It’s been a long few months since this year started. Sometimes, it seems like there’s been some sort of huge intense event to keep attention since the start of the new year. Whether it was the Australian wildfires or the current COVID-19 pandemic, there’s been something to keep attention every week.
Because of that, it might feel like a good long while has passed since Blizzard pushed out its unfinished remaster of one of their most beloved titles, Warcraft III: Reforged. We’ve talked about it a few times on this website, discussing the horrid condition it launched in and the way that Blizzard handled the disastrous event, doing everything from staying silent to offering full refunds to upset fans.
We've just released an update to Warcraft III: Reforged that includes bug fixes and improvements to the campaign, versus, and custom games.
🔍 Check out the patch notes for more info: https://t.co/I8fV54V3R3
— Warcraft III: Reforged (@Warcraft3) March 18, 2020
Back on March 18th, almost a month ago, Blizzard applied another major patch to the title. We wrote about this at the time as well, highlighting how some of the changes were drastically needed but unacceptable. It showed how unfinished the game truly was, with some of the fixes being simple quality control things of characters having the right model. They also made changes to try and fix issues like opponents being invisible upon spawn, the game crashing repeatedly, and other absolutely game-breaking issues that appeared on a regular basis.
This was another step in making the game playable – not good, not acceptable, but playable. At launch, assuming you could run the game long enough to avoid a crash, there were so many issues with units and graphics that playing still could be literally impossible. Switching the graphics back to the original 2002 graphics made it even worse, causing units to spawn invisibly, including your opponent’s units.
But on their journey to making the game playable again, it seems that Blizzard has decided to lapse back into silence. Since the March 18th update, there’s been no word on what the team is doing to improve Warcraft III: Reforged.
This is worrying for a number of reasons. For one, given how much goodwill Blizzard lost with the broken release, fans would expect at least a casual roadmap of the changes that Blizzard intends to implement. If not, fans were at least hoping to have weekly hotfixes and patches. World of Warcraft, which is fifteen years old and unbelievably massive, receives hotfixes on a weekly – sometimes daily – basis. Why isn’t Warcraft III: Reforged getting the same treatment?
Hopefully, as time goes on Blizzard will be more transparent with their work on the title. As it sits now, though, they’ve done nothing to win back the thousands of fans that felt betrayed by the record-breakingly bad release.
