I have never rushed to buy anything as fast as Warcraft III: Forsaken Kingdom. I can’t overstate how important of a game Warcraft III was in my life. It absolutely below me away when I played it at twelve years old, and it’s had an immeasurable impact on me as a gamer, a writer, and a person. Really the only reason I play World of Warcraft is just to spend more time in the universe of Warcraft III.

A full fledged new expansion with its own campaign is something I never imagined possible. We had some rumours of something big coming at BlizzCon, but “big” is a relative term for a twenty year old game. I expected a big multiplayer balance patch, maybe a new Tavern hero at most. When we learned it was an actual expansion pack, and that it was launching that day, I absolutely lost my mind.

I did quickly realize that nothing was likely to equal how special the game felt in my childhood, though. It’s probably a totally different group of people making Forsaken Kingdom, and I’m a different, more jaded person now. I never stopped being hyped, but I did simmer down as I refreshed the store page and then waited for the download.

That was for the best. I would definitely not go so far as to label Forsaken Kingdom a full blown disappointment, but it does leave me feeling a bit torn.

I dived in as quickly as I could, and thus had no information about the expansion beyond the story teases from the trailers. I knew it was an interquel set between The Frozen Throne and World of Warcraft, dealing with the rise of the Forsaken and the Undercity, but beyond that I knew nothing about what to expect.

As the early missions had me only commanding hero units, I thought to myself, “This is fun, but I really hope I get to some more traditional build and destroy missions soon.” Yeah… that never happened. It turns out that Forsaken Kingdom is a full blown RPG campaign, like The Founding of Durotar from Frozen Throne. There are very few missions where you get to train any units, and none where you have a fully unrestricted tech tree. 90% of the time, you’re just commanding a couple hero units and nothing else.

This kind of gameplay works a lot better in WC3 than in other RTS games because it was always designed to be a hybrid of RTS and RPG, but still, I did buy it because I wanted to play a strategy game. For me it is that hybridization of both genres that makes Warcraft III special, and neglecting either side sucks a lot of the fun out of the game.

I don’t think it was done maliciously, but the timing for this really couldn’t be worse. Fans of Blizzard-style RTS games have been absolutely starving for something new. The attempted StarCraft II successors have largely flopped, and the next StarCraft game is going to be a shooter that seems to want to bury its RTS roots. In this climate we get the miraculous news that one of Blizzard’s most beloved RTS games is releasing its first new campaign in over twenty years… but it has no RTS gameplay. Sike.

They added a lot of new mechanics this time to flesh out the RPG side, and I did appreciate that. There’s a full talent tree for each hero on top of their normal skill progression, and you now have a paper doll of gear slots just like in World of Warcraft. Some of the late game items are pretty nuts, too. My favourite was a legendary weapon that gave my hero’s auto-attacks a 1% chance to permanently increase his Strength by 1. That’s not a one-time effect; it just keeps going.

The push to deeper RPG mechanics has its downsides as well, though. The boss fights use a lot of telegraphed attacks like an MMO boss. They did this in StarCraft II’s RPG missions as well, and I liked it there, but Warcraft III is a much older game with slower gameplay and a much less responsive engine. The safety dance gameplay doesn’t work nearly as well here. I spent most fights feeling like I was fighting the aging engine more so than the boss.

The other big problem with Forsaken Kingdom is that it was extremely buggy during my playthrough. I had a truly gamebreaking issue where character models refused to load in on the Undercity map. I figured I would just power through to the next map, but it turns out you keep going back to the same Undercity map, so eventually I had to just restart the entire act, losing hours of progress. Should have tried that sooner, I guess.

That was the worst, but I did encounter other issues. All healing stopped working on my heroes for a while, making for a very rough boss fight. I have a very high tolerance for bugs, but the ones in Forsaken Kingdom were so gamebreaking and so frustrating that they did seriously hamper my enjoyment of it.

With a new release to such an old game, there’s always the concern it could just be a lazy piece of nostalgia bait. It is nostalgia bait a bit, but it’s anything but lazy, to a fault. I think a lot of its problems boil down to the developers being too ambitious and pushing the game beyond what it’s really capable of on a technical level.

On the plus side, the story was pretty good, all things considered. Being an interquel imposes some pretty severe limitations on what you can do, and it did spend a little too much time being a nostalgia tour of famous World of Warcraft bosses (that you know you won’t kill because they appear in WoW), but there’s a very strong character arc underlying the campaign, and the voice acting is excellent.

What I really appreciated is that Forsaken Kingdom does feel very in-keeping with the style of story-telling seen in Warcraft III. While it depends a bit on the expansion, WoW leans more toward a campier style of writing, but WC3 had a more mature tone that is once again on full display in Forsaken Kingdom. It’s very good at capturing the tragedy of Lordaeron’s fall, and the struggle of the Forsaken to find meaning in their horrific new existence.

I did enjoy the final segments of the campaign a lot more than the first two thirds or so (which is also kind of how Founding of Durotar went). They introduce a new hero who is probably my favourite character in the campaign, and having a third member of the party was the missing spice to make the gameplay sing. It’s just a shame it takes so long to get to that point.

There’s some great new soundtrack pieces, too. When I first loaded it up, I spent a while just on the main menu enjoying the new theme. Beautiful piece.

I’m glad Forsaken Kingdom exists. Despite my complaints, it was nice to get to revisit such a beloved game. I hope it sells well enough to justify more new content for Warcraft III. But I also really, really hope that any future content stays truer to its RTS roots.

Overall rating: 6.9/10