Yeah sure, John Smith 3D artist who imports and fixes the assets received from the outsource studio definitely to blame for the art direction of the game. Not someone like 3-4 levels higher…
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Thank you for this topic. Really ! I think it is important for us to keep this in mind.
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You’re accusing an entire team when that isn’t how design or development works. There are directors that are supposed to be guiding the process, but those directors receive pressure from execs. Don’t blame the art guy because his boss told him “Make it look like this”.
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Posts like these are vitally needed, because comments on a forum always lead to entire streets of enraged mobs hunting down and pelting the developers with rocks until they die.
Said no one ever.
Nobody knows anything. How any of it works. Who is really to blame. Just Blizzard Activision. And that’s who people are blaming. Blizzard Activision.
So what the hell is the point of these Grey Knight posts? I say Grey because White Knights actually usually have a reason to blindly defend something, Grey Knights just create reasons and everyone stands around looking at them like, what the hell does that have to do with the price of freedom in china?
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Pressing F
More often than not you are a Gamedev because you have a passion… If you are working on a game for a long time, even if you are a paragmatic person, you feel some ownership, hell, if it’s good you feel god damn pride that you contributed. Over the years I wanted so many times to “disown” the project I’m working on and it worked for a while, but I found it just as harmful… If you can’t feel passion for the game you are working on, even a bad and flawed one, maybe you aren’t in the rigth position.
@Epidemik
I worked on so many projects that ended up like this one and it’s extremely disheartening. I simply can’t imagine that a low level employee would willingly do bad work, make a bad product on his/her own…
No matter how bad you think your game is, no matter how flawed, no matter how much you hate it… if nothing else you get angry at people lashing out “I TOLD THEM SO! BUT THEY DIDN’T LISTEN”. But often, especially if you went to Blizzard not for the paycheck (as the pay is infamously low, even in the industry) you were passionate about the IP, about their world. You just wanted to be a part of it. And you are now, but on the wrong side of history…
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My regards to the dev team. Although this forum is covered in negativity, I’m having a sweet nostalgia trip playing the campaigns in HD. They started 7 years where I spent most of my free time playing a Warcraft game or thinking about the Warcraft universe. Feels good to be back!
I don’t think the pay is low, developing games like wow (and games in general) is a very complicated task and you must have the best of the best (which wont work for low wage, since there is a lot of demand for developers) yet i guess other employees are getting low wages which is acceptable
What devs? Those on Blizzard’s end or the company that the game got outsourced to? I assume both got paid for their work, but the customers didn’t exactly get something that was advertised to them.
The only devs I have sympathy for are the ones that originally participated in the creation of the game 20 years ago because they had created something amazing that is a timeless classic.
Grow a spine and stop being ridiculous please, customers have every right to be mad and it’s great that they are taking a stand for themselves and their rights.
I will not bring the updated graphics into the discussion. Personally I don’t like them but a number of users does. Everything else is either a complete mess, broken or straight up bugged in many ways. Worst offence is that the amount of removed / lacking features in comparison to an already existing product (clans, profiles, ladder etc)
poor devs. sorry for the trouble, not your fault. but you should understand us too 
unlunky to us all
this remake was outsourced. there were no blizz devs on this game at all. now the team this was outsourced to did a decent job. the problem is, this isn’t the blizzard standard we’re used to so it doesn’t make the cut.
Its a great post
This community should help developers. I asked blizzard a refund with all my education, saying that I will buy the game again if I see a improvement in the future, and now i am posting bugs and ideas to make the game better than now, like learder, races (elf and ud) more colorful and detailed, and 60 fps animations.
Would you have still bought it knowing it wasn’t Blizzard that was doing the work? It wasn’t exactly a public secret but they themselves didn’t make any mention of it. The company in question that created Reforged is showing off their work on their own website for everyone to see. The problem here is this isn’t their first work on outside intellectual property, but is very likely the worst.
They do. OG WoW devs went and made MMO’s that have failed and got shut down.
The OG Diablo devs went and made a failed Hellscape london game. Despite Torchlight being better in every way to Diablo 3 the entire Torchlight franchise combined has made less money than just Diablo 3 on it’s launch day.
Brand name and franchise recognition are all that matters. The people that actually make the games don’t mean crap to 99% of gamers and IMO this is a disaster that desperately needs to change for the betterment of our industry. We need to actually know these people by name like we do with movie directors, composers, ect. So we can follow the people and not the faceless companies that are nothing internally to what they used to be 10+ years ago.
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Ohh well, sorry then, as non-american people are not people and malaysian developers obviously don’t have feelings and most of all they are not subject to crunch and overworking. It’s simply unheard of at that part of the world…
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I agree with the OP don’t be mad at the Devs.
This is an Upper Management / Finance failure not a failure of the actual Developers. Gotta get those bigger bonuses by cutting the QA and Community Teams.
Here’s a fun fact, if you make a crap product and piss off your client base your Financial Quarter will suffer and your Stock will under-perform.
Don’t blame the Devs or Middle Management. This is completely the fault of the Activision Board and Mr. Kotick making greedy decisions and firing their QA Teams.
i second this.
while, if i scroll through reddit or forums here, it seems like that majority knows who to blame for real
red dit. com/r/activision <- this can be set on fire instead
This game is absolutely not a result of bad programming or bad assets. It is clearly a massive amount of bad choices, and I would also add from some particular department, since there are Blizzard games that are still indubitably great as they are. I think that the best option is to revert, come back in 4 -5 months, make everyone happy. Or just base this game on storm.dll, you can’t fail with that 
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You’d have a point… if Blizzard didn’t outsource the entire game to a Malaysian company.
I still say we should be considerate to those Malaysian devs and of course the Blizzard support team, these guys did nothing wrong.
Blizzard Blizzard however deserve every bit of criticism they are getting, this is so clearly a case of bait and switch coupled together with some false advertising, it’s sickening.
Now of course that doesn’t mean that I’m saying death threats or whatever is ok, but calling them out on this shoddy downgrade is every bit called for.
no, i didn’t find out until after i refunded (just before blizzcon 2019). as soon as i found out it was outsourced, I knew it wasn’t going to be up to the quality we were promised.