Warcraft 3: Reforged Has the Lowest User Metacritic Score Ever

If you weren’t quite aware, people are a wee bit unhappy with the way Blizzard went about Warcraft 3: Reforged. We already reported that Blizzard took a less-than-user-friendly approach to the subject of user made content, specifically how any modes you made on the map editor mode were forever and irreversibly the property of Blizzard Entertainment, but it didn’t stop there. People also disliked how Blizzard used fake cinematics to sell the game, promised features they didn’t keep, and introduced a whole lot of bugs that people generally didn’t care for. It was and is, as one might expect, a hot mess, and in the standard Blizzard style the company has been nothing but silent on the issue.

But as we have already learned with other Blizzard controversies – which seem to be on the rise lately, bless em’ – silence is not generally the best approach. Because users have taken their displeasure to Metacritic, where Warcraft 3: Reforged is now officially the lowest-ranking game on the site, sitting at a score, at time of writing, at 0.5.

That is a score of “overwhelming dislike”, with a current tally of 21,261 ratings, with over 20k of them negative. As a point of comparison, the critic review score of the game, which is based on the opinion of 9 professional reviewers, sits at 64: better than average, but a far cry from a gem. As another point of comparison, the former lowest-scoring game, Metal Gear Survive, was sitting at a 1.2 user score.

Now, not all of this is Blizzard’s fault. Some things – like the failure to rework all the cutscenes – were communicated, just not as clearly as they could have been. Equally, attempts to re-write the story to make it fit better with the WoW lore was met with criticism from fans, so you can blame them for that.

…But most of it is still Blizzard’s fault. I’m always happy to see people gang up on Blizzard, but I just wish people got this mad over stuff that mattered more.