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Writing for Bloomberg, gaming journalist Jason Schreier has finally released his full investigative piece into the failure of Warcraft III: Reforged. I won't paste the contents of the entire article in this post, but I will include some highlights below. The impression that I received after reading the article is that the Classic Games division bit off way more than they could chew given their team's small size and limited budget, and were unwilling to postpone the game's release because they had already taken pre-orders. Reforged would have never received the budget that it needed to deliver all of its promised features because of budgetary constraints imposed on Blizzard by Activision.
Blizzard chose to plow ahead with a premature release of Warcraft III: Reforged largely because it had already taken pre-orders from players, according to people familiar with the decision. The company couldn’t bump the game too much more without potentially being forced to send out refunds and risking that fans wouldn’t buy the game again.
In notes from an internal postmortem of the game reviewed by Bloomberg, developers on Warcraft III: Reforged acknowledged this issue. "We took pre-orders when we knew the game wasn't ready yet," they said, adding later that the company needed to “resist the urge to ship an unfinished product because of financial pressure.”
The Blizzard spokesman said that “in hindsight, we should have taken more time to get it right, even if it meant returning pre-orders.”
Members of the team began worrying that they had promised more than they could deliver. Remastering Warcraft III was more complicated than their previous remake, StarCraft, thanks to its three-dimensional models. The team was small, the production was disorganized and the amount of work in front of them was daunting. It had taken months to revamp one of Warcraft III’s levels; now they would have to do the same for dozens more.
Morale plummeted. Rob Bridenbecker, the head of the Classic Games team, was known for an aggressive managerial style, for taking frequent trips out of the country during production and a tendency to give unrealistic deadlines. Miscommunication became a serious issue across the team, as did arguments over the scope and art style, according to people familiar with the matter. Bridenbecker, who left Blizzard in April, declined to comment.
The team, which had a reputation of taking on outcasts from other Blizzard departments, was restricted in hiring due to a limited budget. Some people had to do multiple jobs at once, working many nights and weekends to try to finish the game. Technological obstacles and conflicts among the team only exacerbated the problems. A mass layoff of nearly 800 people in February 2019 hollowed out Blizzard’s support departments, which also hurt the team. “We were missing and/or had the wrong people in certain lead roles," the postmortem said. "The team structure didn't set up the project for success."
Warcraft III: Reforged began gradually losing features. Management threw out the revised scripts and re-recordings the team had done, according to the people familiar with the process, choosing instead to stick with the original dialogue and voice acting.
[David Fried], who departed the project as it was rescoped, pinned the blame for these shifts on Blizzard’s corporate parent. “I am deeply disappointed that Activision would actively work against the interests of all players in the manner that they did,” he said. He added that it was “quite telling” that Morhaime had resigned just weeks before Warcraft III: Reforged was presented in November 2018 at Blizzcon, the company’s annual fan convention.
The developers of the game blamed Bridenbecker and other executives. "Leadership seemed totally out of touch with the velocity and scope of the project until extremely late in development,” the team said in the postmortem. "Senior voices in the department warned leadership about the impending disaster of Warcraft on several occasions over the last year or so, but were ignored."
The Blizzard spokesman said the company has “a new team dedicated to updating Warcraft III: Reforged with improvements. In these efforts, we realize our work and actions will speak louder than our words. Across many projects, we’ve made process improvements, implemented better milestone planning, and improved visibility into work-in-progress.”
But a year and a half after launch, Blizzard’s Warcraft III: Reforged remains incomplete. And the company is left facing questions, including whether it will be able to recover from the brand damage caused by the missed expectations.