You might be wondering why Warcraft 3: Reforged's menus are pretty brutal on CPU and memory usage - in-fact, many gamers have taken to social media to complain the menus actually seem to be running slower than the game itself. Weird, you might think?
Well one user on Twitter, Colin Cornaby, has figured out the source of the problem. It would appear that the game's menu systems are actually just web pages, running in a modified version of Chromium, which is the open source variant of Google's Chrome browser.
I've been trying to figure out why the main menu performance on Warcraft 3 Reforged is so bad.
— Colin Cornaby (@colincornaby) January 31, 2020
It ends up the whole main menu is a web app running on Chrome. This thing runs worse than the actual game (likely because it's pegging an entire core of my CPU.) pic.twitter.com/ul10bzmGNl
Yup, that's right, the entire UI experience for the game is simply Google Chrome, displaying web pages. Some users have speculated it may even be possible to access the game's user experience within another web browser, if you were able to obtain the URL's used to power the game's menus.
While this isn't really a huge security concern, as the game is simply serving up it's own web pages internally, it does prove to be a huge performance hit. Chrome has long been known for being CPU and memory intensive.
The problem is compounded by the fact that a lot of Warcraft series gamers tend to play on older hardware, which struggles with Google Chrome.
In a follow up tweet, Colin claimed that while playing the game itself, his CPU was using just 25% of it's resources, but with the main menus open, the game was using 150% of resources.
Anyone who's tried to use the Steam overlay browser will know how much CPU resource trying to browse the web and play a game at the same time can be, so to do this by design seems inexplicable for a company like Blizzard, and it seems many agree.
blizzard is a small indie dev company, please understand.
— LilShpeeThatCould (@LilShpee) January 31, 2020
It seems then that corners may have been cut in this regard. How is your performance on Warcraft 3 Reforged? Let us know down in the comments below.