After Warcraft III: Reforged’s launch saw a disappointed playerbase setting the internet ablaze, Blizzard has issued a response on the ill-fated remake in a developer update.
The Warcraft 3: Reforged developer update covers some of Blizzard’s plans going forward with the title alongside areas that the developer will not alter, in spite of fan outrage.
Blizzard Warcraft 3: Reforged Developer Update
In the developer update, Blizzard notes that the issue which saw players unable to jump straight into Warcraft III: Reforged on launch day was related to server load and since fixed.
Blizzard said that it will support Warcraft III: Reforged for “a long time to come” and proceeded to outline what players can expect from upcoming patches.
The first post-launch patch for Warcraft III: Reforged is set to arrive later this week and will address a bug that makes the Classic Mode visuals differ from those in the original Warcraft III, alongside fixes to portrait animations, UI and audio bugs.
The missing online features (e.g. leaderboards, clans) will be added to both Warcraft III: Reforged and Warcraft III in another patch that’s coming further down the line. The original title lost access to these online features when transitioning to the modern Battle.net framework, following Reforged’s release.
Tournaments and the Reign of Chaos ruleset will, however, not be making a comeback, Blizzard relying on custom games to implement them. The two were removed in mid-2019 from the original game due to low usage.
Lastly, Blizzard addressed Warcraft III: Reforged’s cutscenes, which have been at the forefront of fan outrage in terms of features that were significantly scaled back.
“[…] as we talked about last year at BlizzCon, we did not want the in-game cutscenes to steer too far from the original game. We went a little deeper into the thought process behind that at the show, but the main takeaway is that the campaigns tell one of the classic stories in Warcraft history, and we want to preserve the true spirit of Warcraft III and allow players to relive these unforgettable moments as they were (albeit rebuilt with new animations and the higher fidelity art).”, the developer update reads.
Fans have been expressing their disappointment with Warcraft 3: Reforged continuously since the game launched, pointing at how the title is quite far from the thorough reimagining they were expecting.
To this extent, Warcraft 3: Reforged now has the lowest user score on Metacritic, being rated 0.5 with more than 23,000 user reviews.
As much of a statement as that is, it’s worth keeping in mind that it likely represents the disconnect between the expectations Blizzard drummed up and the final product, rather than Reforged’s actual quality which, while not without issues, isn’t quite in the unserviceable state the 0.5 user score would suggest.
