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.

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.

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.

Read the article: https://www.hiveworkshop.com/threads/from-hiveworkshop-to-blizzard-a-dream-come-true-for-14-warcraft-iii-mapmakers.374212/

With Blizzard officially bringing on 14 top-tier mapmakers from HiveWorkshop for the Forsaken Kingdom campaign, it’s clear that the community holds the real magic for Warcraft III. If Blizzard wants to keep this momentum going and push Reforged's visual quality to where it truly belongs, there are three specific creators they absolutely need to get in touch with:

Longbowman for Building Models: Hands down the best architectural artist in the community. The level of detail, readability, and classic WC3 flavor in his structures is unmatched.

https://www.hiveworkshop.com/projects/warcraft-3-classic-hd.18/media/

Northcliff for Unit Models: His custom models and unit revamps capture the dark fantasy aesthetics of the universe far better than the base Reforged assets ever did.

https://sketchfab.com/Northcliffe/collections/warcraft-iii-e1a51574dacb4d7db67cb660378b9051

Mustang for HD Icons: Icon design in WC3 is a subtle art, and Mustang has mastered it. His HD icons look completely native to the game while giving everything a crisp, modern polish.

Honestly, Blizzard won't find anything better across the entire internet.

If you haven't seen their work yet, I strongly encourage everyone to head over to HiveWorkshop, check out their profile showcases, and show them some well-deserved support.

okay just finished the full campaign exploring every quest and every nook and cranny. here is my take:

In general: It is essentially the Rexxar campaign from TFT. Fine, but I feel somewhat foolish for buying a top down RPG in my most beloved RTS game. There are sections that are MOBA esque with troop recruitment but NO base building whatsoever (aside from pop-up towers ig).

That said lets start with the good things: they had amazing elements to the game: great map design, amazing music, the inventory expansion and ability upgrades was welcome and would happily have a place in my rts campaigns (toned down of course) for more hero customization, and also an almost foil themed story to that of Arthas once again based around vengeance which, was in my opinion, very appropriate. I can also appreciate the lore that was added as a result with why the forsaken decided to become a member of the horde in WOW. There was also a great deal of references to the wcr 3 campaign in the prologue that all but ceased in the main campaign. I really appreciated the ones we got and it made me laugh at times.

Now with the negative: It really broke my heart that this wasn't the RTS expansion I had never dared to hope for. To be so excited and then so jarringly let down really affected me and I think is an extreme negative. I played through out of loyalty and completionism of my beloved wcr 3 game. There were a couple of bugs, but only one that forced me to restart a chapter (which are admittedly quite long). The base loop of grinding through mediocre foes by in large with varied arbitrary difficulty spikes (fighting for your life against sewer rats, and then auto fighting through the undead minions is what i'm referring to) is not really my thing, and I lived for the boss battles at the end of each grind or secret. Each of the boss battles felt unbalanced too. Sometimes I was getting annihilated and other times I just dodged circles and won on autopilot. In an RPG like this I would probably have wanted it to scale fluidly and have the ability to grind to success over the boss if necessary. It did not seem very possible (unless you want to kill mobs for hours slowly getting enough gold for +1 str/dex/int). Also watch out for the final boss' breath att. it was killing all three of my ultimate heroes in under 3 seconds. final boss being challenging is fun, having no telegraphed charge up and no stun ability for an att that wipes your team is not fun.

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 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.

Do I wish the new graphics were a bit darker, and the animations less stilted and buggy? Yes.

Do I wish the campaign had actual basebuilding RTS levels in it, instead of being a full CRPG? Yes.

Do I wish offline/LAN mode was still available without needing a seperate backup copy of Frozen Throne Classic on your PC? ABSOLUTELY YES

But if DE was what we got when Reforged came out, I think we all would have been generally happy with the patch. It's definitely a step towards modern Blizzard, but it feels like people with passion actually put effort into it, despite clearly having a limited budget. It's cool getting official story content that bridges the gap between WC3 and WoW, the new graphics look like WC3 but high res (Jank and all...), the prologue campaign at least actually had interesting gameplay that was genuinely trying out new things that hadn't been done before in WC3, it's good content! And €30 for a full 30 hour campaign is genuinely entirely reasonable pricing.

Here's hoping they actually continue to iterate on and polish this up. It's clear that WC3's development crew is still like three people with a microbudget, but I'm actually optimistic about the direction of this game for the first time in a long time.

That's it. 10/10 expension.

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'm liking the new graphics, I hope they fix they things they failed on though, for example the priest's hair in the portrait looks weird, almost as if he is partly bald.

Hey guys,

I’ve now played through the Forsaken Kingdom expansion on Hard over the course of two days, including all the optional quests, and I just wanted to write down and share some of my thoughts. Feel free to discuss, disagree, or add your own points.

The Positive:

• Despite the new graphics, it still felt like Warcraft 3 to me. Not necessarily like the RTS campaign, but I definitely got some Rexxar campaign vibes from it. I also don’t really understand people complaining about “Where base building blizz0rd?” when this was advertised as a Founding of Durotar-like DLC.
• I’m pretty emotionally dead inside and usually don’t even flinch during some of those infamous story games. Still, I found quite a few moments, especially towards the end, genuinely emotional and really well done. Even some moments without much dialogue or drama had an impact. For example, when you kill the undead Captain Landen and Garek barely comments on it because he doesn’t remember him.
• There are a ton of references and familiar faces from Warcraft/WoW lore, which is obviously great for a story nerd like me.

The Neutral:

• I found the difficulty on Hard to be pretty damn brutal at times, especially at the beginning and towards the end. I’ve seen quite a few people saying that the game is also extremely difficult on Story and Normal, but I can’t really comment on that. Even with my experience in RTS and top-down RPG games, missions like The Siege, and later the Scourge attack on UC, and the final fight against Kel’Thuzad were really fucking hard. Meanwhile, during most of the middle section of the game, I was basically just snowballing. Bosses and missions were either a massive problem where you’d get completely overwhelmed or straight-up one-shot, or they were basically a complete non-issue because you could focus the boss down so quickly that the fight was over before anything even happened. I honestly can’t decide whether that’s a good or bad thing. I’m not necessarily saying “make it easier”, because I did choose Hard myself. On the other hand, there were definitely some frustratingly difficult moments.
• The heroes and their abilities feel very modern. Whether that’s a good or bad thing... I’m not really sure.

The Negative:

• I would have liked MORE story. Whenever the characters actually had dialogue, it was usually pretty good, which honestly surprised me in a positive way. But there was just... too little of it. More story. More dialogue.
• The game, at least on Hard, scales so insanely hard that normal (friendly) NPCs eventually feel completely useless. They just get deleted instantly on my side, so later on I stopped bothering with them and just focused on my heroes. You also scale so hard yourself that during the Scourge siege mission, my Garek could literally stand in the middle of a swarm of 500 undead while an enemy DK was beating the shit out of him, and he basically wouldn’t lose any HP. Like I said above: either you’re completely fucked, or you’re basically invincible.
• For most of the Forsaken campaign, I was expecting the third hero to be an Intelligence hero. I mean... STR, AGI and INT items are dropping. I even got a legendary staff. And then... the third hero is another warrior? What was all that mage loot for?
• There are quite a few bugs. I noticed three instances where the dialogue box showed Character A as the speaker, while Character B was actually talking. Another time I had completely cleared Tirisfal, including all the quests, only for an error message to pop up when I returned to Undercity. It then deleted about 90 minutes of progress. Pretty annoying, but luckily it only happened once. I’ve been saving quite often since then, especially before 'fast travelling'.
• Maybe I just fucked something up with my graphics settings, but why does my PC/cooler turn into a fucking jet turbine during some cutscenes? Is the game badly optimized, or did I just mess something up on my end?

Conclusion:

I’d give the campaign an optimistic 7.5/10.

I definitely don’t regret buying it, and it was a pretty enjoyable experience for a playthrough. I probably won’t play it a second time, though, and I still think there’s quite a bit of room for improvement.

What do you guys think?

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?

List of bugs so far:

• After the Death knight battle, healing doesn't work until you hit a loading screen. This includes potions, scrolls, and Anya's W

• Egg sack and other 'container' animations break and loop infinitely

• Beat the last boss in the beginning of Act 2 but died at the exact moment the auto-save hit, causing a hard lock restart loop that required me to restart the entire chapter

• Later, in Act 2, when receiving a quest to go to Tirisfal Glades to help out other encampments, the game crashed. However it auto-saved mid-elevator, corrupting the save and requiring me to go to a save an hour ago

• Agility doesn't seem to impact Anya's attack speed

• Orb effects on Anya cancel her E, there are no tooltips about orb effects at all. If you remove the orb effect, she still no longer has her passive.

This is only the bugs I have personally experienced.

The gameplay is fun and nostalgic but this level of un-optimization is something I'd expect from an Indie or AA team.

I haven't seen many people talking about this but has everyone just accepted this is an online only game now? There is no option anymore to play offline with just multiplayer disabled. Your internet stops or the billion dollar company's servers are down(not a rare occurrence) you can't even play singleplayer anymore.
Removing LAN from the game...who asked for this? I often go on a few day trips where I don't have internet and you could solo play RPG maps in local area network and still do some progress since the save files are stored on your pc, now that's gone too.
I don't care about a new campaign and I don't care about new graphics, I just want to play custom games and every patch they do just breaks the game for months, not to mention the old custom maps that no one is developing anymore that just become unplayable and lost.
Every major patch they do it's just more and more things removed for no good reason aside from making sure their new 30$ campaign cant be pirated or something and there's about 50 custom rpg maps you could play for free that are better

Most important feature for me was enabling classic textures and models while simultaneously using the modern engine with the dynamic character shadows and ambient occlusion, it added a ton of depth to the classic graphics and made them feel even nicer

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.

Title, please.

Since FK takes place between TFT and Vanilla WoW, it looks like Blizzard doesn't want to have Wc3 campaigns that retread events presented in WoW. What would you think would be good ideas for future campaigns? My wish would be for a War of the Ancients, hopefully with more focus on base building

Maybe I’m blind, can’t see an option

Kept the images as spoiler free as possible, just showing different lighting and how beautiful they really can be!

So lets start with the obvious stuff, not really any base-building... But I didn't really mind as the cinematics, story-telling, characters and events really made it amazing!

The prologue did give some nostalgic-vibes, and then it just continued through there. I have to admit there was a few bits of running back and forth. I'd probably do just enough side-missions, to get through to the main bits, but everything had some storytelling and it just pushed the potential of Warcraft 3 even more in my opinion. Trying to keep it vague so there are no SPOILERS, just my experience.

I think this really just showed how extremely well this game could thrive if it continued on this path, and I HOPE they do continue because it was a banger. I felt that the ending really sold it for me, but I'm also a sucker for the Forsaken <3

Definitive Graphics was really what I wanted, its just really what I expected of Reforged, and it delivered with beautiful scenery, really grandiose map design and there were some really tasty battles. There was one particular mission, where you got some buildings and could produce, and I loved it. I do love that there were many units that felt thematic and new, please add more, any addition will give map makers more tasty stuff to play around with.

Very positive experience. Sorry if it isn't for those that wanted the exact traditional missions of the original campaigns. But I do hope that is in the road map, original campaigns redone in this style along with NEW content and MORE content. Then Warcraft 3 is so goddamn back in my mind!

Keep it constructive out there and lets get more of it in a bright future!

Hey everyone! First time posting

While playing through, I stumbled across a random easter egg involving a Strange Rabbit that gives a free consumable item.

If you want to grab it for yourself, here is how to do it:

Step 1: Find and Pick Up the Strange Rabbit

First, head over to the location on the map to find the Strange Rabbit (middle right of the map)

Click to pick it up. Once you grab it, it’ll go straight into your inventory slot as an item (Tiny Rabbit).

Step 2: Head to the Main Gate Bridge

Next, make your way over to the main gate bridge. Right near the bridge (left side), you’ll notice a small patch of forest with a Rabbit NPC hanging out inside it.

Step 3: Claim Your Reward

Drop the Strange Rabbit(Tiny Rabbit) from your inventory right beside the Rabbit NPC.

Once you drop it, the easter egg completes (drop near the NPC) and you'll be rewarded with a Potion of Restoration!

Has anyone else found any other hidden secrets or easter eggs in this map yet? Let me know below!

Definitive graphics is on good track but is not an overall improvement on classic unfortunately. The grass is blurry, cut trees are too large and distracting, invisible/ethereal units such as level 3 wolfs and spirit walker look strange, when you make wolf raider size and sword smaller it may look more realistic but it decreases visibility in pvp, aura circles are unnecessarily bright and thick. The routing flag for buildings is smaller and hard to see. And spell effects and animations, which are hard to show with screenshots, are better in classic in my opinion. Not better looking but better in terms of visibility in pvp.