You ever wonder what the hell is going on over at Activision-Blizzard since the release of Reforged? What things were like behind the scenes during development? What the developers and executives are saying to each other? Since Blizzard seems to have adapted the Chinese Government model of being as opaque and secretive as possible and making the most generic, legal-team sanctioned canned comments they can its all been a mystery.
How many developers were frustrated with the way things turned out? Was this always the plan or did things go haywire? How many people are currently working? What's the dev room like? Are the executives trying to push this under the rug? Or are they trying desperately to think of a way to fix this without having to spend more money?
Apart from the first few weeks of the game, have there been any leaks? Interviews? Official statements? Anything recent?
You can find the size of the team in the credits. They're all listed there. It's... pretty small. Around 5 (give or take, I don't remember exactly) engineers working on the actual game and 5 more working on the "platform" (which I presume implies tooling, B.Net integration, etc.) As far as software development is concerned, it's a pretty small team for a project of this scope (and complexity, too, considering the archaic nature of the WC3 engine). I'm not sure how fair it would be to blame the actual developers working on the game - speaking from experience, development in the corporate world can
very quickly get bogged down in obscene amounts of bureaucracy, task-tracking, reporting, and all kinds of other things that corporate demands but are not at all related to actual development of the game.
I'm sure the team could do far better from a technical standpoint if they had better or more talent on the team - but judging by the size of the team, it would seem that corporate didn't want to divert a lot of engineering resources at the game. Good engineers are expensive, great engineers even more so, and Reforged, in retrospect, was clearly a "budget" project for Blizzard.
As is typical in the software world, a lot of things probably got
severely under-estimated - hence the delayed release and the drizzling rate of patches. It's obvious that the game, from a purely technical standpoint, needed at least another year or two
at least of just pure
engineering time to iron out all the technical kinks.
Even then, some of the purely technical things accomplished in Reforged are fairly impressive - Lua integration, migration to CASC, the various new APIs exposed to us. The issue is that so many of them were released in a half-baked and broken state. I have no doubt that, given time and resources, all the issues could be ironed out. But that is no longer the option, unfortunately, the damage has already been done.
As far as the corporate side of things goes, I'm sure the execs didn't care. They don't understand the struggles of software development, nor the importance of acquiring good engineers in decent numbers. It can all be fixed in a post-launch patch, right? Now that Reforged flopped for all intents and purposes, it's a miracle it's still being updated. Then, there's also the issue of delivering results to your shareholders - which care even less about the development side of things, and just want to see that growth, which is at direct odds to good software development.
It's also important to remember, that in big companies like Blizzard (and even far smaller ones), there's usually at least 4-7 levels of hierarchy between your on-the-front developer and the actual execs. Developer - team lead - project lead - various department managers - and finally several levels of execs. Each level cares less and less about what's going on in the lower rungs. By the time the message gets to the top layer, it's probably just a 3-line status report on the project. That's a lot of levels where something can go wrong, which it evidently did. The developers get the memo from their lead that time is short, and the lead gets that memo from their project lead, and so on and on... At the end of the day, for the developers it's just a job, and it's not their responsibility to direct the vision of the project or the time constraints.
I think, ultimately, the blame lies with the people who refused to allocate the necessary time and resources to complete the project properly. We'll never know who these people were, and it doesn't really matter now. This is the unfortunate reality of corporatized development, and it's not at all uncommon in the software world overall.
