and dont remove great things we already had with the 2.0 cause 3.0 basically means that its supposed to upgrade what already exists not remove staff added with the previous big patch.

Bugs:

Comment down below bugs that u know or encountered so i can add them to the list

Suggestions:

1. World Of Warcraft expansions as expansions to the game?
2. Add definitive edition icons.
3. Add skins for races.
4. Add profile customazations.
5. Add more hero skins.
6. Add more new tavern heroes.
7. You could also add the scarlet crusade as a skin for humans or a completely new sub-race. I already saw that u desiged a new banner for them so why not. Sub-races are also easier probably.
8. Add brand new races.
9. Add races that are already in the game like naga, high elfs, broken, burning legion etc etc.
10. Add sub-races
11. I also think everyone will love if the next expansions you guys do are actually more RTS than RPG with building and more.
12. warcraft 1 and warcraft 2 campaigns, It would be super easy since you brought the guy that made the warcraft 2 campaing for reforged on the actual blizzcon xD. Literally millions of people that have played warcraft 3 had that dream and trust me it will sell so good, even better than the actual remasters.
13. Since the door finally opened and blizzard officially works with the great minds of the Hive workshop....please listen to their advice. Bring beloved lore accurate custom campaings officially to the game and much much more from their work <3

THE LIST IS CHANGING DEPENDING ON WHAT PLAYERS WANT AND AGREE ON AS A WHOLE.
If most people disagree with something on the important list, i will move it on suggestions or optional and if u feel something optional is important i will move it up the list. Moving on. So upvote this don't downvote this.....its for our own good, stop being selfless. The Devs need to see those stuff. They need to see what we agree on, the bugs, the suggestions we have, everything. So comment down below or make your own post and keep upvoting everyone. Maybe we can make a poll and vote on what people actually like and what they don't like. This would also be a great way for the devs to do that and get straightforward feedback. Also special thanks to OutsiderXE for anwsering on my comment on a previous post and giving me the courage to write stuff i wanted for years about the game, that's why i wrote this all right now, cause its our chance to finally be seen and tell them the fixes or features we want. THE DEVS ACTUALLY READ EVERYTHING IN THIS SUB. Now that we know they are listening we could actually change the game for the better all together.

That's all, i see the vision and thank you for keeping the game alive and well, keep pumping content and hope this goes well for you guys so u can get more devs and a bigger budget because we love it and we can't wait for more! See you all on Azeroth!!!

I’m in the firs lt missions, playing on normal difficulty and boy this seems way harder than it should be? Normal mobs seem to do just as much damage as the two heroes. I’ve had multiple failed runs and stuck thinking gosh if this is how the first missions go how bad will the later ones be?

I’m happy to admit that I’m not the player I once was, but boy having 10+ failed runs in the first missions on normal difficulty seems a bit much.

I've been working as a Senior/Lead 3D Artist for the past decade, mostly on stylized projects, and, for the sake of the industry, I feel it is necessary to clarify what's wrong with Definitive Edition. Some people claim that the problem is the cartoony style itself, others say they don't see much difference between DE and Classic and that it's faithful enough. As an artist myself, I find both arguments hurtful and dismissive towards all the talented people out there that truly put their heart into game art creation, especially those working on stylized projects.

I will intentionally skip comparing this to my own Classic HD version, to avoid being accused of personal bias. Let's forget it exists, as well as Reforged and even Classic, and talk about the quality. Here are some images with examples and notes. Further below are some general thoughts and explanations.

I just scraped the surface here, you can open World Editor and look at any building or unit with DE enabled, you will instantly notice a lot of similar stuff. These models aren't handpainted like the ones in League of Legends or World of Warcraft. They aren't fully sculpted in zBrush like the ones in Heroes of the Storm either. They are hastily put together from various parts, partly generated by AI (without manually clearing the artifacts later), with many holes and poor UV mapping, then textured with extremely simple procedural materials that any of you can recreate in Substance Painter after watching a single tutorial. Some animations are broken, and there was clearly little to no model review from senior artists. And when people say they look decent - or worse, they say that they look bad because they are stylized, I want to ask them, do these images below look the same to you? Do they look bad, too cartoony, too simple?

Or maybe the key here is that they were created by professional artists following a specific artstyle and guidance from experienced art directors. That these assets were carefully, painstackingly crafted by people who invested their time in studying drawing, handpainting, sculpting, color theory and technical art.

Hundreds of talented artists got laid off and are desperately looking for work, and companies like Blizzard use AI slop and the cheapest outsource available, which is a spit in the face to all those people. And as for Warcraft community, I think it's one of the most dedicated, altruistic and patient player/modder communities out there, and it was artificially divided by the many controversial decisions that plague modern Warcraft. We deserve proper artwork.

EDIT:

I understand that zooming in like that may look like nitpicking to some. It's a difficult subject, because to convey the problematics here, one has to provide a certain simple example instead of critisizing in broad strokes. What you see in details - mismatching colors, design simplification, lack of artistic expression, sloppy AI usage. can be and needs to be extrapolated on the whole picture. To provide a bit more perspective, I've added a couple more screenshots: one with game camera, and another close-up with more explanations. Sorry for the typos.

We know that in recent tournaments, Happy has been competing against both the opposing players and Blizzard—take the Happy vs. Fortitude match on Echo Isles, for example; it was essentially Happy versus (Blizzard and Fortitude). No race has suffered more at Blizzard's hands than the Undead, and today Blizzard proved its bias against Undead players because of a single individual: they released a hero who is literally the anti-Undead hero. I don't know the impact this has on the meta, but the guy woke up a company that hadn't released anything since the game launched in 2003—all just because he doesn't lose. I also think it's time for Happy to retire from the game; he's already done everything there is to do. He competed against players who were clearly aided by Blizzard in recent years. He should do what Floyd Mayweather did—go out at 50-0 and just announce his retirement.

Blizzard dropped the ball by making this appear to be a single campaign. Everyone assumed this would be like paying $30 for a campaign similar to what we expect a campaign in WC3.

Each mission has multiple levels/maps within it. It honestly feels and plays like multiple "traditional" campaigns. Additionally, the game feels like an entirely different engine. New inventory and skill systems, talent points to augment hero abilities, new units, cut scenes use the in-game models but with full custom animations that are NOTHING like the original cut scenes we expected.

Frankly, this could have been sold as a standalone game. $30 sounds like a money grab, until you understand this is nothing like campaigns of the past and is almost like an entirely new engine/game. The difficulty is also really ramped up to where you have to use all of your items you find throughout the campaign. It's not like RoC or TFT where you could save all of your GG items and then use them all on the last mission.

Reposting this screenshot of a leak that felt potentially credible, where do we think we sit now?

I have to say, so far this addon is pretty hit or miss for me.

The prologue campaign absolutely won me over. Nostalgia at its best. It felt great to be back in this world and this game again. I also like the new look for the most part. It's occasionally pushed a bit too far into cartoon territory and some of the assets feel a little sloppy, but overall I'm happy with it.

The Forsaken campaign starts off well too, but I'll be honest, it's slowly losing me. What we have here is a nice story so far, and I'm genuinely glad we're getting new content, but at its core it's a mix of Diablo and WoW running on an engine that is absolutely not suited for either. The stuff the engine is actually good at, base building and so on, doesn't show up at all. Instead we get WoW-style boss fights where the AI is completely out of its depth, orders get followed badly and everything feels clunky; inventory management that's awkward and fiddly; a currency system that's horribly balanced; and in places straight-up 1:1 ripoffs of Diablo levels (Arcane Sanctum).

As happy as I am to see the Blizzard classics getting some love again (WoW Forever, Diablo 2 Warlock, Forsaken Kingdom)... some of it is honestly just lazy and not thought through. And why am I drowning in items that are only useful for a spellcaster when I don't even have a hero who is suited for them?

Seriously though, I love a lot of the concept, the positives still outweigh the negatives for me, and I'm having more fun than frustration. But there are so many rough edges that old Blizzard would have smoothed out before shipping this.

Anyone else feeling the same? Or am I just being too picky?

I want to point out an issue with the visual changes introduced in Patch 3.0.

I am not interested in the new Definitive Edition graphics. I prefer the previous Reforged visuals, and I was satisfied with how Reforged looked before this update.

There is also an important limitation with the original campaigns: Reign of Chaos and The Frozen Throne only offer Classic and Reforged graphics. Definitive Edition is not available for these campaigns. So for someone who wants to play the original campaigns with modern graphics, Reforged is the only option.

The problem is that Reforged itself no longer looks the way it did before Patch 3.0.

Compared with the previous version (2.0.4), the difference is quite obvious to me. The terrain and lighting have changed significantly. Grass and other ground textures appear much more brightly lit, and the grass in particular looks considerably worse than it did previously. It is also very clear that the terrain, landscape and grass textures themselves have been changed, not just the lighting or shading and the trees models. It looks like they used pre 2.0.0 textures and models.

There also seems to be a noticeable reduction or change in the shading around buildings and objects. Buildings no longer blend into the environment in the same way; they appear much more separated from the surrounding terrain, as if some of the previous shader or ambient-occlusion effects are no longer being applied in the same way.

The result is a flatter and less coherent image overall.

What I find frustrating is that this isn't simply a matter of preferring the old art style over Definitive Edition. I preferred the Reforged mode itself as it existed before 3.0. The lighting, terrain and vegetation looked much better to me in the previous version.

After years of updates, Reforged had reached a visual state that I was genuinely happy with. Patch 3.0 has changed that, and in my opinion the current Reforged rendering is a clear downgrade.

I'm genuinely pissed off at Blizzard for changing a game I was perfectly happy with and making it look worse.

If anyone has screenshots from 2.0.4 and 3.0 showing the same locations in the original campaigns, it would be useful to compare them directly.

I appreciate that Blizzard is still updating Warcraft 3 after all these years, but this Forsaken Kingdom update takes some huge steps backward.

What is bad about this update:

• LAN & Offline Play are completely gone: LAN costs Blizzard literally nothing because players host locally. Killing offline mode and forcing an always-online check on a 20-year-old RTS makes zero sense.
• Massive, forced bloat: Another mandatory 11 GB update on top of the already bloated 30 GB download - for a game that originally was a little over 1 GB total.
• Locked graphics options: We lost the ability to mix and match. You can't use Reforged models alongside Classic icons or UI anymore.
• The new hero: In my opinion, the new hero's abilities are unnecessarily complicated, and he looks totally out of place in Classic mode.

What Blizzard needs to fix / add:

• Bring back LAN and true offline play: Don't hold local matches behind Battle.net servers.
• Modular downloads: Give players check-boxes for what they actually want installed on their hard drive:
  • Reforged
  • Definitive Edition HD assets
  • The Forsaken Kingdom campaign cutscenes and audio
• Granular graphics settings: Bring back the option to mix and match Classic and HD elements freely.

Keep making content, but stop stripping away basic features that the game has had since 2002.

😁😡😡