Month: January 2021

Enlarge / Is there any chance WarCraft III: Reforged might receive another reforging this year? (credit: Aurich Lawson / Blizzard)

You may have heard that 2020 wasn't the greatest year—an issue we try not to belabor when covering the fun and escapism of video games at Ars Technica. But "disappointing" games are different than bad ones, especially at Ars, where we do our best to err on the side of caution and skepticism before a game is finished. In our case, when a game lets us down, especially during a year like the last one, the results sting that much more.

As the dust settled on 2020, one game—WarCraft III: Reforged—stood out as the year's most staggering and baffling disappointment. Unlike other obvious candidates for 2020's icky designation, it did so with a full 12 months of opportunity to right its own ship. So I'll focus on that game to start, then circle back on other bummers by article's end.

WarCraft III: Reforged: Customs violation

One of the gems of the early '00s PC real-time strategy era, WarCraft III, entered 2020 still buoyed by a devoted modding community and ladder-battling fanbase. It wasn't scorching the charts by any stretch, but WC3 continued to enjoy a hearty online population, largely fueled by a community's goodwill.

Enlarge / In this illustration of its descent to Mars, the spacecraft containing the Perseverance rover slows down using the drag generated by plunging through the Martian atmosphere. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Writing about the space industry kept me sane during the tumultuous and trying times of 2020. While the pandemic swept around the world and America dealt with extremely divisive social and political issues, the space industry more or less plugged along.

Three missions launched to Mars. NASA got back into the human spaceflight game, thanks to SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft. The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft touched an asteroid, while a Japanese vehicle returned with several grams of asteroid regolith, and China brought some Moon rocks back to Earth. In South Texas, some Starships lived, and some Starships died. All of it was glorious to watch.

As we look ahead to a new year, there is as much, if not more, space goodness to come. I asked readers for suggestions on Twitter about what they're anticipating in the coming year and received more than 400 responses. This list is a distillation of those ideas, plus some of my own, to compile the space goodness we most have to look forward to in 2021. Spoiler alert: There's a lot.