I tried to save Reforged - Grubby

Worst thing about WC3 Reforged wasn't the broken promises (which are PLENTY), it's the inarguable downgrade of the product, and the incapacity to go back and play our old copies of WC3

Not to mention the custom maps. Warcraft 3 was made with so much love. They did not just make a game, they made a 3D remake of the classic warcraft 2, coded in C++ with its own engine. An engine so robust you could launch an editor that did not lag, that allowed you to create whatever you wanted. Not only was warcraft 3 the best game ever made, it had some of the best code in the world. The front-en may be what we remember, but the back-end was perfected.

As someone who's worked in QA in games for 20 years, you just described my entire career. PTSD to the max. I've basically stopped caring about the games I work on, because the people running the show have no idea what they are doing and only care about deadlines and money. Thank you for trying to make WC3 better. On the plus side, every time I get contacted by Blizzard for a job opening, I get to tell them "no you ruined my childhood and favorite game of all time WC3"

Reforged feels like an AI attempt at recreating a game

It's baffling to me how they managed to get StarCraft Remastered right by doing what could be described as "the bare minimum", but somehow every decision they could've made regarding Reforged, they chose wrong every time.

It's OK Grubby, Blizzard died years ago, you have to let them go

I will never get tired of listening to Grubby talk about wc3

Sleepers of agility were called "socks of Spider Man" in Russian community for ages :D

this story has everything from character development, to the plot twist, to the betrayal arc and finally the epilogue

As a graphic designer with experience in item icons, I'm very surprised by Grubby's intuition and general understanding of it... It's much more important for the icons to work well together, rather than to look good individually.

This is what you end up with when product designers don't actually use their own product. The gripes about the rally flag make perfect sense from the perspective of utility. But product managers don't play the game and so they think, "Ooh, let's make it animate and move with the unit." They've never played the game competitively such that having it move in that manner and appear different depending on the angle makes it difficult to see and keep track of. It's not just Reforged, it's with a lot of products. It's what happens when they don't eat their own dogfood. And I agree that many of the revised graphics lack contrast or simplicity. That's what happens when you add too much fancy details: they become less recognizable at a glance.

It's not just nostalgia. I recently got my 8 year old into playing Warcraft 3 campaign (they have previously played a little bit of retail WoW so like the universe already) and when I showed them between Classic and Reforged graphics. They had a gut visceral disgust reaction to the Reforged graphics. They kept asking me "but why are the new graphics worse? Why don't they fix it?"

I love how candid this is. I remember watching you play reforged during these tests and you were trying to be fair and optimistic, but we all knew what we were seeing wasn't good. I remember you just trying to remain hopeful, but yeah. This was a really, really cool video. Thanks for this one dude. You're a legend.

Grubby is absolutely right. Heroes get a glow and get bigger to be able to be identified. In SpellForce 3 I can barely distinguish where my heroes are because they just look like random humans...

I learned that when Grubby says something's "not very good", that's actually just his nice way of saying it's "utter and complete rubbish" 😂

As someone who has worked as a paid video game quality assurance tester as well as a paid Focus Group tester for many games, I get really frustrated and angry at games that treat their customers like testers, expecting them to write up bug reports or give feedback for their beta builds, except for free. There was a time when I gave up my time to give detailed bug reports or feedback on betas of games I loved, in hopes that the game would be better upon release. But I realized that I'm just enabling them to release crappy, unfinished products. Why pay anyone to test your games and fix it before release when they can save money and just release it unfinished and their players will do all that work for free?! So while I can understand your desire to help them and provide all the free consultation, I do not blame you in the slightest for ghosting them in the end when they asked you for hours of work on that huge spreadsheet. That's what employees are for. Value your own time, and when someone asks you for free work, always remember this phrase "Fuck you, Pay me!"

Hey Grubby, I really like you for RTS content. No joke, when I first saw the way reforged was received on release, the first words out of my mouth were, "Oh, poor Grubby."

This was incredible! I'm conflicting on the 100s of icons thing at the end . On one hand, they're asking you for unreasonable amounts of feedback without being paid for it and just icons wouldn't be enough to fix the game, but maybe discussing formalizing a paid consulting contract would have been more useful. As you saw, they were interested enough in your feedback to prepare a massive document for you, so maybe they were ready to explore harder-to-change solutions afterwards. It's a shame it didn't work out, obviously they're talented people. Thank you for taking the time to collect all the clips and emails for this video, it must have taken quite some time.

On the topic of Ogres sleeping, i think they just went with this animation because they do it too in Classic, hence why only ogres have a sleep animation in Reforged

🥲Getting ghosted by Grubby would've been the final straw from trying to work on it lol.