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Warcraft III: Reforged - now with lowest user metacritic score of all time

BrotherFrank

Nouveau Riche
Patron
Joined
Apr 19, 2012
Messages
1,573
And not a word in all of that about restoring the custom game scene to how it was before blizz fucked it all up, sadly modders can only do so much to clean up blizz’s mess.
 

InD_ImaginE

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Aug 23, 2015
Messages
5,365
Pathfinder: Wrath
MY only question is who the fuck plays braindead mobile games? Who the fuck pays for this shit?

hey old man if you don't know mobile games has been the biggest ROI for gaming in a while, that's why everybody is making one

things like FPS, MOBA, F2P MMO get a very big resurgence in East Asia (China, Korea), India, and South America (Brazil is a notable market) and in a lesser capacity, SEA, through mobile gaming. Japanese also has a very strong mobile game market altho it is more geared to the domestic gacha games.

People splurged ungoldy amount of money to mobile games even in USA and EU altho the games which is popular in the west is ofc of different genre.

It's easy to circlejerk about how bad mobile gaming is but it's been one of the biggest money maker for gaming industry. Do you really think corp executives are stupid enough to invest without projecting a good return on investment?

Go read the development cost and the return of investment on this mobile gaming, there are more than few reports about that
 

fork

Guest
MY only question is who the fuck plays braindead mobile games? Who the fuck pays for this shit?

It boils down to most humans are cretins. Just take a look outside, turn on the TV, browse youtube's or reddit's trending. Look which sports are popular, which politicians/parties get votes, what kind of music is popular, modern art, architecture etc. The list is fucking endless. Even Codex is getting shittier by the year.
Mobile gaming really isn't so bad compared to what else is going on in the world.
 

Demo.Graph

Arbiter
Joined
Jun 17, 2018
Messages
990
MY only question is who the fuck plays braindead mobile games? Who the fuck pays for this shit?

hey old man if you don't know mobile games has been the biggest ROI for gaming in a while, that's why everybody is making one

things like FPS, MOBA, F2P MMO get a very big resurgence in East Asia (China, Korea), India, and South America (Brazil is a notable market) and in a lesser capacity, SEA, through mobile gaming. Japanese also has a very strong mobile game market altho it is more geared to the domestic gacha games.

People splurged ungoldy amount of money to mobile games even in USA and EU altho the games which is popular in the west is ofc of different genre.

It's easy to circlejerk about how bad mobile gaming is but it's been one of the biggest money maker for gaming industry. Do you really think corp executives are stupid enough to invest without projecting a good return on investment?

Go read the development cost and the return of investment on this mobile gaming, there are more than few reports about that

To add to what you've said.
Last year I got interested in an online eurofarm called Forge of Empires. Now it's aimed at mobile audience with main target platform being tablets and smartphones. It's a very curious thing from a game-design point of view.

At a first glance it presents itself as a kinda clone of Civ but on a single city scope (it even has a tech-tree with a design resembling civs 5 and 6). The premise is you guide a city through the ages and fight and trade for it to prosper. It has a hex-based combat, resource trading system, daily quests and seasonal events - basically, typical stuff from WoW and other MMOG integrated into a kinda strategic city-builder engine.
But at the core of it all it's a casino in disguise. If player wants to develop fast or try and reach the top of the ladder, he has two options.

First option is to spend a humongous time in the game at predefined intervals. All player actions ingame are limited by real-time cooldowns. To play optimally you have to log in at least once a day or better every 8 hours or so. And you'd need to spend at least 10 months to rush through the tech tree because local research points trickle very slowly. And many players don't even try to do it, because it's possible to spend research moneyz on random stuff to kinda turn your city into a functional clone of a lvl 20 twink in WoW. And be all cool kicking noobs.

Second option is to spend real money buying ingame resources to boost yourself. But there're three catches about it.
The first one is that you need to spend a lot of money to propel yourself to about a month forward - like hundreds to thousands of dollars.
The second is that resources that you've bought are first have to be passed through casino-like mechanics: there're ingame analogs to wheel of fortune, shell game and other lotteries. So you can't get a predefined result with your payment. But you have a chance to get "more than your money worth".
And the third catch is that the most powerful ingame assets are available only during seasonal events, so you get a "seasonal sale urgency feeling". And the balance is made in a way that pushes you to pay a little bit of money to get the main seasonal prize (or log in every 8 hours to optimally milk the event). So, say, if you'd spent several weeks doing an event and then had some family business and missed your session, you either miss out on your goal (and weeks of your efforts!) or spend, say, meagre 2 to 5 bucks to get a chance to get your treasured picture of a building or a new avatar.

And it works. People play these games for years and keep paying. One of the players I spoke to had literally said "I spent here a thousand days and at least as many dollars". All of that is sometimes justified by liberal comparisons to a time spent in cinemas and a cost of tickets.

I dug a bit and found out that these games often get most of their income from a small number of "whales" - rich pops who can afford to pay aforementioned thousands of dollars for ingame benefits to feel themselves victors even while they "rest". And the majority of players that had spent a lot of time in the game, turned it into their daily habit and play as random mooks who try to overcome overwhelming odds (represented by whales) and sometimes treat themselves to a small gift or two.

It's disgusting, really. But it works. It brings money to management and jewelopers. These are basically virtual casinos that often go below the radar of western and muslim legal systems. And asians simply don't care.

edit: formatting and typos
 
Last edited:

MWaser

Arbiter
Joined
Nov 22, 2015
Messages
607
Location
Where you won't find me
MY only question is who the fuck plays braindead mobile games? Who the fuck pays for this shit?

hey old man if you don't know mobile games has been the biggest ROI for gaming in a while, that's why everybody is making one

things like FPS, MOBA, F2P MMO get a very big resurgence in East Asia (China, Korea), India, and South America (Brazil is a notable market) and in a lesser capacity, SEA, through mobile gaming. Japanese also has a very strong mobile game market altho it is more geared to the domestic gacha games.

People splurged ungoldy amount of money to mobile games even in USA and EU altho the games which is popular in the west is ofc of different genre.

It's easy to circlejerk about how bad mobile gaming is but it's been one of the biggest money maker for gaming industry. Do you really think corp executives are stupid enough to invest without projecting a good return on investment?

Go read the development cost and the return of investment on this mobile gaming, there are more than few reports about that

To add to what you've said.
Last year I got interested in an online eurofarm called Forge of Empires. Now it's aimed at mobile audience with main target platform being notepads and smartphones. It's a very curious thing from a game-design point of view.

At a first glance it presents itself as a kinda clone of Civ but on a single city scope (it even has a tech-tree with a design resembling civs 5 and 6). The premise is you guide a city through the ages and fight and trade for it to prosper. It has a hex-based combat, resource trading system, daily quests and seasonal events - basically, typical stuff from WoW and other MMOG integrated into a kinda strategic city-builder engine.
But at the core of it all it's a casino in disguise. If player wants to develop fast or try and reach the top of the ladder, he has two options.
First option is to spend a humongous time in the game at predefined intervals. All player actions ingame are limited by real-time cooldowns. To play optimally you have to log in at least once a day or better every 8 hours or so. And you'd need to spend at least 10 months to rush through the tech tree because local research points trickle very slowly. And many players don't even try to do it, because it's possible to spend research moneyz on random stuff to kinda turn your city into a functional clone of a lvl 20 twink in WoW. And be all cool kicking noobs.

Second option is to spend real money buying ingame resources to boost yourself. But there're three catches about it.
The first one is that you need to spend a lot of money to propel yourself to about a month forward - like hundreds to thousands of dollars.
The second is that resources that you've bought are first have to be passed through casino-like mechanics: there're ingame analogs to wheel of fortune, shell game and other lotteries. So you can't get a predefined result with your payment. But you have a chance to get "more than your money worth".
And the third catch is that the most powerful ingame assets are available only during seasonal events, so you get a "seasonal sale urgency feeling". And the balance is made in a way that pushes you to pay a little bit of money to get the main seasonal prize (or log in every 8 hours to optimally milk the event). So, say, if you'd spent several weeks doing an event and then had some family business and missed your session, you either miss out on your goal (and weeks of your efforts!) or spend, say, meagre 2 to 5 bucks to get a chance to get your treasured picture of a building or a new avatar.

And it works. People play these games for years and keep paying. One of the players I spoke to had literally said "I spent here a thousand days and at least as many dollars". All of that is sometimes justified by liberal comparisons to a time spent in cinemas and a cost of tickets.

I dug a bit and found out that these games often get most of their income from a small number of "whales" - rich pops who can afford to pay aforementioned thousands of dollars for ingame benefits to feel themselves victors even while they "rest". And the majority of players that had spent a lot of time in the game, turned it into their daily habit and play a random mooks who try to overcome overwhelming odds (represented by whales) and sometimes treat themselves to a small gift or two.

It's disgusting, really. But it works. It brings money to management and jewelopers. These are basically virtual casinos that often go below the radar of western and muslim legal systems. And asians simply don't care.
The mechanics of monetary exploitation which you described here are essentially the same in each of those popular mobiles games. The randomness usually is differently representated but also always seems to exist because, I would bet, it increases player investment when it's based on "lootbox-equivalents" than straight pay-for-result structure. And entirely likely it simultaneously is made out to get the players to gain less than advertised as well but with a better promise to keep pushing for the attempts at great success.

The (successful) mobile games also always have the same general structure regardless, Some kind of long-time progression based, be it cities/ships/spaceships/trade empires/kingdoms/characters/adventure bands/war parties etc. But differently from having a regular game structured with these concepts, they always have to structure the progression mechanics similarly and can just differentiate on the auxillary gameplay structure, but the core structure being based around the slow grind, they all end up essentially fulfilling the same psychological needs in people and there's little desire from them to engage in multiple games of this type.
 

BrotherFrank

Nouveau Riche
Patron
Joined
Apr 19, 2012
Messages
1,573
MY only question is who the fuck plays braindead mobile games? Who the fuck pays for this shit?

You underestimate the “social” aspect which sucks people in + the amounts of rich twats who love nothing more then to p2w to dunk on plebs unwilling to spend hundreds to keep up with the content threadmill. So to reinforce what Demo.Graph said.

By social aspect I mean an excuse for people to compare penises with each other, this is why you'll always see mobile games advertising these aspects heavily, whether it be pvp or guilds, the entire point is to get people invested enough they spend money trying to outdo each other. To give a different type of example illustrating this from Demo, One mobile game I tried (at some point I was curious about mobile games and downloaded a bunch of them to see what the fuss was about) was euh...I don't even fucking remember the name, something empire or empire something, and found myself a clan pretty quick since was needed to get anywhere in the game and was immediately faced with a phenemenon I had little prior experience with: chinese gamers.

Now one terrifying aspect of bugman culture is that they don't have the same conception of "fun" as regular human beings like you and I might understand it. When I play a game, If I have to insert money to beat the other person I'm playing against, that's no fun nor would any human consider it "skill", they would find this a shitty way to play games.
Bugmen don't think like this, I forgot the exact phrasing for it but its a chinese saying like "win at all costs" and "everythings fair so long as you win", the end result is the chinese only care about the outcome of a game and any way to get a win is fair in their eyes, they genuinely don't understand the concept of playing just for the sake of it instead of trying to win. So in this game they banded together and had massive international pride where they always wanted to be top of the leader boards and crush non chinese at the game...And this meant they were throwing cash into microntransanctions with wanton disregard, all because china numba wun.

Of course this meant othernon chinese tards wanted to take down the chinese and that involved...buying lots of microtransanctions in order to keep up with the bugmen.
It was a never ending arms race, and I bailed on it without a second thought asap. But this insight into the thinking of bugmen was if nothing else, fascinating from an anthropological pov, and I've subsequently found it repeated within most mobile games I've dabbled in, it might not always be the chinese but there is always going to be some tribalism at play pitting players against each other whilst devs laugh and count the money going in.

Now onto the people who are really supporting this industry.... Rich mofos who wipe their asses with thousand dollar bills. If you didn't know, mobile games is all about fleecing the "whales" who are happy to drop ungodly amounts of money, and to a lesser degree the "dolphins" who spend on the game but not quite to exorbitant amounts (if you spend like 10£ every now and then on a mobile game, congratulations, you are a dolphin) but who are the most numerous. so there is a 3 tier system at work (with freenium players at the bottom of the pole who get dicked by everyone), and among these rich mofos you got everything from saudi princes to business tycoons. Why these lot dabble in mobile games to begin with is a mystery, but I can only assume it relates to flexing on the peasants.
 
Last edited:

Seethe

Arbiter
Joined
Nov 22, 2015
Messages
967
the end result is the chinese only care about the end result of a game and any way to get a win is fair in their eyes, they genuinely don't understand the concept of playing just for the sake of it instead of trying to win. So in this game they banded together and had massive international pride where they always wanted to be top of the leader boards and crush non chinese at the game...And this meant they were throwing cash into microntransanctions with wanton disregard, all because china numba wun.

This is why they also cheat so much in online gaming.
 

Justicar

Dead game
Glory to Ukraine
Joined
Apr 15, 2020
Messages
4,413
Location
Afghanistan
You underestimate the “social” aspect which sucks people in + the amounts of rich twats who love nothing more then to p2w to dunk on plebs unwilling to spend hundreds to keep up with the content threadmill. So to reinforce what Demo.Graph said.

By social aspect I mean an excuse for people to compare penises with each other, this is why you'll always see mobile games advertising these aspects heavily, whether it be pvp or guilds, the entire point is to get people invested enough they spend money trying to outdo each other. To give a different type of example illustrating this from Demo, One mobile game I tried (at some point I was curious about mobile games and downloaded a bunch of them to see what the fuss was about) was euh...I don't even fucking remember the name, something empire or empire something, and found myself a clan pretty quick since was needed to get anywhere in the game and was immediately faced with a phenemenon I had little prior experience with: chinese gamers.

Now one terrifying aspect of bugman culture is that they don't have the same conception of "fun" as regular human beings like you and I might understand it. When I play a game, If I have to insert money to beat the other person I'm playing against, that's no fun nor would any human consider it "skill", they would find this a shitty way to play games.
Bugmen don't think like this, I forgot the exact phrasing for it but its a chinese saying like "win at all costs" and "everythings fair so long as you win", the end result is the chinese only care about the outcome of a game and any way to get a win is fair in their eyes, they genuinely don't understand the concept of playing just for the sake of it instead of trying to win. So in this game they banded together and had massive international pride where they always wanted to be top of the leader boards and crush non chinese at the game...And this meant they were throwing cash into microntransanctions with wanton disregard, all because china numba wun.

Of course this meant othernon chinese tards wanted to take down the chinese and that involved...buying lots of microtransanctions in order to keep up with the bugmen.
It was a never ending arms race, and I bailed on it without a second thought asap. But this insight into the thinking of bugmen was if nothing else, fascinating from an anthropological pov, and I've subsequently found it repeated within most mobile games I've dabbled in, it might not always be the chinese but there is always going to be some tribalism at play pitting players against each other whilst devs laugh and count the money going in.

Now onto the people who are really supporting this industry.... Rich mofos who wipe their asses with thousand dollar bills. If you didn't know, mobile games is all about fleecing the "whales" who are happy to drop ungodly amounts of money, and to a lesser degree the "dolphins" who spend on the game but not quite to exorbitant amounts (if you spend like 10£ every now and then on a mobile game, congratulations, you are a dolphin) but who are the most numerous. so there is a 3 tier system at work (with freenium players at the bottom of the pole who get dicked by everyone), and among these rich mofos you got everything from saudi princes to business tycoons. Why these lot dabble in mobile games to begin with is a mystery, but I can only assume it relates to flexing on the peasants.
 

Olinser

Savant
Joined
Nov 1, 2018
Messages
977
Location
Denial
picked this game up and am playing through the campaign on hard mode
fucking hell this game's hard AF
no wonder i just played custom maps as a kid
Should have picked up the Starcraft remaster instead. It is at least as good as the original.

That's because it literally IS the original with just a visual upgrade.

That's the reason the WC3 'remaster' failed so catastrophically.

They fucked with the actual base game and screwed it up.
 

J1M

Arcane
Joined
May 14, 2008
Messages
14,616
I completely understand why companies want to extract dollars from whales. I also understand why it works. What I don't understand is why it is considered part of the game industry instead of a digital casino or some other category.
 

Olinser

Savant
Joined
Nov 1, 2018
Messages
977
Location
Denial
I completely understand why companies want to extract dollars from whales. I also understand why it works. What I don't understand is why it is considered part of the game industry instead of a digital casino or some other category.

Because they make sure they give the right government scumbags their cut.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,228
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
:necro:

Jason Schreier does Warcraft 3 Reforged: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...blizzard-s-botched-warcraft-iii-reforged-game

Blizzard Botched Warcraft III Remake After Internal Fights, Pressure Over Costs
Under former co-founder and CEO, Blizzard games had endless development timelines to get it right. But new Activision approach focuses on financials.

Blizzard Entertainment's disastrous remake of the classic video game Warcraft III last year was the result of mismanagement and financial pressures, according to newly revealed documents and people with knowledge of the failed launch. The release also reflected Blizzard’s significant cultural changes in recent years, as corporate owner Activision Blizzard Inc. has pushed the developer to cut costs and prioritize its biggest titles.

Warcraft III: Reforged was a long-awaited reimagining of one of Blizzard’s most popular games. Blizzard President J. Allen Brack called the original title “monumentally important” when Reforged was announced in 2018. The company promised “over four hours of updated in-game cutscenes and re-recorded voice-overs.” But the project was never a priority for the company, in part because a remaster of an old strategy game had little chance of becoming the type of billion-dollar product that Activision wanted, according to the people, who asked not to be named because they weren’t authorized to speak on company matters. With Blizzard pressured to focus on its biggest franchises, Warcraft III: Reforged couldn’t get the ambitious budget that its leaders wanted.

When Warcraft III: Reforged was released on Jan. 28, 2020, it was widely panned, earning a 59 of 100 on the review aggregation website Metacritic. The game was buggy and missing the components that Blizzard had promised earlier, including the updated cutscenes — sequences that develop the story line but aren't part of game play — and re-recorded voice-overs. The remake even lacked features that the original Warcraft III had contained in 2002, such as a “ladder” system that ranked competitive players. Blizzard also had disabled the original version of the game on its digital platform, so the inferior remake was the only version that fans could easily play.

In the weeks after launch, Blizzard promised to update the game and add some of those features over time, but 18 months later, they are still nowhere to be found.

“Warcraft III: Reforged not only felt like a disappointing remaster, but it actually made the online experience of the original game worse for fans who have been playing it continuously for almost 20 years,” said Wes Fenlon, an editor for the website PC Gamer. “Five years ago, I think Blizzard was one of the few big game companies that could still cast itself as being your friend, but I think that innocent trust is gone now.”

At the time, the company apologized for the launch and said it had chosen to backtrack on updating the cinematics because “we did not want the in-game cutscenes to steer too far from the original game.” But documentation produced after its release, as well as interviews with 11 people who worked on or close to the game, indicate that Reforged was actually rescoped due to budget cuts and internal arguments over the game’s direction.

In a statement, an Activision Blizzard spokesman said the company offered “no-questions-asked refunds” to Warcraft III: Reforged owners. “Blizzard prides itself on releasing games when they’re ready—gameplay and quality come first and foremost—and our goal is always to do right by our community,” the spokesman said. “The central issue with Warcraft III: Reforged was an early, unclear vision and misalignment about whether the game was a remaster or a remake. This led to other challenges with the scope and features of the game, and communication on the team, with leadership and beyond, which all snowballed closer to launch. Developers across Blizzard pitched in to help, but ultimately bug fixing and other tasks related to the end of development couldn’t correct the more fundamental issues.”

The spokesman added that as a result of the negative reactions to Warcraft III: Reforged, the upcoming Diablo II remake, planned for release in September, will be “a pure remaster, faithful to the art, gameplay, and cinematics of the original game.”

Since its founding in 1991, Blizzard has grown into one of the biggest U.S.-based game publishers by releasing critically acclaimed, lucrative titles. Franchises such as Diablo and Overwatch have helped Activision Blizzard reach $8 billion in revenue last year.

Blizzard’s success, under co-founder and former Chief Executive Officer Mike Morhaime, was a product of its high standards for quality and willingness to delay games until they were ready. But Activision, which absorbed Blizzard in 2007 and had left it largely to operate independently, has been taking a bigger role in Blizzard’s operations recently, putting financial pressures on the developer.

Warcraft III: Reforged was Blizzard’s first bad game and another blemish for a company that has faced multiple internal challenges in recent years, including high-level departures like Morhaime and disputes over low wages. Blizzard also faced widespread criticism and calls for a boycott after banning a player who supported Hong Kong’s protest movement on a livestream. This week, the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing sued Activision Blizzard over claims of harassment and discrimination, accusing the company of facilitating a sexist culture.

Small teams like Classic Games, which worked on remakes including Reforged, were all but ignored in favor of potential billion-dollar games like Diablo IV and Overwatch 2. Blizzard even canceled some of its other projects in favor of the proven hits. Eight months after the release of Warcraft III: Reforged, the Classic Games team was dismantled.

800x-1.jpg

Warcraft III: Reforged was buggy and fans complained about missing features.

Blizzard chose to plow ahead with a premature release of Warcraft III: Reforged largely because it had already taken pre-orders from players, according to people familiar with the decision. The company couldn’t bump the game too much more without potentially being forced to send out refunds and risking that fans wouldn’t buy the game again.

In notes from an internal postmortem of the game reviewed by Bloomberg, developers on Warcraft III: Reforged acknowledged this issue. "We took pre-orders when we knew the game wasn't ready yet," they said, adding later that the company needed to “resist the urge to ship an unfinished product because of financial pressure.”

The Blizzard spokesman said that “in hindsight, we should have taken more time to get it right, even if it meant returning pre-orders.”

In the beginning, the Classics Game team had ambitious plans. Throughout 2017 and 2018, developers revamped the game’s script and re-recorded all the dialogue. The goal was to rewrite scenes and flesh out characters to align them with the lore of World of Warcraft, the massively popular online game that had been evolving the story of the franchise for the previous decade and a half.

David Fried, a designer on the original Warcraft III who was briefly brought back to work on Reforged, said in an email that “there were things in the works for Warcraft III: Reforged that would have absolutely revitalized a classic game.”

But behind the scenes, things weren’t going well. Members of the team began worrying that they had promised more than they could deliver. Remastering Warcraft III was more complicated than their previous remake, StarCraft, thanks to its three-dimensional models. The team was small, the production was disorganized and the amount of work in front of them was daunting. It had taken months to revamp one of Warcraft III’s levels; now they would have to do the same for dozens more.

Morale plummeted. Rob Bridenbecker, the head of the Classic Games team, was known for an aggressive managerial style, for taking frequent trips out of the country during production and a tendency to give unrealistic deadlines. Miscommunication became a serious issue across the team, as did arguments over the scope and art style, according to people familiar with the matter. Bridenbecker, who left Blizzard in April, declined to comment.

“We have developers who have dealt with exhaustion, anxiety, depression and more for a year now," the developers later said in the postmortem. "Many have lost trust in the team and this company. Many players have also lost trust, and the launch certainly didn't help an already rough year for Blizzard's image."

The team, which had a reputation of taking on outcasts from other Blizzard departments, was restricted in hiring due to a limited budget. Some people had to do multiple jobs at once, working many nights and weekends to try to finish the game. Technological obstacles and conflicts among the team only exacerbated the problems. A mass layoff of nearly 800 people in February 2019 hollowed out Blizzard’s support departments, which also hurt the team. “We were missing and/or had the wrong people in certain lead roles," the postmortem said. "The team structure didn't set up the project for success."

Warcraft III: Reforged began gradually losing features. Management threw out the revised scripts and re-recordings the team had done, according to the people familiar with the process, choosing instead to stick with the original dialogue and voice acting.

Fried, who departed the project as it was rescoped, pinned the blame for these shifts on Blizzard’s corporate parent. “I am deeply disappointed that Activision would actively work against the interests of all players in the manner that they did,” he said. He added that it was “quite telling” that Morhaime had resigned just weeks before Warcraft III: Reforged was presented in November 2018 at Blizzcon, the company’s annual fan convention.

The developers of the game blamed Bridenbecker and other executives. "Leadership seemed totally out of touch with the velocity and scope of the project until extremely late in development,” the team said in the postmortem. "Senior voices in the department warned leadership about the impending disaster of Warcraft on several occasions over the last year or so, but were ignored."

By the end of 2019, the Classic Games team had brought in help from all across Blizzard to finish Warcraft III: Reforged. It wouldn’t be enough.

When Blizzard releases a new game, there’s usually some sort of celebration — a lavish launch party full of drinks and speeches. For Warcraft III: Reforged, however, there were no champagne toasts; just wincing anticipation of how angry players would be when they saw how many features were missing from the game.

The next Classic Games project, Diablo II: Resurrected, due out in September, is being produced by other teams. The project was transferred to the Diablo IV team and Albany, New York-based Vicarious Visions, which was absorbed into Blizzard earlier this year. People who have seen and played that game are optimistic about its chances.

Blizzard vowed to patch and update Warcraft III: Reforged, but progress has been slow. In lieu of official support, a group of fans began writing their own patches for the game, building a service called Warcraft 3 Champions that aims to add back missing features. This version of the game includes a competitive ladder.

“We have a level of freedom that Blizzard could never have,” said John Graves, a member of the Warcraft 3 Champions team who has made the project his full-time job for the last year.

The Blizzard spokesman said the company has “a new team dedicated to updating Warcraft III: Reforged with improvements. In these efforts, we realize our work and actions will speak louder than our words. Across many projects, we’ve made process improvements, implemented better milestone planning, and improved visibility into work-in-progress.”

But a year and a half after launch, Blizzard’s Warcraft III: Reforged remains incomplete. And the company is left facing questions, including whether it will be able to recover from the brand damage caused by the missed expectations. “I think Blizzard lost some community trust,” said Elizabeth Harper, editorial director for the website Blizzard Watch. “But they've earned quite a bit of trust over the years, and it will take more than one bad game release to destroy it.”
 
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whydoibother

Arcane
Patron
Joined
May 2, 2018
Messages
15,477
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Codex Year of the Donut

This article probably won't get the necessary attention, because of the California lawsuit about workplace discrimination that was revealed several hours before this was published.
I don't think their original plan was very ambitious. Without having access to the source code, and just speculating, but it seems something that would be easily done even by a small studio, in no more than 15-20 months. That they kept cutting promised features, that were previously revealed in marketing, and STILL had to delay it, and STILL it went over budget, and STILL it was shit on release... just bad craftmanship.
 

Tavar

Cipher
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RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In
What is even the point of writing such an article one and half years after the game was released? Everybody remotely interested in the subject knows that the game was a shitshow and was never repaired. Blizzard didn't even restore the option to play the untouched version of the game. The problems outlined in article (too little time, the wrong people in the wrong roles, understaffed, communication gaps) are also hardly unique and not particularly interesting.
 

Zeriel

Arcane
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Jun 17, 2012
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13,378
In the beginning, the Classics Game team had ambitious plans. Throughout 2017 and 2018, developers revamped the game’s script and re-recorded all the dialogue. The goal was to rewrite scenes and flesh out characters to align them with the lore of World of Warcraft, the massively popular online game that had been evolving the story of the franchise for the previous decade and a half.

Honestly, this sounds like a terrible idea. Maybe it was a blessing in disguise that this didn't come to pass.
 

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