The natural consequences of outsourcing your product to Asia and SJWs.
You know, we keep joking about purple haired dykes taking over creative positions in the industry, but I'm really close to believing this had a significant impact.
Cause if there is one thing these guys have in common, it is that most of their art is professionally on just the level that you can sell it, but nowhere beyond that (in other words: the perfect diversity hire).
Basically just go and take a look at some devintart profiles by the stereotypical pink haired girl in her mid-20s (the types you will now find on group photos of blizzard and other companies currently going down the drain). There is a common theme through all of them and it often finds its full realization in the cal-arts animation style (among other things):
Low contrast, high value colors (often from some neon palette).
And - I shit you not - this is a recurring theme in the texture work of WC3 reforged.
There is very little contrast, the values are all over the place, the stylization is essentially non-existent, to the point where it becomes hard to even read what's going on in some textures.
When you directly compare the old texture work to the new, you realize just how good the old artists actually were. Their stuff actually still looks pretty fucking fantastic (low poly limitations aside). It's the fact that they not only made a deployable piece of technical art, but also went the extra mile to make that stuff pop in the perspective you will be looking at it:
The lower one looks completely flat. Trees and grass had highlights painted into the texture in the original, something that, by the way, is only done by confident, well trained professionals and regularly ignored by those that believe they can hide their art under a layer of PBR maps and post processing.
The values are completly off. The value on the lower layer of grass is way, waaaaay to high. The trees have this fucking DotA gradient going on - which wouldn't be a problem if the tops didn blend into the ground - which uses the same value of green.
The remaster misses details and "exaggerations" that actually help the eye when you are looking at a scene from above. To be more exact, compare the size of the blades of grass in the original to the blades of grass in the remaster. Same applies for cracks in the mud and "small" rocks on the road (which seem to be missing - which is not a big surprise, since they are a deliberate, contrasting exaggeration in the original - something the new artists is apparently incapable of).
As an ATVI investor I'm naturally thrilled by all of this.