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January 2020 saw the arrival of Blizzard’s highly anticipated Warcraft 3 remake, Reforged, but the party mood quickly deteriorated once fans realized the game hadn’t delivered much of that. that was originally promised and took away even more. Now, a Bloomberg report has shed new light on the behind-the-scenes decision-making that led to such a disastrous release for one of Blizzard’s most beloved games.
When Reforged was initially announced at BlizzCon 2018, Blizzard sold it as a major overhaul of its classic real-time strategy game. However, the final version was plagued by bugs, discontinued online play, and the lack of the expected features promised when it was first revealed, including improved cutscenes and re-recorded voiceovers. It even removed elements from the original Warcraft 3, such as Leaderboards and Clans.
The negative response to Reforged was so significant that Blizzard eventually implemented a refund on demand policy, but the question remained as to why the company thought it was even far acceptable to ship a product in such a condition. mediocre to begin with.
Warcraft 3: Reforged – Gameplay Trailer.
The answer, according to Bloomberg, is “mismanagement and financial pressures,” as Activision pushed Blizzard to cut costs and prioritize bigger titles throughout Reforged’s development – a move that would be indicative of cultural shifts. within the company.
According to Bloomberg, the project, run by Blizzard’s Classic Games department, got off to an ambitious start, with the developer reworking the original script and re-recording all dialogue between 2017 and 2018. However, the small team size and disorganized production took months. to rearrange a single level of Warcraft 3.
“The leadership seemed totally out of touch with the speed and scope of the project until an extremely late stage of development,” says Blizzard’s internal postmortem from Reforged, as seen by Bloomberg. “High-level voices in the department have warned leaders of the impending Warcraft disaster on several occasions over the past year, but have been ignored.”
Ultimately, as Activision began to cut budgets, Reforged began to lose functionality. Management redefined the scope of the project, ditching the revised scripts and re-recordings the Reforged team was working on, and it became necessary to enlist the help of all of Blizzard to bring the game into a deliverable state in time for it. its launch.
Of course, many gamers would reasonably argue that the version of the game that eventually shipped was not fit for release at all. The fact that Blizzard doesn’t seem to have a problem with this, Bloomberg says, ultimately comes down to the developer worries about having to send refunds if he delayed the launch of Reforged too long, and fans wouldn’t buy the game. again – something of an irony given the no-questions-asked refund policy the company was ultimately forced to adopt as hugely harsh reviews of the final product escalated.
There’s a lot more to Bloomberg’s full report, which is worth reading, but the less-than-stellar image it paints of Blizzard comes at a time when the company is already in the limelight, at the following disturbing accusations from the California Department of Fair Employment. and Housing, which Activision has repeatedly overlooked a culture seen as “fertile ground for harassment and discrimination against women.”
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