Blizzard’s spokeperson said Blizzard is sorry we didn’t get the experience we wanted, but that experience (in game cutscenes) was somehting Blizzard promissed inside a game trailer and a live gameplay. Why aren’t there cutscenes even 1 year after release despite Blizzard saying “we stand behind our product and will keep updating it”
Where is the experience you promissed Blizzard?
Why do you think we are ok with this? “we want to preserve the old cutscenes” fine, keep those in “classic” mode, and remake them for “reforged” mode in the menu.
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“We’re sorry you didn’t get the experience you wanted” almost sounds like “You expected too much” like it’s the fans’ fault that the Reforge failed.
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Get over it dude. How long ago was it?
You must have missed the announcement at Blizzcon 19 where they said that they changed their minds about the plans to recon some of the story.
And since the new cinematics contained the majority of the recons, they couldn’t be used. Instead we got the original, engine-rendered cutscenes uprezzed to the remastered assets.
So it’s not a matter of them not being commited to putting the new cinematics in, it’s that they were scrapped before the game was released.
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Pretty much this. One of the very VERY few things Reforged got right imho.
OK.
Let’s assume that the upgraded =movies= are not a problem.
Warcraft 3 trailers showed =in game cinematics= with upgrades (hand and arm movements, facial expressions, etc), which were shown in a trailer, then scrubbed meaning it was false advertizing so where is the experience they promissed? it is not a high bar for Blizzard to create reasonable cinematics.
Furthermore, as all the new game provides is unit and terrain models, why is there so many things removed and never came back such as, Ladder system which was promissed with new and revamped icons for us to gather, this was a broken promiss that even loyal fans like you can’t deny.
The experience we were promissed and never got includes:
Clans, All of the missing chat commands, Player Profile, Tournaments… and even the Warcraft 3 news bar before you choose to start the game was removed, it has been confirmed that the people working on ladder and player profile was moved to another Blizzard office so we NEVER gonna get the experience we wanted.
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No, those trailers were created and shown during development, before the idea was scrapped. Nothing during development is final which Bliz is always diligent to point out in all of their games. So just because plans changed, it doesn’t make it false advertising.
There was a short length of time after the game was released when footage of the new cinematics was left up on the website. So at most that was the only time I’d agree there was false advertising. But they were taken down and replaced with the uprezed cutscenes, which is how it remains to this day.
As for all the rest that’s missing, you may have missed the reports and interviews that revealed that WC3R was rushed out by management, leaving no time for the developers to do everything they wanted. That is why so much was missing at release. Pre and early pandemic, there were regular updates and examples of the work that was being done to replace the missing profiles, ladder, clans, etc.
However, as the pandemic got worse, it put a huge dent in their developmental timeline. On top of that, last October, development Team 1 (which included all the Classic dev teams) was dissolved. That undoubtedly delayed things even more because the new team that was brought in from Activision to take over had to spend time getting up to speed with unfamiliar code.
After a long silence, Bliz posted an update in March saying that they’re still going to deliver the many of the missing features, it’s just taking longer then they planned due to the state of things.
Sadly, even if all of those things DID come out in the timeline we were expecting. . . they can not make up for how the basic functionality of the client is WORSE than the previous one. Everything from the interface to the server architecture. . . the lag spikes, jitter, and constant custom game crashes to the match results screen are infuriating and, quite simply, were not even a thing in the old client.
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I’m with you 100% on that. Some of the design choices were cheap.
It honestly feels like an IRL scenario of Map 2 of the TFT Human campaign. Activision is Garithos, Team 1 (classic games division of Blizzard) is Kael, and the release of an upgraded WC3 Reforged is the Undead, lol.
Activision removes Team 1’s time and resources to accomplish the job and they’re left saying, “What am I to improve the game with? Nothing but sticks and harsh language?”
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And then they censored it so now it only has sticks.
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I’ll believe that when I see it. And even then it’d probably just be a half-baked effort even if it is true.
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As time has gone on, I’m become more skeptical of it as well.
On a side note, you can still login to the official GW servers of arenanet and, beside the fact that they are almost empty, you can still get the experience you want… after 16 years…
Was there any real reason to remove Reign of Chaos?
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Blizzard thought they would be supporting the competitive scene and this game for a long time, so if there was enough demand they could bring RoC balance back…until they decided to completely abandon this game and pretend it doesnt exist, this whole silence is a huge insult to all the fans, old, new or anyone who trusted in Blizzard, and the worst part is that nobody aside of the minority community that W3 still has, cares anymore, D2R is getting the blind trust from fans that believe W3R was just a “mistake”, and that it wont be repeated, Blizzard just had a bad day so this time everything will be fine…
VV isnt Blizzard, everyone should be grateful that VV still means quality under the Activision flag.
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What happened to Reforged was due to upper management, not the development team.
Meaning, now that VV (the development team) is officially under Blizzard, and thus under Blizzard upper management, they are going to be subject to the same decision making people that Team 1 was. Simply being from Activision doesn’t mean anything.
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@Leviathan I have always tried to have a similar perspective as you because of my software dev bias, but coming from a software dev background, I can’t agree with how long it’s taken anymore. Maybe the last several months hasn’t seen any devs on wc3, but prior to that there was. And I can honestly say that the features they were changing/adding for a ‘remaster’ should not have been so significant that it would take a whole team several years to get it working. That just means that either their legacy code was horrible and just barely worked as it was, or their team working on the remaster were bad developers. I’ve seen many “professional, experienced” devs come and go, and 90% were horrible. Just because you have been in the industry for many years doesn’t mean you’re actually good at your job.
If you want examples of good teams, go look at the work quenching and w3champions are accomplishing in less time than the blizz legacy team. They are giving us all the old features back, and they are hobbyist groups that also had to figure out how to workaround wc3’s software limitations.
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The difference I see between Bliz and the 3rd parties is that Bliz has to develop within their clients and Bnet, whereas 3rd parties develop around the clients and create their own servers.
Having to build within old client code, and build into a larger Bnet system is likely far more delicate work than just adding something along side a client/creating new servers.
So I can see 3rd partied being much quicker and efficient.
Yeah true… Although also keep in mind that their bnet Api is used throughout all their clients. It needs to be very easy to plugin otherwise it’d be a nightmare for every single game they plugin. So I obviously don’t have facts, but I can assume their Api is well written. And that just leaves the wc3 client being poor. Or at least its safer to assume the client is poorly written rather than the bnet Api.
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ah… the good old times of the storm.dll…
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