WarCraft III: Reforged - What Happened?

[Music] hey it's meats it's it's man and this is this is what happened the show all right let's do this Blizzcon 20 18 amongst a few announcements we don't have any plans at moment to do P City you guys not have phones yeah lizard revealed the worst kept secret in the industry at that time they were remastering Sark sorry reforging 2002 s seminal RTS blockbuster Warcraft 3 now as far back as April of 2017 senior producer for classic games Pete Stilwell said it was an eventualities a Warcraft would get the same treatment as its 1000% less controversy played cousin Starcraft remastered did that year not only that after years of inactivity the Warcraft 3 battled on that client was getting more and more patches leading up to the announcement of the reforging so yes everyone knew this was going to happen what people didn't realize is just how much love and attention Blizzard was giving this particular project I mean initially let's let's make that distinction since Warcraft 3 was their first 3d polygonal game and this was their first remake of said game it lent itself to be tinkered with far more than the 2d engine of the original Starcraft all of the in-game cutscenes were being redone and we're going to be far more cinematic showing off the vastly improved character models which don't get it twisted is a ton of work almost all of the cgi cutscenes were going to be upscaled in higher resolutions which back in 2002 were scaled down from the source resolution and the game's intro is going to be completely reanimated from scratch as well taking a Manesh of all the strides blizzards made in that area in 18 years god I'm old Blizzard also allayed all fears saying that the transition from the original client to reforged would be a smoother button along with all of this they promise improvements to the UI and the in-game graphics a light retcon for certain characters and story elements so they'd better fit into the lore and Wow and touted that they were going to retain all the fan favorite features that made Warcraft 3 a fan favorite then on January 28th 2020 reforge was unleashed on the ravenous throngs of Blizzard fans the world over so what happened okay so it's as clear as Moon well water that something went down during the year between its reveal versus its launch time or more accurately a lack of it when it was first shown you can see already that a considerable amount of work had been put in with the remade cutscenes being the most obvious indicator what's more is that while yes at the end of the day this was PR speak aside a remaster of existing assets the nature of Warcraft 3's 3d engine meant it would take significantly more time and effort than say star crafted regardless 2019 passed by with little to no updates on the game and its progress up until the following Blizzcon where only the multiplayer aspect of the game was shown or even discussed at length the campaign was m.i.a which was a stark contrast to 2018 and that was for good reason the scope of the reforging had been significantly scaled back at some point in the air without this ever having been communicated to the fans thus the reception was not good almost immediately the first thing people noticed was that yes the more cinematic cutscenes were completely gone and instead simply played out exactly as they did in 2002 you sick bastards you'll never get away with this change was again never publicly admitted even during Blizzcon 2019 and seemed to be some sort of dirty little secret as every prior showing of reforged was always focused on the multiplayer to make matters worse the official reforged website featured an embedded trailer that was still using the updated cinematics over a week after the game's launch which as you can imagine was noticed by literally everyone when Blizzard finally addressed this missing feature in a letter to the fans their explanation was thus as we talked about last year at Blizzcon we did not want the in-game cutscenes to steer too far from the original game we went a little deeper into the thought process behind that at the show but the main takeaway is that the campaigns tell one of the classic stories in Warcraft history and we want to preserve the true spirit of Warcraft 3 and allow players to relive these unforgettable moments as they were that's not true you lied to me at Blizzcon they were up front with the fact that they had decided against adding the war and character dialogue that was going to better connect to World of Warcraft Blizzard had stated that due to fan feedback and the sheer amount of work they're already taking on that the added story elements were being cut however they never explicitly said that the revamped cutscenes were also being axed at least in all of my research if a blizzard rep did state somewhere during 2019 that yeah all those revamped more polished ingame cutscene the uploads are gone it yeah I can't find a quote like that now their reasoning that they wanted to preserve the spirit of the original campaign that's fine why not make it an option for the player to toggle in-game cutscenes classic or reforged you already started working on it so why not see it through and a fans don't want new cutscenes they could turn them off I mean what was the problem right right right this then leads us into the CGI cutscenes which like blizzard's stated would see the opening intro completely reanimated from the ground up but obviously wasn't as high fidelity as some of their more recent work what was even less high fidelity was the ending cinematic of the undead campaign in the 2002 released the epic battle between artists and Illidan was conveyed through in-game models but for reforged it was done via CGI dodgy CGI has a distinct quality level that was a bit below anything Blizzard has done in the last kind of ever so okay let me get this straight this cutscene this one was appropriate to change the spirit of but not every other cutscene in the game okay the common consensus from fans and critics alike was that this cutscene in particular resembles something you'd see in a mobile raid Shadow Legends is an immersive online experience with everything you'd expect from a brand-new RPG title it's got an amazing storyline awesome 3d graphics just anyway this whole issue is so odd and I just I mean this is Blizzard Entertainment one of the most successful and well known developers in the world you should probably know the scope of your project a year before you release it now those are some of the surface level things from the campaign that were immediately obvious it doesn't end there though as it's only the tip of the iceberg what are some of the other things you asked well here's a giant list custom campaigns player profiles cross region play for custom games ultra wide screen clans support ladders tournament mode original battle.net chat system crashes black screens the game failing to boot no audio bugs progression blockers oh and Blizzard now owns all your custom maps and modes especially if one of them becomes more popular than Warcraft 3 itself yes when you boot up reforged there is a new EU la screen which of course you must agree to if you you know want to play the game while most of it is standard players immediate we notice that if they decide to make oh I don't know a new dota Blizzard will now own your creation your of your boda and be able to do what they like with it Blizzard or Activision more likely we're probably unhappy that they missed one of the biggest gravy trains you could ever miss users creating content with custom tools that become massively successful but they Activision can't monetize ah a goldmine we'll set up our base there okay next let's say you're all like man f reforged I'll just keep playing classic Warcraft 3 on the old client surely there's not you you cannot legally play the old 2002 version anymore like at all if you own I mean owned the classic Warcraft 3 on the old client you get reforged for free but it installs itself for you deletes the old version and replaces it automatically thanks I hate it we're not done while reforge contains the Frozen Throne expansion you can't access it right away even though you could on the old client you need to beat the entirety of reign of chaos all over again to be able to sit in arthas's chili icicle chair now I get it that kind of sucks but what's weirder is that reforge uses the unit and hero balanced changes of Frozen Throne everywhere even in reign of chaos the vanilla release there's no option to choose between the two and this still happens even if you haven't unlocked the friggin expansion imagine you buy a street fighter to collection that contains world warrior turbo and super but all three games only play like super so yeah that's that's a lot of stuff and that's not even all of it but I digress we must move on at last we've reached our landing site warty while you are gone the nearby volcano erupted this entire island has begun to sink now blizzards initial response that came a few days after launch that I mentioned earlier was deemed as being less than satisfactory but instead ultra unsatisfactory even the first sentence rubbed people the wrong way first off we want to say we're sorry to those of you who didn't have the experience you wanted that implies there's some subjectiveness to the release but when the game is straight-up missing features and modes that the old version had and this new version has the lowest recorded user Metacritic ever that's not those of you anymore about a week after that statement J Allen Brack Blizzard CEO you know the guy that was fresh off his apology just a few months earlier I'm sorry and I accept accountability addressed Warcraft theory forged at an earnings call for Activision Blizzard concerning Warcraft 3 reforged honestly it's been a bit of a hard week our community has come to expect really amazing things from us and we've heard from them that we did not achieve that far but we stand behind our games and have consistently shown that not only do we support them but we continue to build on them even after launch and we're committed to doing that here as well so we're going to continue to update the game and we'll continue to update the community with our plans going forward listen I mean I'm no CEO business lord but it's quite the boggle as to why they release a buggy unfinished project based on their flagship franchise as a chaser to the Hong Kong controversy the Diablo immortal controversy and the Lucio o serial being garbage controversy you'd think Blizzard would have strapped permanent eggshells on their shoes for the next few months or years to avoid things like this happening you father ruled this land for seventy years and you've grounded to dust in a matter of days but then why did this happen well like stated before reforged already had maybe a year or more sunk into it by 2018 and at least another year after that the thing is though is that at the end of the day blizzard needed to release a product to boost fiscal earnings before April of 2020 now remember on this very show in our Starcraft Ghost episode Blizzard delayed a game for an entire console generation before shelving it they felt it wasn't good enough and not up to their standards well this business strategy wouldn't fly in a post Activision world when you get to brass tacks and look at the release schedule Blizzard hasn't shipped a new game in four years yes aside from the starcraft remaster and to switch ports the last major game Blizzard released was overwatch which was like in 2016 and guess what blizzards future slate of projects overwatch 2 diablo 4 and diablo immortal aren't even confirmed to be 2020 titles as of yet so they need to release something and I present to you something so with no other options reforge was the game that clearly got the short end of the stick or the Frostmourne and it's really really really easy to imagine yourself as a fly on the wall and seeing some activision suit going yeah I'll just get it up before the end of the fiscal year and you know we'll patch it it's it's vital b5 this reasoning is the only thing that makes sense because I mean reforge the state of it there's no way Blizzard from 1998 or 2002 or 2005 anything pre Activision would ever release a game this unpolished I mean Justice League task force ain't great but it's less broken and all of this culminated when people attempted to refund the game on Mass which was why this was trending for a while trying to mitigate the damage blizzard denied refunds to any battle.net account that had accrued too many hours on reforged which again was probably the wrong move after about two weeks though this policy was then rescinded and anyone would get an automatic refund for the game despite how many hours they clock into it well this was a step in the right direction it really shouldn't have been needed in the first place okay we're wrapping up here there's one more thing I want to address though there is absolutely no way that any of the programmers or artists or QA testers everyone in the trenches on this project were happy about the game launching in the state that it did none of them looked at reforge and said that's good and then took a vacation everyone knew this wasn't going to go over well and yeah it didn't go over well that being said those artists and programmers did not have much of a choice or any say in the matter as of this writing the first patch which fixed a number of graphical UI and progression blocking issues went live eleven days after the initial release however custom campaigns cross region play for those custom campaigns clan support ladders in tournament mode have not yet been added and it's unclear right now if they ever will as for those revamped cutscenes well Blizzard has stated that they will not be in any future patch and that it was a creative decision to no longer include them into the package now given the fans fervor for all things Warcraft I'm sure Blizzard will indeed continued to support reforge but it's simply unbelievable that a company who were lauded for never releasing in a game until is 100% finished and polished could ever bungle such a project so completely it's even less clear Blizzard themselves can ever crawl out of this quagmire of poor communication poor business decisions and half-baked apologies because they as a company could stand to some reforging of their own yeah that wasn't Pleasant but if you know of any other monstrous tales of mismanagement let me know in the comments below or carry some gold or wood over to the flophouse vfp patron we can officially nominate the game or movie like me to tackle next see you next time and thanks for watching I am intrigued I am thrall

Channel: Matt McMuscles

Views: 940,259

Rating: 4.8763494 out of 5

Keywords: Warcraft III Reforged, Blizzard, Warcraft, Starcraft, remake, Video Game Disasters, Video Game Documentaries, Matt McMuscles, What Happened?, wha happun, controversy

Id: sURZZkQxru8

Length: 17min 51sec (1071 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 27 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Detective_Robot]

The fact you can no longer play the old version is wrong, screw Blizzard.

[u/therealchadius]

It didn't hit me until he mentioned time as a factor.

Blizzard, of all companies, had to rush a game to completion.

StarCraft Ghost spent years in development trying to "get things right" that they had to cancel it and start over, while WC3 is kicked out the door and will be soon abandoned.

The fact that you can't even play the 2002 game is icing on the shit cake Blizzard baked us.

How the mighty have fallen.

[u/zarfoobla]

I feel like this was made a little too early because oh boy.

Dreamhack.

Oh boy. This game is a disaster.

[u/Karkadinn]

Easily the most depressing Wha Happun. This isn't just one company's singular mistake or a series of unfortunate business circumstances or risky design experiments. It's a timeless memorial to the spiraling death of once-great companies who've slowly been eaten from the inside out by a corporate profit over quality mindset. They took one of the most important games in the industry's entire history and remade it in such a way as to make it worse than if they had done nothing at all.

I didn't care for some of the things Blizzard did in Starcraft 2, WoW's expansion quality has been of questionable consistency post-Wrath of the Lich King, and Hearthstone is a shocking display of questionable decisions needlessly screwing with one of the most incredibly smoothly-playing money makers in digital card game history. But none of those issues were so extreme to make me give up on the very name of Blizzard as a place where good games are made.

This, though? Yeah, this did it.

Blizzard doesn't mean anything anymore. The people who made it great are long gone, and hoping for anything good to come from the company now is just hurting yourself.

[u/MechaAristotle]

Those custom maps were much of my gaming life, had hundreds of them downloaded and it was one of the most creative scenes I've ever seen.

This hurts, even more so my best friend continuing to support them.

[u/Gigafortress]

I think some of the writing/phrasing in this doesn't properly convey why the game is so broken. He sais "Game modes that are not included in the new version" as a reason why people are pissed off, it's not only that but they removed gamemodes from the original game.

[u/cbb88christian]

Blizzard CEO: “Did we forget something?”

Devs: “It can’t be important if we forgot it.”

*cut to Warcraft 3 reforged standing in pouring rain

[u/Commando_Joe]

This is, to me personally, the most important What Happen video he's ever made.

Even more than Mighty No 9 and I kicked in 500 dollars on that kickstarter.

So many hours of my life were spent in the original WC3 engine.

Fuck this game.

[u/rhinocerosofrage]

I have a slight correction to make.

It's true that WC3 Reforged immediately replaces WC3 Classic in the libraries of people who own the latter, and installs itself (via manual or automatic update) while uninstalling and blocking access to the classic game.

However, you still do not get Reforged for free. You get the Reforged ENGINE, running on the abominable new UI and the works, but it actually runs a piecemeal shambles imitation of the classic game. You are still asked to pay an additional $40 if you want to use the new models or (barely upgraded) UI elements from Reforged.

To reiterate, you do not receive Reforged for free. You just get to "continue to enjoy" the now-mangled big-air-quotes "Classic" version, because fuck you.