New Warcraft 3 installer fuels rumors about upcoming announcement

Is a remastered version of Warcraft 3 on the way? First, there were rumors of a secret event at Blizzard that required several international WC3 players to get visas to come to the US, suggesting something was happening soon. And further veracity was added with a new installer for Warcraft 3, which is very similar to the Battle.net integration that StarCraft got when it was remastered.

According to Wowhead, the installation gives you both games, and then you can unlock access based on what game keys you have — both Reign of Chaos and the expansion The Frozen Throne come in one install/download. That’s pretty excellent. The installer is not part of Battle.net as of this writing and there’s no tab on the app for Warcraft 3 but I imagine it wouldn’t be particularly hard to add.  They put one up for StarCraft when the game got remastered, so if the rumor is correct and there’s going to be a special Warcraft 3 event to announce a remaster for that game, I’d expect to see it hit the launcher as well.

The timing of this change, coming hot on the heels of those aforementioned rumors, definitely has me thinking something is up with regards to a remastered Warcraft 3. A lot of people thought we might be getting Warcraft 4 but I sincerely doubt that — I think Blizzard has learned that doing StarCraft 2 just ended up splitting the crowd that likes RTS properties and it’s better to do a remaster than a completely new game. That’s just my opinion, but combined with the fact that World of Warcraft is still trucking along fourteen years later, the idea of a Warcraft 4 seems a lot less likely than a remastered WC3.

Until we get some kind of official announcement, all we can do is speculate, but this new installer seems definitely to point to news on the way. Stay alert and we’ll see how soon we know more.