At this point, virtually everyone knows how disastrous the launch of Warcraft III: Reforged was for Blizzard. They managed to deliver an absolutely broken, barely playable recreation of one of the most influential titles of all time, swiftly launching it to become their worst release yet. It still sits at a 0.5/10 on Metacritic with several thousand negative reviews burying any positivity.
Thankfully, Blizzard acknowledges that the only way out of the mess is through, and they’ve been patching the title somewhat faithfully since the launch about a month ago. Today’s patch brings a new set of fixes, alterations, and bug squishes to push the game towards playability, as well as fixing a few quality of life issues.
Beginning with the campaigns, they’ve adjusted some dialogue audio levels to fix issues of some dialogue being significantly quieter/louder than others in the same scene. Several missions have had bugs squished where units were appearing invisible, as well as tweaking the animations, triggers, and cameras of some cutscenes. Bugs with Tyrande and Rexxar’s inventories have been fixed as well.
Moving to gameplay fixes, there have been a handful of tweaks both in quality of life and playability. The female model for the Demon Hunter now has a unique metamorphosis animation instead of the copy-paste of the previous model. In terms of models, Lady Vashj’s model has had a fix where her ears – which were inexplicably human – now appear as they should for a naga.
Succubus models are now more visually distinct, and there’s been a fix to the icon for the Firelord’s Incinerate ability. The Guardian Golem has had a sound fix, along with resolving some issues where Reforged sound effects were playing in the Classic graphic option. Three maps – Banewood Bog, Fountain of Manipulation, and Ruins of Stratholme – have been removed from map pools due to instability issues. Finally, an issue has been fixed where the Blademaster was immune to non-magical abilities during his Whirlwind ability.
In terms of interface fixes, players will now be able to leave the matchmaking queue instead of being locked in. Map vetoes will also save in Versus FFA mode, and there have been multiple localization fixes along with fixes for portrait issues. Squelching (or muting) functionality has now been added as well.
There are a handful of other relatively-minor fixes through the patch notes, but this tl;dr provides most of the changes. It’s nice to see that Blizzard is working to fix the busted title, but it’s also alarming to see some of the fixes that they allowed to be necessary. We’ll likely be seeing quite a few more patches in the days to come.