Grubby | My Thoughts On The Latest REFORGED NEWS...

all right i'm here to discuss some uh some news an article came out yesterday on pc gamer and bloomberg bloomberg first and then on pc gamer that referenced it and we're going to be starting with this one it's going to shed some light on what happened to warcraft reforged in its development how it would end up releasing in such a botched state while also ruining the old warcraft 3 in that they don't allow you to go online via the classic client anymore and why everyone is now forced to install the 30 gigabytes client that has repackaged the old graphics mostly with a minimum of bugs though a few bucks how we've essentially lost features like ranked and profiles and stats and a lot of things basically that we used to have in warcraft and that with reforged ended up being removed one of the worst products that i've ever seen brought out in the gaming industry and definitely the worst blemish on blizzard's game release history warcraft reforged thanks to the w3 champions team we are still enjoying warka 3 multiplayer if you're using your old cd key or the reforged cdk you can have the new bloated client use the old graphics via the warcraft 3 reforged client and enjoy old warcraft albeit without ranked but thanks to w3champions.com you can now enjoy ranked as well having said that what happened really was a catastrophe for warcraft and a blasphemy for such a wonderful game that we've enjoyed for so many years it deserved better blizzard messed up big time and this sheds a little light on perhaps what happened insiders claimed the reviled remake was never treated as a priority by activision warcraft 3 reports underwhelming release was the result of budget cuts mismanagement and internal disputes a recently released report from bloomberg has found that we opened over here released last february reports arrived in a shocking state not only was the remake missing many of the planned grand sweeping updates to the game's art and voice over but it retroactively ruined the original warcraft from 2002 wholesale replacing its online service with one lacking basic features like competitive ladders in the new report sources write that warcraft 3 suffered from constant instances of miscommunication and financial pressures planned improvements were scrapped as the game was re-scoped arguments flared over the game's art style and scope and the head of blizzard's classic games team rob breidenbecker was accused of having an aggressive managerial style as well as frequently taking trips out of the country during production we have developers who have dealt with exhaustion anxiety depression and more for a year now developers wrote in an internal postmortem obtained by bloomberg many of 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 yeah i can only echo what i have read so far i don't see anything that i find hard to believe or that i would say is most likely not true i think all this is fair so far and believable reforce also faced pressures from corporate owners activision which didn't prioritize a throwback rts with little hope of it becoming a blockbuster success anyway mass layoffs across the company in 2019 did not help with 800 people being laid off even as barbie kotik collected a record salary right and with pre-orders opening long before the game was complete the team was constantly having to resist the urge to ship an unfinished product because of financial pressure we took pre-orders when we knew that the game wasn't ready as a postmortem writer explained the report goes further into how the classic games team was largely maligned by blizzard and how management at blizzard was out of touch with the project until extremely late in development but the report ultimately blames activision's increasing influence over blizzard post-merger which happened in 2007 pushing the developer to focus only on its stable of staple it's staple i think of billion dollar games like wow and overwatch so i've met and collaborated on bringing out some news for reforged which is why this all hurts and hits me extra hard also because warcraft 3 has been a big part of my life pretty much everything good that happened in my life is in some way via warcraft 3. so when i tell you that i feel like our histories and destinies are deeply linked you kind of get a sense for how much this might hit me which is also why it's been difficult sometimes to play and enjoy warcraft 3 leisurely and relaxedly i had high hopes for this remake and i was enjoying the game loads before the game came out and in the months leading up to it it led me with a sick pitch in my stomach sick feeling in my stomach knowing that it was not going to be ready yet i still climb onto hope because of the track record that blizzard had had and that they would probably fix it afterwards um there's one thing i need to do is i need to take a black box and put it underneath the text so that the twist chat can be read give me one second i think if i make this bigger that will help a little bit okay this will help a little bit so yeah it's been it's been difficult to see what happened and i have held on to hope and i think recently that hope kind of petered out that blizzard was going to do anything with the game anymore but there seems to actually be a little hope at the end of this and that's something at least to to look towards but let's continue before we discuss more this report comes hot on the heels of a lawsuit filed against activision blizzard and this is very hot news right now by the california department of fair employment and housing accusing the publisher of a frat boy workplace culture that saw women pay demonstrably less than their male colleagues and subjected them to constant sexual harassment so that's this article for now and then there's this one by bloomberg the original blizzard botched warcraft 3 remake after internal fights and pressure pressure overcasts under former co-founder and ceo blizzard games have 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 3 last year was the results of mismanagement and financial pressures 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 reforce was a long-awaited reimagining of one of blizzard's most popular games blizzard president j alan brack called the original title monumentally important when reforge 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 pressure to focus on its biggest franchises warcraft 3 reforged couldn't get the ambitious budget that its leaders wanted when warcraft 3 reforge was released on january 28 2020 it was widely banned aka heavily criticized 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 developed the storyline but aren't part of the gameplay and re-recorded voiceovers the remake even lacked features that the original warcraft 3 had contained in 2002 such as the latter system that ranked competitive players blizzard has also 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 there's still nowhere to be found warcraft 3 reforge not only felt like a disappointing remaster but it actually made being online worse for people that have been playing five years ago i think blizzard was one of the few game companies that could still cast itself as being your friend but i think that innocent trust is now gone at the time the company apologized for the launch and said that it had chosen to backtrack on updating the cinematics because we didn't want in-game cutscenes to steer too far from the original game i think we all kind of pierced through that layer of bs we are going to do this thing we decided not to do the thing because you probably don't want it it's uh it wasn't executes we knew that but it's it's good to see that document documentation produced after its release as well as interviews with 11 people who worked on or were close to the game indicated reforged was actually rescued due to budget cuts and internal arguments over the game's direction in a statement an activision blizzard spokesperson said that the company offered a no question asked refund to warcraft 3 reports owners and this is still active to this day blizzard prides itself on releasing games when they're ready no they have not been proud releasing reforged the central issue with reports was an early unclear vision a misalignment no no the central issue is that they no longer pride themselves on releasing games when they're ready that's the issue and as we all knew and as you'll find out later in the quotes of this article there was plenty of people within the reports within the classic games team within blizzard that knew this is going to be an absolute show when it comes out there's no way you wouldn't know it so this is just total pr bs gameplay and quality come first and foremost and our goal is always to do right by our community the central issue with 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 snowballs 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 information that i had was that warcraft was going to be a remake not a remaster and i don't think there was any doubt about that that it was going to be a remake any restructuring to just the remaster and let's just keep the old features would have been a later decision as they realized how much they were in that they couldn't get everything done on time budget cuts staff cuts lack of expansion of the team lack of expansion of the funds and the talents available to help code stuff fixing old systems and remaking them into new systems while keeping the functionality when they realize all this and also the botched graphics remake when they realized all this at some point they must have decided to start scaling back and this still feels like uh not the whole story i mean this is the spokesperson right so this doesn't feel right to me my bs meter is going off the spokesman added that as a result of the negative reactions to reforce the the upcoming diablo 2 remake planned for release in september will just be a pure remaster faithful to the art the gameplay and the cinematics of the original game since its founding in 91 blizzard blah blah lots of money blizzard success under co-founder and former chief executive officer mike morheim was a product of its high standards for quality and willingness to delay games until they were ready can we just pause and talk about this for a second because this okay this makes me feel all kinds of things we are in this complicated situation where and we haven't even got to the sexual harassment stuff that spanned across years we're in this complicated situation where you and i are consumers of games that were made by passionate people skilled passionate developers that made a game that was worth playing for 5 years 10 15 or 20 and that is insane when you look at the pace of the industry how games are being developed quicker and quicker how some games are sometimes less deep nowadays than some of the old games how games are made with the intent to make maximum profit and not just to make a good game and then figure out the monetization with all this we are sitting on some absolute gems in warcraft 3 and in heroes of the storm even these like these games are thoroughly enjoyable to play and there were many good people that worked on these games talented and good people with their passion in the right place and that yeah hell yeah they deserve to also earn from making that product i mean they made something phenomenal that touched and changed the lives of many people including you and me this this hurts to see this because it doesn't seem to be true anymore for for blizzard uh you know and some people will be like well i'll never play a blizzard game again i'll never watch anyone playing blizzard games again to me that goes too far as we see that with when there's a mismanagement at the game company when there is terrible case of harassment that happened within a company that needs to be rooted out this kind of evil needs to be rooted out and the people that are affecting others and hurting others they need to be punished for those things they need to be found out that is important but if you throw out the baby with the bathwater and say i'll never play a blizzard game i'll never support someone that plays a blizzard game i unfriend everyone you're allowing these evil people to have even more power and i don't want to give them that power i don't want to say because 10 of people in this group are rotten i will disavow all of them because then those evil people will have ruined everything and i cannot disavow my past i cannot disavow how much good experiences i have had out of playing blizzard games i have made most of the friends that i know in life i have met my life partner through playing these games i have made a living out of it and i still make a living out of playing these games i have been challenged i've grown up i so much has come out of playing these games that i cannot and i i will not turn my back on the games that were made but also by good people but the evil needs to be rooted out the people that like there there is a there is a lawsuit there's a criminal lawsuit going on california state versus blizzard that we can get to uh and touch upon but like that they need to do their job the the enforcement they need to do their job to find people that have made others feel unsafe or worse civil lawsuit but this this uh this hurts civil not criminal [Music] you you can make your own decisions in uh what you want to consume what you want to watch what you want to do but i cannot i cannot stop playing the games i don't want to but activision which absorb blizzard in 2007 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 3 reports warcraft 3 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 morheim 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 movements on a live stream this week the california department of fair employment and housing sued activision blizzard over claims of harassment and discrimination accusing the power 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 d4 and overwatch 2. blizzard even cancelled some of its other projects in favor of the proven hits 8 months after the release of warcraft 3 reforged the classic games team was dismantled it was buggy and fans complained about missing features blizzard chose to plow ahead with premature release of warcraft for forge 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 the fans wouldn't buy the game again and that's the part that just that i don't freaking get if you are a person with gray matter and you see what you're sitting on in what in how reforge was released where when it was released you couldn't even play the campaign there was no ladder it would kick you with the anti-cheats out of the campaign on day one with a horrible release and the graphics and the bugs and a volcano summoning another volcano instead of a bit of lava remember the volcano fountain it's like when you sit on that and you know you have you're aware of that how can you possibly think that will do less damage than to just say let's delay for another three years let's hire another studio and let's let them make this remake for the game as it deserves to be this is so incredible in notes from an internal postmortem of the game reviewed by bloomberg developers on reforged acknowledged this issue we took pre-orders when we knew the game wasn't ready yet and we should have resisted the urge to ship an unfinished product because of financial pressure sorry oops the blizzard spokesperson 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 this is something i heard about very early on in 2018 and it's something that i didn't think was necessary personally i like the original voice lines and i could see no good coming out of giving all the cinematics a makeover in terms of voice lines and even the script just to try and retcon the wow story that is already fairly convoluted i think most people would agree and try to retroactively impose it on the gem of the past i've learned a lot from all of this had i been able to go back in time and spoken at the earliest opportunity where blizzard told me that they are remaking the game i would have advocated to do it in the fashion of d2 res and of starcraft remastered in my naivety back then i thought some things may be able to be improved and that would include things like game balance as well as maybe an attractive graphical alternative as well as maybe a more interesting and diverse campaign that would connect with some parts in wow i could not have foreseen the show that came and i was naive to think that maybe it could be improved perhaps but then again i have to be fair to myself as well and say i could not have anticipated they could have made it better it was possible it just ended up not being so and i didn't foresee it so they re-recorded and i'm probably i would probably be arrogant to overestimate my influence in that anyway yeah it would i mean there must have been developers raging against the direction that the game had taken people that are just as aware as you or as me that have just as much of a finger on the lifeline of the game or close to it anyway and knowing that some decisions would be bad and they must have been overruled by upper management raging against the knight so yeah they they revamped all the dialogue and then they ended up never using it you know that means that they spent money on voice actors and script writing and got everything ready and then just ditched it i know a lot of people that work at blizzard and most of everyone i know and met are just passionate gamers agree the evil that should be found and cast out and dealt with but i think we should find a way to support the good people at blizzard and hopefully this gives them hope for change yeah there's going to be people that work there where it's literally like that's their paycheck right like they have done nothing wrong and that's their paycheck and we would what expect them to do what like just quit and see just hope it goes fine that they can feed their fam it's it's thorny but we must remember to reserve our judgment for the entity of company that produced what that produced this game and then the evil people and then there's the good people why didn't the good people speak out or do something about the abuse that's uh that is a good question but it has no simple answer have you ever seen something evil happen and you didn't speak out because you were afraid for repercussions or you thought it wouldn't do anything i think everyone has and it's uh it's complicated but we must remember to blame the evil people first i'm a nurse so it's my job too 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 people get scared for sure david fried a designer on the original warcraft 3 who was briefly brought back to work on reports said in an email that there were things in the works for warcraft 3 reports that would have absolutely revitalized the 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 3 was more complicated than their previous remake starcraft thanks to its three-dimensional models gmark says when i spoke out against the co-worker being mistreated and dealt with unfairly the ceo verbally harassed me and a vp threatened me in every interaction we had until i quit yeah very very very recognizable the team was small and the production was disorganized and the amount of work in front of them was daunting it had taken months to revamp one of warcraft 3's levels now they would have to do the same for dozens more morale plummeted rob breidenbecker 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 master breidenbecker who left blizzard in april declined to comment we have developers who have dealt with exhaustion anxiety depression and more for a year now many have lost trust in the team in this company many players have also lost trust and the launch certainly didn't help the team which had a reputation for taking i think we read this in the other article they were restricted to hiring due to a limited budget some people had to do multiple jobs at once working many nights i've spoken to people at blizzard that uh had more jobs than they signed on for and you won't get compensated times three either you'll work over hours having more responsibility than you could handle doing jobs that you weren't brought on for technological obstacles and conflicts among the team only exacerbated the problems a mass layoff of nearly 800 people in february 2019 hollowed out blizzard support departments which also hurt the team we were missing and or had the wrong people in certain lead roles the team structure didn't set up the project for success warcraft 3 reports began gradually losing features management threw out the revised scripts and re-recordings the team had done according to people familiar with the process choosing instead to stick with the original dialogue and voice acting fried or fried who departed the project as it was re-scoped pinned to blame for these shifts on blizzard's corporate parents i am deeply disappointed that activision would actively work against the interests of all players in the manner that they did it was quite telling that morheim resigned just weeks before reforce was presented in november 2018 at blizzcon the company's annual fan convention developers of the game blamed breidenbecker 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 post martin 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 nice not nice there was a time i wanted to work for uh blizzard in 2010 after my warcraft career was rounding out and starcraft 2 became a next potential challenge i thought what if i helped them with balancing and i had an inkling even then that as agile as you may feel you could move on certain moves for instance you have an experiment for balance that you would want to try out and if it doesn't work you would play a lot you would try it with the community find out it doesn't work listen understand reiterate and then change it in a week i realized that that kind of agility would most likely not be possible in that you would have to constantly pass every chain change up and down the chain where there was going to be a multitude of different considerations including player retention and monetization and balance and player psychology and at the end of the day i think what you get is a very filtered down product of everyone's efforts being put together and yeah i don't know like if i would have been happy working there with that but but then that stands in stark contrast and this is the thing that's weird i've met so many developers from the classic games team and others that have that i have seen they treated me with respect i could see from what i could see they treated each other with respect they were passionate they were aware of the game that they needed to make they were aware of what players might like to enjoy they had improvements they were good many of which aren't even in reforged yet like i've seen i've seen like overlays and and systems for ranked and profiles and of course there were some screenshots as well years ago by now years ago that aren't in yet like it just dies by the end of 2019 the classic games team had brought in help from all across blizzard to finish reforged it would not prove to be enough when blizzard releases a new game there's usually some sort of internal celebration a lavish launch party full of drinks and speeches for 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 ta-da the next classic games project diablo 2 resurrected due out in september is being produced by other teams the project was transferred to the diablo 4 department and albany new york ah and already 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 i have played it and it's better than reforged blizzard vowed to patch and update 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 we know this one this is great that aims to add back missing features this version of the game includes a competitive ladder it's not really a version of the game it's a memory reading add-on edition with an app a third-party app that you have open but it's uh i think it's better for general understanding that they say it like this and nice to include a link as well we have a level of freedom that blizzard could never have said john graves a member of the warcraft 3 champions team that's floss twice daily right i think a member of the warcraft 3 champions team who has made the project his full-time job for the last year the blizzard spokesperson said that the company has a new team dedicated to updating reforged with improvements and this one is an interesting one because i didn't fully believe him on all the other stuff that he said which would lead me to also be skeptical of this one but this is a recent article like this just came out yesterday and while the other spokesperson messages were damage control pr misdirection this is something that seems difficult to kind of fact bend around either it's happening or it's not because i think it would have been believable that blizzard never mentions reforged again never improves it again does not release any of the missing features i would have believed that if that if someone were to tell me that that was going to happen this is in contrast to that are we going to love the changes is it going to happen is this actually true i i don't know but after resurrected ships the very same team could in theory try to do some image repair and taking their hand at warcraft and say hey this 30 gigabytes let's throw away 20 gigabytes the new graphics and let's just remaster the old ones and make sure everything works like we did with diablo in these efforts we realized our work and actions will speak louder than our words across many projects we have 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 reforge 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 more than some i know that i was probably overly sentimental but i truly used to see blizzard as almost like almost like my father or something like like family like uh can do no wrong you make a game i'm gonna trade i'm gonna give it a fair shot i was probably over sentimental about it at the end of the day a company is you know it's the sum of its parts the sum of its employees employees change people leave people come naturally it's going to evolve and that's fine and and to to trust them forever for decades is probably not wise and yet you know i grew up with these games they made so many good ones they had my trust they lost more than some for me doesn't take away that there's still games that i love to play starcraft warcraft hats i cannot suddenly turn off my feelings about those games the experiences i've had with this and the joy that i feel when i play them but the trust they have lost if they actually remake warcraft again even though it's not gonna make them millions that would show a level of uh that would show steps towards reparations it will never be like it was before it's not like we're going to forget what happened you cannot undo that pass how reforg's released but let's say if a year from now a year hence reforce is uh has been well taken care of can forgive can uh can at least say hey that that was a good move it will take more than one bad game release to destroy it and it did forgive not forget yeah it will take more and it did take more and there was more and it did get hurt a lot that's uh that's the so that's the news for for for reforged here's what went wrong i think nothing truly surprising it's what any one of us would have imagined i would be what's what's wrong when we sell what we got i mean imagination is the limit right and i think it's uh it's pretty much yo thanks for the sub it's pretty much as we would have imagined the little silver lining is maybe if we believe that last line maybe they are working on it again but i don't have internal confirmation that this is that this is uh the case [Music] you

Channel: FollowGrubby

Views: 79,603

Rating: 4.8499999 out of 5

Keywords: Grubby, FollowGrubby, Heroes of The Storm, Warcraft, Warcraft 3, Starcraft, Starcraft2, Blizzard, Blizzard Moba, Games, Strategy Games, Multiplayer Games, E-Sports, Esports, Streamers, Pro Gaming, Best, Top, Epic, Family, Friendly, Funny, Fail, news, article, bloomberg, pc gamer, thoughts, allegation, reforged, failure, failed, budget, cut, activision, corporate, culture

Id: wZ-eQ4Cr90I

Length: 41min 52sec (2512 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 24 2021