People have been complaining about the lack of Furion in Reign of Chaos, and the fact that he is riding a Stag when that is supposed to happen during The Frozen Throne. Well, I’ve been digging into the files, and I’ve discovered that the reason for this is not down to some dastardly scheme by Blizzard, but simple mistakes. Here is what I found using World Editor & CASCViewer:
- There is a filename for Malfurion without a stag. You can look this up yourselves using the unit path unit\nightelf\malfurion\malfurionnostag.mdx
- The problem is that they accidentally uploaded the Malfurion model for this filename when applying it to CASC. This accident becomes obvious when looking at the potrait models.
- The portrait model for Stag Malfurion has the entire stag model included within it. The portrait model for No Stag Malfurion does not have the stag at all, and the model looks great but lacks combat animations.
- The reason he is called Malfurion instead of Furion is down to the Reforged maps defaulting to The Frozen Thrones unit database, which replaced the name Furion with Malfurion.
There is nothing shadowy going on, but two mistakes that ended up causing a lore issue. These would be very easily corrected by renaming Malfurion in each ROC Night Elf Campaign mission (a task that takes less than a minute), and by uploading the correct model to the MalFurionNoStag.mdx filename.
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Of course they’re mistakes, they’re so “committed” to this project they forgot to fix so many inconsistencies lol.
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Do you know why the new succubus models are gone or why Tyrande mountless was cut? There were 5 different succubus models and now there’s only 2.
And if this task takes less than a minute then why don’t they just fix it?
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Its not that simple, they even removed the name Furion from the dialogue in ROC as if they’re censoring it (kinda like how they removed the name Grom). So they’re trying to make the lore “consistent” and this gave them reason to be lazy and remove the other Furion models… as if its so hard for people to figure out that Furion is the same person as Malfurion and Grom is the same person as Grommash Hellscream (they don’t understand the idea of nicknames) or riding a stag makes you a different person somehow
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Tydeous, can you explain also how the naga females ended up having human ears maybe?
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That is likely due to the outsource company using himanoid base meshes for Reforged models and the ears were not caught.
A lot of the models still have undermeshes intact and aren’t well optimized. Heads still have bald tops and ears even if they are covered by hair and never revealed. Body meshed aren’t always cut away by clothing. The optimization of the models is not very consistent.
This is also likely the reason trolls don’t have the back toe any more, and other such details. They are modified human meshes because thats the fastest way to create many models.
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So in other words…poor and lazy work ethics by everyone involved in something they sold as amazing
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Nothing we didn’t already know, no one should be surprised.
‘Poor and lazy’ is subjective though. 700+ models in a year and a half is not a lot of time to ensure quality, especially for a small team like the Classics team. Laziness and poor work ethics implies unwillingness to work, while the more likely scenario is they were understaffed for the amount of work required.
Keep in mind that the longer they take to iterate and push back for changes, that is also time not being used to create new models. The deadline for the game was set when the game was announced. This is no excuse for poor quality control, but i doubt its due to laziness. This game was not allowed the typical Blizzard ‘when its done’ deadline.
Its like if you ever seen the Youtube artist who does the ‘drawings in 10 hours, 10 minutes, 10 seconds’ videos. The same artist can make awesome art if given time, or rush out something much rougher but ‘captures the basics’ in less time. The poor quality, in this case, isn’t laziness, its a lack of time.
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