By Kotaku | Created at 2026-09-15 13:32:53 | Updated at 2026-09-15 16:46:29
3 hours ago
Warcraft 3: Reforged got a surprising new lease on life at Blizzcon 2026 this past weekend, with the announcement of a brand new campaign, new definitive graphics, and other quality-of-life updates aimed at re-sparking interest in the RTS revival after its initial 2020 release was widely panned by critics and fans.
The new campaign, The Forsaken Kingdom, includes over 30 hours of new gameplay set at a pivotal moment in Warcraft history: the sacking of Lordaeron and the early days of the Undercity, bridging the time between Warcraft 3 and World of Warcraft. Its announcement and surprise launch are a pretty big deal for fans of Blizzard’s older RTSes who may have seen Warcraft 3: Reforged‘s struggles as a bit of a death knell for Blizzard’s work in the space.
However, this second attempt at a launch is also frustrating some fans due to a weird mishmash of seemingly missing and inconsistent features. For one, the new Definitive graphics are only available for The Forsaken Kingdom; they don’t carry over into the classic campaigns. But the option available in the classic campaigns to play with original graphics is also not available for The Forsaken Kingdom, meaning it’s impossible to play through the entire game, start to finish, in one singular graphical style.
I spoke to Warcraft senior manager Brad Chan and game director Ion Hazzikostas at BlizzCon and asked them what was going on with this strange lack of parity between the two parts of the campaign, and Chan reassured me that the team does have plans for a definitive version of the classic campaign. It’s coming in the “near future,” he says, and it will be available for free for all players. He didn’t confirm anything one way or another around a classic-look version of The Forsaken Kingdom, though.
I also asked the pair about another issue fans have picked up on: dubbing. Warcraft 3: Reforged released with text and voiceovers translated into a dozen different languages. Though some of these used the original voices, others had been fully rerecorded, much to the chagrin of some fans. Still, while these dubs were controversial, at least they were there, in the game. The Forsaken Kingdom’s text is localized into all these same languages, but the voiceovers are only available in English.
“We’re definitely looking at different regions that we can do via localization in the future,” Chan said. “We’re still exploring which regions that they will be.”
I asked why The Forsaken Kingdom campaign was launched without either of these features, which are seemingly pretty important to a lot of the community. Hazzikostas answered this one, saying that it “ultimately comes down to time” and that they wanted to get the game out alongside BlizzCon.
“We opted to make the immediate splash and start getting feedback, start getting a sense of what players felt about this experience,” he said. “We know that, of course, we are a global company with a global audience and having a full experience in your language of choice that we’re supporting is important, but we ultimately just wanted to get this out into players’ hands so that they could experience it and let us know what they want next to start informing our next steps as well.”
I pressed them on this one. What was the urgency for it to be out at BlizzCon specifically?
“I mean, the urgency is frankly the excitement of it, right?” Hazzikostas replied.
Okay, sure, but couldn’t they have announced it with BlizzCon and then released it a bit later when these features were ready?
“I mean, yes, that’s an option,” Hazzikostas said. “But I think it’s just making the trade-offs of the ability to say, ‘This is here, you can play it today’ versus ‘we need to work through a localization pipeline.’ And if there are players who feel like they wish we’d made a different decision, we’re very open to that feedback and that can inform how we approach other similar decisions down the line.
“But I think with this moment, really looking to get as many eyes on this as possible, looking to get that feedback and hopefully revitalize interest in the game, even the genre. BlizzCons don’t come along very often. And so, you know, this is something that we really wanted to make sure we were capitalizing on.”
