Warcraft III: Re-Reforged? Blizzard President hints at June announcement from WC3:R team

Hope is on the horizon for Warcraft III fans as Blizzard Entertainment president Mike Ybarra posts that we’ll hear from the development team in June. The post was in reply to a live stream on May 28th in which Ybarra chatted about games, while playing some Valorant and World of Warcraft.

The message ends months of silence on the front of Warcraft III: Reforged. After a disappointing launch in 2020 that saw it panned by reviewers and lambasted for missing features and simply worse gameplay. 

Now it seems there could be news about the remaster of one of the most classic real-time strategy (RTS) games of all time. Which leaves us with the question, what changes will Blizzard make to improve the game?

Warcraft III: Reforged broke mods, made the original version of Warcraft III unplayable, and generally mucked everything up if you were a fan of the series. To compound this, there were core changes to the story and missions of WarCraft III in order to bring the game up to line with the modern World of Warcraft lore. 

For example, in the original Fall of Silvermoon mission in the Undead campaign, Sylvanas Windrunner would launch multiple attacks on your base. In doing so, she’d battle you to the death, causing huge damage, and then respawning (Warcraft III’s heroes respawn). However, in the Reforged version, Sylvanas only attacks until her health gets low. She then turns invisible, and retreats, making her attacks far easier on all difficulties. 

This change was made to make the mission consistent with Sylvanas’ current lore. After the battle in Silvermoon, Sylvanas becomes a banshee after being killed with Frostmourne. This story beat is kind of moot if you’ve just spent the entire mission killing her with Arthas anyway, and so was changed so you can’t kill her until the end of the mission. And while this sounds like pedantry to be annoyed by that, it’s changes like this that became real “Han shot first” moments for Warcraft III: Reforged.

But it’s unlikely these are the elements that are changing. Afterall, one of Reforged’s stated goals was to align the game more accurately with the modern Warcraft story. Instead, it’s expected that features that were completely missing or taken out of the games, such as player profiles, custom campaign support, and ranked ladders.

Warcraft III remains a pillar of RTS gaming. And with this hint of new announcements, perhaps the classic game will receive the support it deserves.