In January 2023, Blizzard sent out a survey asking about possibly soft relaunching Warcraft III: Reforged. What exactly was the point of this if nothing came from it? Is something coming?
Very much doubt it.
Besides, even if they did have plans for it… I wouldn’t bother with it.
They burned the bridge, no sense for us to cross the river anymore.
They never said anything about “soft relaunching.” They simply said they were going to update the game, which they did, for better or worse…
There were various patches restoring functionality that had been removed from the game with the launch of Reforged. Eventually, they started allowing the game to be on sale when battle.net has sales, and removed the no-questions-asked refund path, returning the game to the regular refund policy.
There was never any talk about any sort of “relaunch,” like a grand re-opening of a store or anything like that. It was simply about updating the game.
A survey doesn’t mean anything will be done, it’s survey. If something was planned to be done, there wouldn’t have been a need for a survey.
There was a question at the end asking how appealing a soft relaunch would be and they gave some examples of new features they could add or old features they could restore to illustrate what kind of scope would be realistic. This came after a long series of other questions about where players stood on how they should prioritize various features going forward and what might be standing in the way of players returning. Warcraft Tavern has an article about it that includes screenshots of the questions.
The soft relaunch topic was just the last in a very long survey that mostly came down to where PlaySide games should put the most attention. I’d guess that most people who responded were very interested in a soft relaunch but whatever they gleaned from the results also had to be presented to Blizzard.
The survey was around the time they restored some of the most glaring missing features like player profiles, leaderboards, ranked leagues, custom campaigns. Later that year they made some focused on automated tournaments and observer mode. Since then it’s been some visual features and more balance changes.
Personally, I doubt future patches will involve anything beyond more QoL items like minor options and visual touches along with more balance updates. It seems like PlaySide is still handling things but Blizzard controls the budget and gets the final say. And, while the survey was looking at how interested players were in new features, it was also looking at whether they even were still interested in playing WC3.