I went into this thread thinking that nothing has quite as big a target on its back as Anthem did a year ago, but those mentioning Marvel's Avengers have a point. I had honestly forgotten it was coming at all, but I have no perspective on whether expectations are high outside of this community, which has generally been pessimistic.
But let's talk about
Warcraft III: Reforged.
It's supposedly two weeks away from launch—already delayed from its original 2019 projection, which Blizzard was very hush-hush about all the way into December—and the consensus among those who have played the beta is that it's just not ready. As in December, the community is actively hoping for the best-case scenario of another delay, as things haven't improved since they last checked.
Performance is overly demanding; the original ambitions of the product have been scaled back since its announcement; the main selling point, the fully remodelled graphics, is putting some players off with the overall colour balance and the clarity of unit silhouettes in the RTS top view. Promised networking/matchmaking features have not made it into the beta and are not expected to make it in for launch. The entire Mac build has not been made available in beta at all (whereas with previous Blizzard games apart from Overwatch, which does not have Mac support, beta clients were rolled out, just a little late) and some players are starting to doubt it will show up on day one. What's more, it has emerged that
even the "classic mode" is not a faithful continuation of the existing TFT experience, so it's not like the players already active in WC3 can just ignore the performance issues in Reforged and get on with their lives. In its current state, Reforged could quite possibly do the community more harm than good.
If Blizzard intends to commit to their January date, every sign suggests they are in for an awfully rough landing, and that Reforged will squander its generational opportunity to revive interest in one of the PC platform's most influential and durable games. The public mood around this product is considerably grimmer than it was around StarCraft: Remastered (which also under-delivered at launch on advertised features like leagues and matchmaking), and even the broadly competent SC:R dwindled very rapidly into its traditional constituency of South Korea instead of giving the international scene a fresh start. (We know this partly because all of Blizzard's microtransactional bonuses for SC:R, like announcer voice packs, are made for the Korean market.)
Keep an eye on this one. Barring a delay or a surprising turnaround, it might get ugly.
