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Warcraft III: Forsaken Kingdom Review

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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.

Sylvanas Windrunner in Warcraft III: Forsaken Kingdom.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.

The prologue campaign from Warcraft III: Forsaken Kingdom.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.

An abomination in Warcraft III: Forsaken Kingdom.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.

Uther the Lightbringer in Warcraft III: Forsaken Kingdom.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.

Dark Ranger Anya in Warcraft III: Forsaken Kingdom.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

AoE4: Small Steps

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Earlier this month, I played through the Yue Fei’s Legacy DLC for Age of Empires IV. I’ve had a lot of criticism for AoE4’s direction since launch and had all but lost hope for the game, but I enjoyed this DLC quite a bit.

A cutscene from the Yue Fei's Legacy DLC for Age of Empires IV.The campaign starts out a bit slow, but halfway through it really turns around. That fits narratively; you start out with Song China on the backfoot, and only later they begin to push back against the Jin. The mission design reflects this.

I feel like the latter missions of the campaign are built with a real understanding of why we play these kind of games: Big maps, big armies, big fights. There’s enough twists to each mission to keep them feeling fresh, but they don’t stray too far from the core Age of Empires gameplay.

I particularly enjoyed the Siege of De’an mission. I’m not generally a huge fan of gunpowder units in these games, but nests of bees are super fun, and there are few things in life more satisfying than an RTS mission where waves of enemies slowly march into your heavily fortified chokepoints. It’s simple, but it works, damn it.

I didn’t find the story quite as compelling as Sultans Ascend’s, but it’s still pretty solid. I like the animated cutscenes, and the addition of in-mission dialogue is welcome. Overall, a very solid campaign.

The Siege of De'an mission from Age of Empires IV's Yue Fei's Legacy DLC.This was my first time picking up AoE4 in quite a while, and I was immediately struck by just how good the game feels to play. It’s a shame it’s languished for so long with content droughts and mismanagement because the actual nuts and bolts of the game are truly stellar. The sound design, the feel of how units control… it’s so much better than the other AoE games on that level.

After everyone had fully convinced themselves that the Jin Dynasty was a truly new civilization, it turns out they are classed as a variant of the Chinese after all, but as probably the world’s biggest hater of variant civilizations… I’m okay with this one.

The Jin address pretty much all of my complaints with variants. They’re a major polity and ethnic group, not just a minor faction like Order of the Dragon or some weird fan fic like whatever Zhu Xi’s Legacy is supposed to be. They have very distinct mechanics from their base civilization without feeling too weird or out there. They’re basically a new civilization that just happens to share a few assets with the Chinese.

They’re the first variant I’ve actually played, and they’re pretty fun. They’ve got some strategic diversity with strong support for both cavalry and gunpowder. They feel like the launch civilizations; different enough to be interesting, but familiar enough to be easy to learn.

Winning a skirmish as the Jin Dynasty in Age of Empires IV.If all variants were like this, I wouldn’t have developed such a disdain for the concept.

Yue Fei’s Legacy also came with further tweaks to the skirmish AI, something that has been an ongoing struggle since launch. I decided to give it yet another try, and after five years, I would say it’s finally in a functional state.

The AI is definitely still a bit janky. It macros pretty well, but it has a tendency to just wander its army around the map seemingly at random. I’ve seen it retreat from fights it was winning. But if you crank it up to “hardest,” it’s good enough to actually get some decent enjoyment out of.

I ended up sinking quite a few hours into skirmishes over a couple weeks. I started out doing 1v1s, but I’ve been finding 2v2 with an AI ally can make for some very fun, protracted brawls. It’s right at the sweet spot of difficulty where I usually win, but it’s not a 100% certainty (I just got my ass beaten in by the French while playing some Abbasids earlier today).

My most memorial match to date was one where the opponents ganged up on my ally early in the game, crippling their economy to the point they never made it out of the Feudal Age the entire game. This left me playing effectively 1v2.

The timeline from one of my hardest Age of Empires IV skirmishes.

The timeline really tells a story.

Not only did I almost lose, I almost lost in every possible way you can lose. I was brought to the brink of defeat militarily several times. The enemy AI got within striking distance of sacred victories on more than one occasion. One opponent got within literal seconds of a wonder victory before I managed to carve my way through their base and snipe the wonder.

Eventually, I stabilized enough to build a proper death ball and start snowballing. I was playing as Delhi Sultanate (probably my favourite AoE4 civ), and it turns out there aren’t many problems twenty elephants can’t solve. I managed to eek out a sacred victory; by that point one opponent had been all but annihilated, but the other was still putting up a non-trivial resistance. A landmark victory would have been possible, but sacred happened first.

I still think there’s a lot of room for improvement in AoE4’s skirmishes and single-player experience in general, but things are a lot better now than they have been in the past. I do want to try the Crucible as well, but it doesn’t seem like enough content to justify the price of the DLC considering it otherwise only includes variant civilizations that mostly don’t interest me. Hopefully a large enough discount will come someday.

I think it’s a bit too early to declare this the start of a redemption arc for AoE4, but Yue Fei’s Legacy is definitely a solid step in the right direction after a lot of floundering.