The failure of Warcraft III: Reforged is like the existence of a real-time, forgotten, and quiet strategy game series in the modern gaming industry.
Up to this point, maybe people have cursed at Warcraft III: Reforged, and it has set a record as the game with the lowest score in Metacritic history (anywhere from 0.4 to 0.5 points or so). . The failure of Warcraft III: Reforged can be seen from the time it was first launched, but more generally, it is like the collapse of the real-time war game (RTS), when many years now We don’t see a truly excellent rep.
Warcraft III: Reforged or its original version, has always been a monument to the real-time strategy game genre. Back more than a decade before the heyday of this series, we can see names covered everywhere like Warcraft, Age of Empires, Battle Realms, Red Alert, Company of Heroes, and StarCraft… Every gamer has spent hours running out of the net to experience them. Unfortunately, things have changed a lot.
Over the past few years, the concept of a real-time strategy game (RTS) has gradually disappeared, even if you can mention more than 5 of the unique names that have appeared in the past four years? It must be remembered that real-time tactics must comply with the rules, economic development, and military construction in the same map, not divided into two or more sections like the Total War style.
It is easy to see why Warcraft III: Reforged is so expected because it is not only an immortal monument in gamers’ hearts. But also expected to revive the already-too-silent RTS genre partially, but Unfortunately, everything fails as miserably as we have seen.
Even in the Game Awards, we see the absence of the RTS genre. Even before 2016, the Strategy category has not been included in the official list of award nominations. Even if you strictly look at it, the winning games are not pure RTS, scarce to mention just a few names such as Tooth and Tailor Halo War 2. They are ignored by other brothers, like Total War or Fire Emblem overwhelmingly.
The current trend of the gaming industry does not focus on the development of pure RTS games. Warcraft III: Reforged is like “skimming” to find more ways to milk. The new IPs appear too sparse and do not achieve the impression as their predecessors. It can be seen that nowadays, people only focus on how to create epic battle graphics on the battlefield more than convey the old gameplay of RTS.
The game publishers also deliberately ignored the black child, when just having elements to control the army on the map can be called RTS. It is entirely wrong because the strategy must include economic development and war, building management, and mapping, not merely “instant noodles” like that. Unfortunately, it seems that the gameplay is no longer trendy.
When Warcraft III: Reforged launched and no longer had LAN features, some people joked that it had partially lost its identity. However, the LAN feature was cut off because it was too outdated and replaced by a more modern internet-based game mode. Unlike other games, RTS has a strange quality: it is a pure spawn for PvP, but no one is free to go in and choose to fight with machines day after day.
The time that RTS games were popular in Vietnam was also when the internet was not yet developed. Lan Game was still dominating, not to mention excessively that RTS games were only perfect when you were playing with friends or crowded places. Unlike a single-player strategy game where you can sit there and calculate an hour of autism, RTS is fast-paced and continually evolving between the two.
RTS is also explicitly geared towards competing with each other or ranking, but its annoying is that a game often takes too long, plus you need a relative skill. In the current competitive era where publishers have to find a way to keep players from the beginning, RTS is not the right choice unless you have built a reliable brand like Warcraft III. : Reforged (but Blizzard is another matter).
It is now too difficult for gamers who love the real-time strategy genre to find a good game and play with friends like before. Whether or not it wants to live, anything needs the community, especially in the PvP genre like RTS. It doesn’t even need to be said.
So in countless cult genre games today, RTS is just like an older man hiding in the shade of trees in the afternoon, leaving nostalgic gamers to remember a golden age is far away.
