- Warcraft 3: Reforged is one of the biggest gaming flops in recent times
- A new report reveals how some of the problems with the game came to be
- Apparently, the game was rushed, had an extremely low budget, and was developed by exhausted employees
Warcraft 3: Reforged remains as one of Blizzard’s largest stains even a year after its release. A new document reveals how it all came to this.
Reforging in a Hurry
Warcraft 3: Reforged is the remake of the beloved old real-time strategy game that raised a generation of gamers. However, the remake failed to reforge the magic Blizzard once boasted and was instead labeled as a lazy corporate cash grab. This cemented the game as one of the worst in the history of gaming – it has some mere 0.6 out of 10 ratings on Metacritic more than a year after release.
A new report from Bloomberg gives us an insight into what went wrong and how the developers managed to make their fans this sour.
According to the report, Warcraft 3: Reforged’s release was rushed, and the game could have benefitted from some extra months in the workshop. However, there was a problem: the game had already started taking pre-orders. Blizzard had a choice: to delay the game and risk people retracting their purchases or to release the game in an unpolished state and try to fix it on the go.
Blizzard chose the latter, and it definitely turned out to be a bad decision. People were taken aback by Warcraft 3: Reforged’s sorry release state. Their disappointment quickly turned to anger as they blamed the company for false advertising. In the end, a lot of people still ended up demanded their money back. The fact that Blizzard temporarily closed the refunds didn’t help Reforged’s image.
In an internal Blizzard document shared by Bloomberg, it is stated that from now on, “the company should resist the urge to ship an unfinished product because of financial pressure.”
How Lower Standards Led the Game to Ruin
According to the reports, Warcraft 3: Reforged was allocated a laughable budget as Activision, Blizzard’s parent company, didn’t believe in the product’s success from the very start.
Because of the restraints in resources, the developers had to let down the players on numerous aspects of the game. The ideas of new cutscenes and cinematics, new dialogue and content, etc., were all scrapped.
Moreover, there wasn’t enough passion on the developers’ side – Bloomberg’s reported document reveals that most of them were severely overworked and suffered from exhaustion and depression. Much like the players, many employees had lost their trust in the company.
According to the report, senior developers foresaw the failure of Warcraft 3: Reforged and desperately pleaded with the higher-ups in the company to rethink their bad decisions. Alas, to no avail.
A year later, Warcraft 3: Reforged has received some major fixes and has a dedicated team that will work on polishing things. However, the game is still a mere shadow of what was promised.
In recent times Activision Blizzard has been involved in some kind of scandal on an almost daily basis. Some are pretty mild as they only involve Blizzard’s products and their quality or the lack thereof. Others reveal a darker side of the company’s inner workings, like the CEO’s disproportionate salary and the company’s alleged tendency of mistreating female employees.
