It's actually worse, they pulled the legacy version from the users and forced the (effectively) downgraded version to everyone. Even the owners of the legacy version were shafted as they forced a update which removed much of the functionality of the legacy version. To this date still the best version was the pre-patch one for everyone who has the original installers and the latest pre-upgrade patch

And the AoE2 DE has way higher systemr requirements while only looking marginally better in some aspects, but looks worse than 2 decades old 2d art in some other aspects. Just because it "has to be 3D" these days, while there is nothing truly requiring any 3D in the game.

This is subjective, but I liked some of the old unit designs more than the new ones. For example Teutonic Knights and Cataphracts looked better in my opinion. The Teutonic Knight looked leaner and taller, while it now looks a bit like a walking barrel. OK, somewhere they need to carry all that armor ... but still I liked the old ones better.

Also I would have been completely fine with units having only 8 or whatever directions in which they can look. I don't need 360° all-around rendering of units. It even substracts a little from AoE2's abstract character.

What I do like is, that they added more civs.

I think DE actually looks worse. Old graphics hold up great - just look at this: https://imgur.com/hWSZBpb. The new ones lost the soul. They have a weird glow/fuzziness. Nonetheless, DE has better multiplayer performance and cool new civs, so it's the one I play.

> I don't need 360° all-around rendering of unit

But you don't have it anyway? I assumed the game is still actually isometric and not 3d but even if it is the camera is still fixed.

I'm surprised this isn't illegal.

I would imagine that in certain countries with strong consumer rights (e.g. Australia or Germany) it may well be, just understandably no one bothers with the expensive legal fight it would take.

This kind of crap is actually why I will not buy Diablo 4 (even though I kinda want to, to have a good hack'n'slash on my PS5) or put money into any Blizzard game anymore.

Update: In fairness to Blizzard, I did just check this again and it seems like they have started maintaining Warcraft 3 Reforged again, releasing some small patches last year and a significant update in January 2023:

https://news.blizzard.com/en-gb/warcraft3/23896791/warcraft-...

I'll have to take another look now that this has been released.

But still, there was a 2 year stretch between 2020 and 2022 when the game was in a very crappy state and absolutely nothing was done to improve it or address the issues.

Blizzard also pulled the original W3 downloads and switched everyone to a non-hd version of Reforged. I'm still mad about that because I paid for both and I'm no longer able to get one of them.

But isn’t Reforged using the same engine as the original, with higher res assets (mostly textures)? At least, I thought so, as that was part of the criticism of Reforged.

Nothing wrong with that, necessarily. In fact, I’d argue that’s exactly what I would want out of an ideal War3 reforged. Exactly the same game modernised for modern systems, with the “same” graphics just at higher resolution and detail.

Besides, World of Warcraft, StarCraft 2, and Heroes of the Storm were all built using upgraded versions of the Warcraft 3 engine, so it’s proven to be quite capable. It’s logical to use an updated version of the engine for an updated version of the same game.

Trying who port the game to an entirely different engine would not only be much more effort, it would risk introducing subtle differences in gameplay and feel that could mean it doesn’t play quite the same any more.

I haven't played it for a while now, but one of the major complaints after release was that many of the old custom maps didn't work.

It's not just maintenance, Microsoft has released several expansion packs to the original Age of Empires II, plus an Xbox port to boot.

Yeah it appears my Diablo 2 has been pulled from my Blizzard account when the D2 Remastered was launched, at least I can't find it anymore. And now I either have to dig up the CD and key and hope those still work or pay $60 or something to play D2. My desire isn't really that big.

I see this link on the Blizzard support site that provides downloads to classic D2 and LoD but I haven't tested them out to see if they ask for a CD key or not.

https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/13867

The amazing thing is that this new version of AoE was a fan made upgrade, and they did such a good job that MS brought them in house.

The Forgotten Empires team is brilliant and I can't be more grateful to them for bringing back a childhood favorite.

It's really been amazing. Also very cool how much the community has grown in the past few years. The subreddit is super active which adds to the fun.

Broodwar is still super popular and they don't do shit there either.

Even more amazing still is that it still has a large active player base and YouTube streamers make money playing it and casting videos of their play through. I'm routinely shocked by how easily I can join online multiplayer matches.

For a 24 year old game!

A bunch of guys in my company play it. Most of them were 3 or 4 years when the game was released. A couple of them weren't even born.

Real kudos to the team maintaining it. They constantly listen to player feedback and keep updating the various unit stats and bonuses to keep the game balanced.