One of the industry’s best-known insiders, Jason Schrier, has posted a new report about Activision Blizzard. The American company has been in the spotlight for years due to changes in positions of authority that led to a change in the way of making games.
This new report reveals the reasons for the bad launch of Warcraft III: Reforged and how it went from being a good remake, to a lousy one. For those who do not know, this game was presented with a trailer in style with highly polished cutscenes and new performances. However, at launch, the game lacked the features that were promoted and received a lot of negative reviews.
Changes under the table
Blizzard spoke of the game in public as one of the most important. However, behind closed doors this project did not have such a high priority. Development was left to Classic Games, an internal studio that never knew how to define whether the game was a remaster or a remake, a very common question.
In addition, there was a lack of organization, bad leadership, lack of vision and above all, more promises than could be fulfilled with the budget at hand. It was Activision that allocated resources to other titles when it learned that WC3: Reforged was not going to generate billions of dollars like Overwatch 2 would. In this way, the game was losing functionality that had been promised.
The size of the project decreased and it began to target lower than it originally did. However, the pre-purchases of many players were ready so Blizzard did not warn anyone and still carried out the project with fewer features than promised.
The result was a WC III: Reforged without a competitive rank system, with rules on maps and mods created by the community, without new voice actors and with less polished cutscenes.
The evidence of everything said comes from developers and people involved with the project who have not shared their identity to avoid being fired. Bloomberg also spoke with an anonymous Blizzard spokesperson who revealed that the company plans to “fix” the WC III: Reforged. However, Classic Games was dismantled months ago, so no one who has worked on the project is really still working on it or even Blizzard.