Blizzard’s reboot of Warcraft III will go on sale January 28, offering the chance to experience the classic RTS all over again – but with contemporary visuals (and more besides).
Warcraft III: Reforged has benefited from a complete overhaul in terms of the graphics, with everything being revamped from new characters through to the environments, buildings, animations and effects.
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Not everything has changed, however, and although the audio has been jazzed up, the original voiceovers have been kept, because Blizzard (wisely) didn’t want to mess with those (or indeed need to).
And the core missions remain the same, although you get The Frozen Throne expansion thrown in, meaning there are seven single-player campaigns in total (and some 62 missions to tackle).
Reforged is fully integrated with Battle.net, so you get all those useful social and matchmaking features (plus automatic patching), and it allows multiplayer between different versions of Warcraft III, so you can play against folks with the original game. There’s also a new World Editor to boot.
Carefully forged
We were promised Reforged before the end of 2019, but Blizzard decided to avoid rushing to the finish post, according to a blog post which explains: “Though we’ve been working hard to get Reforged in your hands before the end of the year, as we started approaching the finish line, we felt we’d need a little extra development time for finishing touches. As always, our goal is to honor the high standards you hold us to.”
At any rate, Warcraft III: Reforged is now up for pre-order starting at $29.99 or £24.99 (around AU$40) for the Standard Edition, and $39.99 or £34.99 (around AU$60) for the ‘Spoils of War’ Edition. The latter gives you the expected load of bonus content including various unique hero skins, and a bunch of stuff for other Blizzard games like a Meat Wagon mount for World of Warcraft.
Those who pre-order also get access to the multiplayer beta.
We fondly remember Warcraft III, and were avid fans of the game when it was released way back in 2002. So much so that we picked the title as one of the PC gaming moments which have most wowed us in the last 30 years.
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