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

[Fedora Master]

People are quite pissed about this, huh.

For about a month before nobody talks about any of this anymore and the same people who are autistically sperging now will be looking forward to Diablo 4 or whatever.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

You don't own proprietary software, you're licensing it. Don't be surprised if this ends up happening to more games during their "remake".

 

[Preben]

People are quite pissed about this, huh.

For about a month before nobody talks about any of this anymore and the same people who are autistically sperging now will be looking forward to Diablo 4 or whatever.

Many idiots will do, but this is a death spiral nevertheless. A string of bad releases cuts off a supply of new suckers customers.

 

[Lacrymas]

We'll see if there are a significant amount of people actually interested in this game to make any lasting impact. Maybe Blizz did their research and said "fuck it, very few people are going to buy this game anyway, might as well release it half done and cut our losses". And now the media is spreading this outrage like wildfire because that's what they do when it's convenient. The most anyone can hope for is people who didn't buy the game or didn't even care about it to become second hand outraged, I'm told group mentality is quite prevalent, especially on the internet.

 

[Preben]

Maybe Blizz did their research and said "fuck it, very few people are going to buy this game anyway, might as well release it half done and cut our losses".

On the basis of my past experience in working for a corporation, my guess is that plenty of people in the company knew that it was going to be a disaster. If was released either because the managers were too stupid and/or blind to realize what a turd it is (stupid or ignorant CEOs are surprisingly common) or because they were themselves under immense pressure from supervisory board or investors to maintain a releasing schedule.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Going to go out on a limb and guess that like most companies that deteriorate, it's filled with management that was hired because they were friends/family of talent rather than actual talent.

 

[baud]

Going to go out on a limb and guess that like most companies that deteriorate, it's filled with management that was hired because they were diversity hires rather than actual talent.

FTFY

 

[Preben]

Going to go out on a limb and guess that like most companies that deteriorate, it's filled with management that was hired because they were friends/family of talent rather than actual talent.

It's usually at the moment when a company goes from privately owned to publicly traded or subsidiary status. This marks a paradigm shift. There's an influx of "professional" managers who gradually replace the old staff in a self-perpetuating drive to hire friends and trade favors. From then on, the company's actual goal is not profit or quality of products, but the well-being of the management staff. And this staff is evaluated and rewarded or fired in a yearly (or even sometimes quarterly) cycle, on the basis of often very stupid criteria. This system promotes acting very short-term, box-ticking and disregard for anything else. Enron would never happen without such mindset. And I guess that shitty releases like Warcraft III Reforged would also never happen without that.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

Honestly if anything I feel that WC3 isn't hitting their internal Pre-order targets or some obscure matrix to gauge market interest, so they simply cut down every single resources they can and just "release" the game.

That's the kind of decision a by the number project manager would do.

 

[Fedora Master]

 

[baud]

Going to go out on a limb and guess that like most companies that deteriorate, it's filled with management that was hired because they were friends/family of talent rather than actual talent.

It's usually at the moment when a company goes from privately owned to publicly traded or subsidiary status. This marks a paradigm shift. There's an influx of "professional" managers who gradually replace the old staff in a self-perpetuating drive to hire friends and trade favors. From then on, the company's actual goal is not profit or quality of products, but the well-being of the management staff. And this staff is evaluated and rewarded or fired in a yearly (or even sometimes quarterly) cycle, on the basis of often very stupid criteria. This system promotes acting very short-term, box-ticking and disregard for anything else. Enron would never happen without such mindset. And I guess that shitty releases like Warcraft III Reforged would also never happen without that.

Not saying it wasn't the case for Blizzard, but saying it's something that usually happen at the privately owned/publicly traded switch seems stupid to me, because once a company is public, its financial results are public and the owners are mostly focused on short-terms gains, not long-term sustainability like a private owner could be. The board won't care about the staff, just about the dividends and how valuable the shares are.

 

[Absinthe]

Zawinski's law of software envelopment: "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can." I guess these days it's reading webpages instead of mail but that's honestly worse. This is amazingly incompetent trash.

 

[Preben]

Going to go out on a limb and guess that like most companies that deteriorate, it's filled with management that was hired because they were friends/family of talent rather than actual talent.

It's usually at the moment when a company goes from privately owned to publicly traded or subsidiary status. This marks a paradigm shift. There's an influx of "professional" managers who gradually replace the old staff in a self-perpetuating drive to hire friends and trade favors. From then on, the company's actual goal is not profit or quality of products, but the well-being of the management staff. And this staff is evaluated and rewarded or fired in a yearly (or even sometimes quarterly) cycle, on the basis of often very stupid criteria. This system promotes acting very short-term, box-ticking and disregard for anything else. Enron would never happen without such mindset. And I guess that shitty releases like Warcraft III Reforged would also never happen without that.

Not saying it wasn't the case for Blizzard, but saying it's something that usually happen at the privately owned/publicly traded switch seems stupid to me, because once a company is public, its financial results are public and the owners are mostly focused on short-terms gains, not long-term sustainability like a private owner could be. The board won't care about the staff, just about the dividends and how valuable the shares are.

Which is what I have said, haven't I?

 

[Olinser]

Going to go out on a limb and guess that like most companies that deteriorate, it's filled with management that was hired because they were friends/family of talent rather than actual talent.

It's usually at the moment when a company goes from privately owned to publicly traded or subsidiary status. This marks a paradigm shift. There's an influx of "professional" managers who gradually replace the old staff in a self-perpetuating drive to hire friends and trade favors. From then on, the company's actual goal is not profit or quality of products, but the well-being of the management staff. And this staff is evaluated and rewarded or fired in a yearly (or even sometimes quarterly) cycle, on the basis of often very stupid criteria. This system promotes acting very short-term, box-ticking and disregard for anything else. Enron would never happen without such mindset. And I guess that shitty releases like Warcraft III Reforged would also never happen without that.

Not saying it wasn't the case for Blizzard, but saying it's something that usually happen at the privately owned/publicly traded switch seems stupid to me, because once a company is public, its financial results are public and the owners are mostly focused on short-terms gains, not long-term sustainability like a private owner could be. The board won't care about the staff, just about the dividends and how valuable the shares are.

The issue with companies like that is that there's a pretty respectable chance that the executives DID NOT know the game was pure shit.

The issue with long projects like that is that at a certain point, the managers are stuck. The mid level managers know they're not going to make the deadline and that its going to be a buggy mess. So in a corporate shithole like Activision they have basically 3 options:

1) Say that they can't make the deadline and probably get fired and replaced with somebody else

2) Release it in a bad state and count on being able to spin problems as 'unexpected' and that you can patch them out in a few months

3) Lie about it and count on the fact that when you release a shit project you can shift the blame to somebody else. Usually with weasel statements like, "I told my boss I needed more people to get the job done and he said no."

And since Activision is run by suits that have literally no way to actually evaluate for themselves if a game is good or bad, they're at the mercy of the managers telling them the truth.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

So, they're doing this to those of us that have classic CD keys and did not purchase Warcraft III: Retarded. Thanks for raping the game of my childhood all the way into my college years.



According to this poster on the Blizzard forums, you may be able to download the Public Test Realms client and enjoy the original game.

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/w...classic-tft-now-everyone-come-read-d/16355/40

Link to PTR is here, per the Blizzard forum poster:

https://www.blizzard.com/en-us/lega...500a402ea/blizzard-end-user-license-agreement

 

[LabRat]

Good.

 

[Olinser]

So, they're doing this to those of us that have classic CD keys and did not purchase Warcraft III: Retarded. Thanks for raping the game of my childhood all the way into my college years.



According to this poster on the Blizzard forums, you may be able to download the Public Test Realms client and enjoy the original game.

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/w...classic-tft-now-everyone-come-read-d/16355/40

Link to PTR is here, per the Blizzard forum poster:

https://www.blizzard.com/en-us/lega...500a402ea/blizzard-end-user-license-agreement

POINT OF ORDER.

The title should be "Life, uh, finds a way".

 

[Alex]

original wc3 artstyle is pretty shit too compared to wc2 ironically.

I agree with this.

Also, all the assholery aside, I don't fully understand the surprise and shock at blizz game looking like utter shit? Diablo 1 and Warcraft 2, their last good looking games, were already a couple of years ago, poor and outdated graphics are pretty much their forte for a long time now.

The style of WC3 was inferior to WC2 but the art itself was professional and high quality.

Same with Diablo 3. Shit style compared to the original, but you can't say the product doesn't feel expensive.

This, however, feels like some mod that was abandoned mid development.

I still remember my first thoughts on playing Warcraft 3 for the first time all those years ago. They were: "why does this look so ugly? It is almost as bad as Mario 64".

I suppose later on I got used to the graphics and they didn't get much in the way of the game, but it was still annoying and I can't understand what you've seen in them.

 

[Fedora Master]

How long until Blizzard in their wisdom and benevolence disables the ability to play WC3 Classic?

 

[Lyric Suite]

original wc3 artstyle is pretty shit too compared to wc2 ironically.

I agree with this.

Also, all the assholery aside, I don't fully understand the surprise and shock at blizz game looking like utter shit? Diablo 1 and Warcraft 2, their last good looking games, were already a couple of years ago, poor and outdated graphics are pretty much their forte for a long time now.

The style of WC3 was inferior to WC2 but the art itself was professional and high quality.

Same with Diablo 3. Shit style compared to the original, but you can't say the product doesn't feel expensive.

This, however, feels like some mod that was abandoned mid development.

I still remember my first thoughts on playing Warcraft 3 for the first time all those years ago. They were: "why does this look so ugly? It is almost as bad as Mario 64".

I suppose later on I got used to the graphics and they didn't get much in the way of the game, but it was still annoying and I can't understand what you've seen in them.

Mario 64? What are you, some kind of Zoomer?

The game was released during the age of early 3D. In no way the game looked any worse than other 3D releases from that time like Battle Realms or Empire Earth or Dark Reign 2 or what else was there back then, and in fact it looked better. The way the game moved, the variety in the terrain, all those little details they slapped everywhere. I remember when i loaded Battle Realms a few years ago i was shocked at how technically inferior it looked compared to Warcraft 3, where as back in 2002 they seemed comparable to me.

 

[Lyric Suite]

How long until Blizzard in their wisdom and benevolence disables the ability to play WC3 Classic?

They already have. Warcraft 3 "classic" is now basically Reforged with "retro" graphics.

 

[Fedora Master]

How long until Blizzard in their wisdom and benevolence disables the ability to play WC3 Classic?

They already have. Warcraft 3 "classic" is now basically Reforged with "retro" graphics.

So the version you can get from the PTR isn't even the real one? Fucking lol.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Ho, nevermind, that's what you meant when you said classic.

Of course they'll eventually block it.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Old meme but this has to be one of the best implementations of it to date.

 

[Alex]

original wc3 artstyle is pretty shit too compared to wc2 ironically.

I agree with this.

Also, all the assholery aside, I don't fully understand the surprise and shock at blizz game looking like utter shit? Diablo 1 and Warcraft 2, their last good looking games, were already a couple of years ago, poor and outdated graphics are pretty much their forte for a long time now.

The style of WC3 was inferior to WC2 but the art itself was professional and high quality.

Same with Diablo 3. Shit style compared to the original, but you can't say the product doesn't feel expensive.

This, however, feels like some mod that was abandoned mid development.

I still remember my first thoughts on playing Warcraft 3 for the first time all those years ago. They were: "why does this look so ugly? It is almost as bad as Mario 64".

I suppose later on I got used to the graphics and they didn't get much in the way of the game, but it was still annoying and I can't understand what you've seen in them.

Mario 64? What are you, some kind of Zoomer?

The game was released during the age of early 3D. In no way the game looked any worse than other 3D releases from that time like Battle Realms or Empire Earth or Dark Reign 2 or what else was there back then, and in fact it looked better. The way the game moved, the variety in the terrain, all those little details they slapped everywhere. I remember when i loaded Battle Realms a few years ago i was shocked at how technically inferior it looked compared to Warcraft 3, where as back in 2002 they seemed comparable to me.

Maybe you are right and it looked better than the 3d of the time. But it still was rather bad. People frequently say the older 3d aged badly, but I thought it was always bad, to be honest.

As for being a zoomer, I don't really know what that is. I thought about Mario 64 because both games had exaggerated bright colours and simple textures. It was what came to my mind at the time, so take that as you will.