Blizzard Responds To Warcraft 3: Reforged Criticism, Patches Coming Soon

After a wave of criticism was directed toward Activision Blizzard for its handling of Warcraft 3: Reforged, the company has issued an apology for the problems and outlined a couple of patches currently in the works.

Warcraft community manager Randy “Kaivax” Jordan took to the company’s forums to discuss Blizzard’s plans for Reforged, specifying that the team is “fully committed to supporting the game [and the Warcraft 3 community] for a long time to come.” This includes preparing a patch scheduled to go live later this week that will address mismatched color and shading modules, portrait animations and audio bugs, UI fixes, and more.

Most notably, though, Jordan takes aim at the cutscene controversy. Many fans have noted that certain cutscenes failed to live up to what Blizzard had previously shown during BlizzCon 2018. Jordan said the lack of re-animated cutscenes was, essentially, to keep the original spirit of Warcraft 3 intact.

“[W]e did not want the in-game cutscenes to steer too far from the original game,” Jordan said. “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 3 and allow players to relive these unforgettable moments as they were (albeit rebuilt with new animations and the higher fidelity art).”

“[W]e want to say we’re sorry to those of you who didn’t have the experience you wanted, and we’d like to share our plans for what’s coming next.”

Elsewhere in the forum post, Jordan said that some online features like clans and leaderboards are still coming. Jordan didn’t provide a definitive date as to when they will go live, other than the vague “in the coming weeks” timeframe. Still, he confirmed that Blizzard is “hard at work” on getting these missing features up and running.