Giant Bomb GOTY 2020 - Brad on Warcraft III: Reforged and the State of Blizzard

Clip from Giant Bomb GOTY 2020 Day 4.

My concern is with Overwatch. I know 2016 Blizzard was pretty damn good when they released Overwatch. The game is still supported with new content even today. If Ovewatch 2 is a terrible game I will definitely worry about Blizzard.

As a more creative type, I can't imagine why Blizzard who shoot themselves in the foot with the EULA. Don't they know that is going to stop anyone from ever developing anything meaningful for WC3 again? They certainly won't lose another DOTA because there will never be another DOTA on that engine. Valve showed how this model works, let people develop without claiming ownership and just offer lots of cash for the good stuff.

@vallian88: I mean, anything is possible. Somehow autochess became a whole genre thanks to Dota 2.

But overall that’s exceedingly rare, and I agree that the Warcraft 3 EULA thing Brad mentions is harsh. The days of the 90s/early 2000s mod scene are behind us, and for the most part I don’t think original game concepts are being made as mods, or custom maps in Warcraft/Starcraft. I assume that for creatives with a game idea, engines/tool sets like Game Maker and Unity are just so accessible now.

Luckily the industry is in a place now where the people that are able to make high quality mods, now get to sell those games directly through steam and get paid for it.

I already posted some of the more nitty gritty faults with Reforged in the GOTY thread, but i figure it's better suited here. I believe some of these things have been changed and fixed over time.

• Gamesize ballooned from 1.3 GB to 30 GB, even if you don't own reforged. You can't play the old game without having all the reforged content installed as well. Those files are just locked away until you pay up.
• Clans were gone
• No offline play at launch
• Profile pages with match history were gone. No way to see match history.
• Race winrate stats was gone. No way to see your stats.
• Automated Tournaments were gone
• Ranked ladder was gone.
• Couldn't see profile pictures or stats of opponents to figure out how good they were.
• Remapping keys had to be done through an .ini file
• Reign of Chaos (base game) balance was replaced with The Frozen Throne (expansion) balance
• Fog of War didn't hide starting positions of the players
• Units being trained off screen didn't use their voice.
• Singleplayer games would occassionally start with a 'you are defeated' button. You had to restart the mission.
• Heroes not always centered on their selection circle.
• Some heroes scaling weirdness where some hereos hardly stand out from base units and some heroes look humongeous.
• Many shadows missing.
• Many text pop ups not alligned well. Like when you win an online game, the prompt is at the bottom of the screen instead of in the middle
• Visual language of the game ruined. Characters would hold their weapon up to artifacts to make it clear that they were 'activating' them. Highlighted with some magical glistening around the artifact. Now it just looks like they hold a speech until something happens.
• Prioritizing the lore of WOW over the lore of these specific games. Example: When Arthas gets Frostmourne, No longer is Muradin getting smacked by the ice shard as a sacrifice for Arthas to wield this evil weapon. Instead, some glowy particles are sprayed on him and he falls down. It makes for a much less dramatic scene. And completely unnecessary because no one would bat an eye if he didn't die from the shard. This is a magical world where heroes revive at altars, drink invulnerability potions and have a bunch of healing potions & spells.

It was truly awful that they shipped this in this state and made the game worse for everyone that cares about Warcraft III, whether you bought Reforged or not.

@bisonhero: I didn't mean people would not make interesting new mods anymore - I just meant they wouldn't do it with WC3: Reforged. Why would I invest time in something I know Blizzard could just sweep out from under me?

On further reflection, I think the Blizzard MGMT must have been so far up their own rear end and believe the fandom for their game was so huge, people would have no choice but to build new maps for their old game. Instead, they nuked it from orbit.

I feel like they are just super late to the party on this one. Blizzard started changing the moment Activision bought them. This isn't the old guard leaving and opening the flood gates, that happened a loong time ago. The exit of Frank Pearce and Mike Morhaime and promoting of Jay Allen Brack was just the final exhale.

I remember back when the merger first happened it was almost immediately announced that Starcraft 2 was gonna be split and sold as three separate games, which ripped through the Blizzard community like a tidal wave. Then came Diablo 3 and all it's problems. But most notably, people who have been playing/following WoW have literally witnessed the change of the company through the game. There's a reason why WoW Classic is a thing, and why it's been close to as popular as the Retail version. It's not just people who want to re-experience the past, but the game drastically changed once Activision came into the picture, creating a massive split in the playerbase.

It's easy to dismiss a lot of the complaints around Blizzard to its fervent fanbase. I have plenty of times made the joke myself about their community trash-talking their games after spending thousands of hours playing them. But Blizzard hasn't been Blizzard for over a decade now.

Forgive me for saying but for someone who's experienced the game industry so closely for so many years, Brad's take seemed a little naive. But he will also forgive Bethesda for almost anything and then throw CD Projekt Red under the bus the moment they miss a beat. I'm not saying one excuses the other but those are some double standards. Kind of feel the same way about the Call of Duty toxicity getting a free pass.

I'm glad I got my MMO fix from other games than WoW and ultimately they're "just" corporations, sigh.

Having personally only really played Starcraft's primary campaign a handful of times as a kid, I completely agreed with Brad. CDPR IMO was one fantastic game (with its own myriad of tiny troubles that took over a year to smooth out) and a cult following. They bit off way more than they could chew with Cyberpunk and the console releases, which is how I experienced it, were practically a criminal act. But by all accounts the game works on PC, sometimes very very well, and for those people it seems clear that plenty of them had one of their favorite gaming experiences this year.

Outside of the console port of Diablo III, I can't say I can remember the last time I heard anything positive about Blizzard from either critics or fans, and this is a company I grew up recognizing as one of the very best developers in the industry despite only ever playing one of their games. Blizzard as an entity was just as important as Squaresoft, Nintendo, Valve or id (the latter two I also only played the original DOOM shareware) in the 90s and early 2000s, and while these and others have had their downs in the ensuing years none have seemed to be always down as much as Blizzard has.

With all that context, I can only imagine if I actually played and liked Blizzard franchises. And so for me Warcraft III had a really strong case for the most distressing game of the year because it not only continued a downward trend for a company that used to seem almost bigger than any one developer or publisher could possibly be, but also just a larger cratering of their reputation in a long series of smaller meteor collisions. All they had to do was modernize the game, but instead they found a way to outclass the Square phone ports of Final Fantasy and Rockstar ports of Grand Theft Auto San Andreas by leaps and bounds...aimed at PCs! Crazy.

"Was this in-house?"

This was TEAM 1, the team responsible for Starcraft 2 and HOTS, which according to Jason Schreier, has been dismantled late last year. So even if the people from old Blizzard hadn't left, their organizational structure was gutted. This leaves the 4 other teams (and Vicarious Visions) with expansions and maintenance for their 3 live games, Diablo 4, and Diablo 2 remake.

I do agree with others that the signs of trouble have been there for awhile, but I do think Brad is right that it is at a critically obvious point right now. Starcraft 2 being split into 3 games to tell a crappy story that never paid off is a dumb business decision but would have been fine if the story had actually done anything worthwhile with the sheer amount of story missions that allowed for. Diablo 3 was bad but eventually got better. It's not the ideal arpg that sits on the throne of Diablo 2 but Reaper of Souls is a fun game and quite frankly amazing they even salvaged that much of 3. Overwatch is a fun game if its your thing. Hearthstone was a fun game when I played it. As was HotS. SC: Remaster is actually pretty damn good.

Previously Blizzard was still making fun games that were held back by scummy business decisions. That's hardly as gloomy and damning as straight up releasing a broken WC3 and breaking old WC3 in the process. Many of there games have fallen into the "decent to good category, but could have been better." WC3 I look at and can't say anything good about it. So while it feels smart to say "look at the signs, they've been there all along" I understand where Brad is coming from. I expect bad business decisions from blizzard and consumer manipulation through loot boxes and card packs nowadays. I don't expect completely broken products prior to this WC3 nonsense.

To keep it brief: they killed Blizzard. Was a long, slow death but this was the final proof of it.

@mezza: It's not about feeling smart, it's more that for people who have been following Blizzard Reforged is not a big surprise. To say that Blizzard only has been doing bad business decisions is greatly downplaying what's been going on. They literally got booed at their own convention two years ago because they've been failing their Diablo community time and time again. It has become a meme in the Blizzard community that they're a "small indie company" because they continuously fail to deliver on the technical and support side. People remember Error 37 from Diablo 3 launch, but that's basically every launch of everything they've launched for years now, and it never gets better. And their back-end battle.net is still riddled with random downtime issues, Hearthstone is crumbling under its engine constrictions, WoW is suffering badly from understaffed game moderation and the list goes on.

I too understand how someone who's not been following their games closely can see Reforged as the breaking point, but that's sorta the point I was trying to make. Giantbomb is a site that follows the videogame industry closely, and for them to be this out of the loop about one of the biggest studios out there feels off.

This is also the year the killed StarCraft 2 support. So sad to see a studio that felt like they supported games for forever, and were really in tune with what the community wanted going this route.

@ares42: They got boo'd at their show for diablo because they had been very content light on diablo for years with the fanbase riling themself up every Con that D4 is coming. They then made a (business) decision to tease a diablo announcement leading up to the Con and schedule it as the closer of the opening ceremony (typically a slot held for big game announcements and showings). When in reality the big reveal was a phone game at a convention largely populated by hardcore pc gamers. They're out of touch and driven by corporate priorities rather than fans, but I don't place my assumption of the companies ability to release games that function at the bare minimum on fan rage over a phone game.

Blizzard makes decisions to exploit and manipulate it's fanbases in ways that are extremely out of touch with the core fanbase. But that doesn't guarantee a game like WC3R comes out as broken as it is. There are plenty of companies with bad PR and bad internal management that make games that function fine and are often enjoyable past initial release problems. There's no causation here and no reason to overly fixate on the idea that everyone in the industry shouldn't be surprised or more offput by this instance.

Also, in reference to things like the errors on D3 launch: Yes that was bad but D3 recovered from it and even recovered from the initial vanilla state of the game. Past Week 1 (I'd even say past day 3) the load stabilized a bit more and people were playing the game. In my total playtime on that game I honestly haven't thought about those errors since day 2 because they were such a miniscule portion of the actual life of the game and had no impact on the enjoyment I got out of the game. Online only games should be better but high demand games that require you to hit a server to play are almost always trash fires on launch day because no one can get in. If someone says that those server errors are a sign of the roadmap to blizzards fall all I can think of is pokemon go, destiny, etc. It's more a sign that the tech world is strict about building for the average server load rather than the peak launch day server load to reserve resources. Note, I'm not saying the game doesn't deserve critique, but there were much larger issues in the life of the game then those server errors.

Personally I just feel the idea that he shouldn't be surprised is a bit of an overstatement. There's a subsection of developers out there that are shitty to consumers but still generally release games that are above average. I'd put blizzard in that. Releasing WCR3 propels them further down into the territory of developers that don't care if their games even work or not.

Their greed ruined the game, all because they were jelly something amazing was created, all they did was ensure nothing amazing will ever be created again, the funny part is they did this so they could cash in on anything amazing which is created.

I'm mostly trying to say that this is the thing that makes Blizzard not Blizzard anymore. It is much more damning for a company like Blizzard that their core philosophies have been completely corrupted rather than the fact that they made a bad product. If Blizzard still had the same management it used to have a bad product launch would probably just be waved off as a temporary mistake (which is sorta what happened with Diablo 3).

I think Brad's opinion is fair, but a little late. Blizzard is not the company of your youth for some years now. Remember the online market in Diablo 3? Splitting a campaign into 3 different products for Starcraft 2? The Chinese/Hong Kong fiasco make it into congress, and I am pretty sure Overwatch 2 and Diablo 4 were speed up to be announced while still barely in concept as a way to distract public attention. They are mirages that might be released in at least 5 or 6 years...

Warcraft 3 Reforged was just one of the latest attempt to push the envelope in whether their community would take it.