Metacritic
Two days ago I wrote a story about how players of Warcraft 3: Reforged were disappointed with the final release, and were channeling their anger into review bombing the game on Metacritic.
The result? An almost unheard of low score of a 0.8 when I wrote that article, based on 6,000 reviews. I said I couldn’t find a lower score on the site, though someone pointed out to me later the 0.4 user score for Day One: Garry’s Incident, albeit based on a much, much lower vote total (and the game isn’t even scored by critics at all).
Well, things have…escalated since I wrote that article. Possibly even because of that article, given that it went somewhat viral on reddit yesterday.
Now, in order to make sure Warcraft 3: Reforged is the lowest user scored game on Metacritic, fans have brought the Garry’s Incident score up to a 0.8, and now there are 17,000 reviews in for Warcraft 3 that has slammed it down to a 0.5/10. I have genuinely never seen anything like this.
This all may sound pretty goofy to outsiders and I mean it is, to a certain extent. And yet fans do things like this because they often think that it’s the only recourse when something in the industry goes so poorly it feels like an actual affront to them. They’re not critics, so they can’t review the game “officially” on Metacritic. They could make blogs or YouTube videos but if they don’t have a large platform, it can feel like shouting into the void. So what do they do? They spam user vote systems like this to make their feelings known. In other instances, review-bombing can be somewhat eye-rolling, like thousands of people bombing Captain Marvel for its “politics” before it’s even released, but in this case, it feels warranted, as this game is truly bad and deserves the pushback its getting.
Warcraft 3 Reforged
While there are many issues with Reforged, the one that seems to get people the most is what it’s done to the original Warcraft 3, in that it has stripped away features from it and mangled it to the point where some players are actually turning to piracy to get a “clean” version of the original game free from Blizzard’s meddling. It’s not just that Reforged is bad and didn’t deliver on its promises, it’s that it also directly hurt the original Warcraft 3, and for some players, killed it outright.
Again, we have yet to see a public statement from Blizzard about all of this. At first, I was willing to grant them some time to collect themselves for a response. But now, it seems pretty clear that they need to explain what happened here, why the game was released in this state, and what they’re going to do to fix it. Blizzard has been skating on thin ice with fans for a long time now, and this incident feels like the surface shattering and everyone plunging into the icy black water.
We have seen disaster launches like this get turned around eventually. The Master Chief Collection comes to mind as that game went from unplayable to quite good over time (a lot of time). Will Blizzard do the same with Reforged? We might know, if they would actually say anything about what’s happening, but for now we can only guess.
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