Games publishing and development giant Blizzard has responded to the widespread criticism its recently-released Warcraft 3: Reforged has received.
In a blog post on its website, the firm addressed some of the negative feedback it received since the project's launch in January, saying that it was "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."
The company said that it is working to fix an issue which saw colours and shading to differ in Reforged compared to the original game. There's an upcoming patch that will address that as well as other bugs, including animations and audio errors, as well as some tweaks to the user interface.
There have also been concerns raised about the game's online functionality, with Blizzard saying it is working on the backend of both Reforged and Warcraft III in general. The company also said it wasn't planning on reinstating tournaments and Reign of Chaos ruleset, which were both removed in the middle of 2019 due to low use. The studio also said that the reason why Reforged's cutscenes were of rather low quality is due to the developers wanting to stay close to the original game's spirit.
"We know this update doesn’t address all questions, but we’re committed to the development and support of this game," the post closed.
"We hope you’ll keep an eye out for this week’s patch and future updates and let us know what you think as we continue fine-tuning things. Until then, thank you as always for your support and passion for Warcraft III. We appreciate all your feedback and will continue to keep the Warcraft III community updated on everything we’re working on."
The blog post doesn't address one area of contention from the userbase, which is that Reforged's terms and conditions say that Blizzard owns all custom games made in Reforged. This is likely a response to the fact the MOBA genre spawned from a Warcraft III mod, going on to spawn two notably successful games in League of Legends and Dota 2, while Blizzard's own Heroes of the Storm failed to see the same success.
