Blizzard Apologizes for Warcraft 3: Reforged, Offers Refunds

Well, someone decided to have a word after radio silence. Blizzard has issued an apology for the problems with Warcraft 3: Reforged and is issuing instant full refunds on its website to those who submit a ticket. The official statement was published on Blizzard’s forum.

Blizzard says they are “sorry to those of you who didn’t have the experience you wanted” and has issued some patches.

“One of the concerns with Reforged that we’ve seen are the visuals when selecting Classic Mode. We’ve identified the bug causing the colors and shading to look different from the original Warcraft III, and we’re testing a fix that will be incorporated in a larger patch addressing this issue and others. We expect to release that late this week. The patch will also address many other known issues, such as fixing some portrait animations and audio bugs, implementing some UI fixes, and more. Please keep an eye out for the patch notes for a detailed list of all the bug fixes.”

Also, Blizzard is planning to add new features to multiplayer like clans and leaderboards. “We’ll share release plans as work progresses in the coming weeks — please be assured that the team is hard at work on standing these features up.”

The company also gave a comment about cutscenes:

“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).”

No comments were given regarding the game’s low Metacritic user score — for the moment it is 0.5.

The best part of it all is automated refund system: you need to go to this page. Many players report that this time it works properly. Previously, the community was complaining about the refund system — and per users, Blizzard deleted appropriate topics on forum.

In the end, this is quite an unpleasant story to happen. Many players are saying that the attempt “to preserve the true spirit of Warcraft III” is a very poor excuse for false advertisement and I have to agree with that. For example, if Black Mesa developers just did a cosmetic change to the original Half-Life and call it a “remake,” people would be mad just like this.

If someone wanted to “to relive these unforgettable moments as they were,” they could play the original Warcraft III. This is not what remakes are created for. Seems like the whole video game industry needs to have some regulation tool for something like this.