What happened to competent devs? where are they now?

Of all the problems with Warcraft Reforged, you pick a fucking patch of road?
I fucking hate this board

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>Washed out colors
>Weak/missing shadows
>Minimal texture detail

I was so excited to recreate Azeroth in the World Editor with the Reforged graphics and make a free playable 32v32 WoW or w/e the new player caps were.

They took that from me. I hate them.

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The colors make more sense and the textures are objectively more detailed than before at a higher resolution, the only valid issue is the lack of shadows or AO.

soul actually is code for hard shading

They went in to normal software dev because the pay's better there if you're the kind of person that can write a game engine.
Fun fact, the main menu for WC3 reforged was a chromium app, that's how stripped of competent devs they are.

if you don't know what's bad with it then you should stop having conversations with people outside of the "weather is nice today, isn't it?" type of meaningless trash
don't even take this as an insult, as someone who works with people i can tell you that you are the type of person that should bother doing anything more with your life besides working and making money to pay bills and maybe go on a vacation or two a year

I'm just going by the OP image alone, it's a dumb pic to use as it fails to show any of the actual problems with Reforged.

Don't even agree with the whole soul/soulless meme but the bottom looks so bland in comparison.

Competence ends at concept artists these days

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everyone is fucking retarded these days
I'm convinced that humanity will go extinct in the next 3 generations because no one will know how the fuck to do anything right

Noticed this too, anything "soul" according to this board just has contrast cranked to 11 with harsh lighting. Anything with soft or natural lighting is called soulless.

>the textures are objectively more detailed than before at a higher resolution
how

What could've been if they didn't chinksource

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dead, retired, headhunted, or replaced with diversity/gender hires.

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Pretty much this,
its much the same with the Japanese retro graphics, as of a few year ago there is really only a handful of people left in the world who can actually create in this style

Like said, most of the talent have been brain drained, now most devs are just full sail code monkeys, without a lick of innovation or creativity

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Sex with Maiev...

Wasn't even bugs, it was like, seamonkies or something, which is worse

It's not a great pic as it's downscaled, but if you look closer you can still tell the original is a much lower resolution compared to the smaller finer detail below. For example, the main body of grass is just noise with some blades at the edges, whilst the remaster you can see individual blades of grass throughout.

>How is this bad?
Are you genuinely fucking blind?!
Do you not see the fucking lack of detail, the absolute washing out of the colors, the absent contours?
Do you not fucking see that the image above has actually visible individual blades of grass, has details like mushrooms, objects like stones, which are either missing ENTIRELY from the bottom image, or literally turned into a texture blob that does not resemble the actual object above?
Do you not see the trees lacking shade?

The FUCK is wrong with your eyes?

I don't even give a shit about Warcraft, those games were always ugly as sin and I'm not even sure this picture is not some bullshit, but just looking at the two image, without any context, how can you not see the problem there?

I want a Reforge of Reforged

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Sex with Jaina...

this is actually a thread about game design

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They got bullied out of the industry.
Metzen left because of panic attacks induced by corporatism.
Morhaime got pushed out of Brizzard because he wasn't corporate enough for Bobby.

Top looks like it could be taken out of a panel of a comic

Bottom looks generic for a game

It's not about competency, but new vision direction.
The industry's current opinion on aesthetics and backgrounds is that backgrounds should generally be muted, with less saturation and less contrast that active characters and props, so that there is more clarity and the player can't feel like they missed out something because of bad visual design.
I think I remember watching a GDC lecture on this a long time ago. Maybe it was Ubisoft talking about the newer Rayman games. Or somebody else. Can't remember.
Basically everything looks worse in screenshots, but is clearer and faster to read while playing.

So much talent squandered

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>lack of detai
refer to

>where are they now?
Indie and mid-ranged development, mostly. Blizzard is literally the definition of completely corrupted corprorate AAA environment. Of course anyone with any talent has fled that environment two decades ago.

The problem is that you idiots literally don't know anything that isn't fucking Activision, EA or Ubisoft at this point. If it does not have at least 70 mil marketing budget, it does not register on your fucking radar. You have really only yourself to blame.

Ugh

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Glad you could remake it, Uther.

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>I want a Reforge of Reforged
Blizzard obviously don't have the people to make a proper WarCraft or StarCraft RTS anymore.

soul...

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>bottom picture
The little segments of random grass have been replaces with a flat texture. Flowers have been entirely removed from any patches of grass. The rocks have less detail and are dulled down. The dirt path has stones and other debris removed from it along with flattening out the texture. The trees are copy pasted and stretched outwards or compressed to pretend they look different. The shadows of the trees, pathing and grass in general is none existent. All the trees have the same shading regardless of where they're placed. The trees out in the open are still dark at the base of their foliage and turn into a lime green as they reach the peak

There's probably a whole fuck more wrong with the bottom image that I missed but all of that was from a quick glance

This is probably not the best example, but compare the ground grass in these two Dota 2 pictures. The top one is old, the bottom one is new. See how they made the grass have a less saturated color and a homogeneous value palette, rather than contrasting blades? It's not coincidence. The bottom one is clearer.

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The problem aren't the Devs...It's the new engines they work with...Example: Unreal

Unreal Engine is the cancer of the industry, everyone know it's terrible to work with and more terrible to bugfix.
Engine Devs are a dying race.

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Essentially what happened is that traditionally trained artists and/or programmers were switched out for specifically "video game focused" ones (vidya degrees).

The result is cookie cutter bullshit and the lowest level of "professionalism", as found in many other academic flavor of the decade degrees. The artists that made warcraft 3's textures originally were already good at what they were doing and on top of that they developed a specific style useful for that particular kind of game. When you look at the models in that game you will realize that almost every single one of them (with the exception of maybe small environment props) follows a certain gradient that makes the bottoms contrast with the ground texture and the tops pop out due to being significantly brighter (look at the trees in OPs pic). Now that style was made especially for RTS games of the time and that perspective.
To develop something like that requires a certain level of expertise, pragmaticism and craftsmanship that was developed over the years.
Nowadays however the video game industry is in/out hire/fire bullshit with people coming directly from university.
They will likely burn out and quit the industry before they even achieve the necessary level of competence that you saw in the 90s/early 2000s.
If at all you will more likely see that in AA and indie games.

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he looks fat

fpbp

>Engine Devs are a dying race.
Because an engine on par with unreal is an unbelievably costly boondoggle, and if you fuck it up you're getting another fiasco like Crystal Tools which tanks the entire output of your company for at least half a decade.

Yes, millenials will end up being boomers in steroids in a couple decades.

>individual blades of grass
It looks like moss, not grass. The classic variation looks like grass clumps, I can't take you people seriously any more

They are either milking your nostalgia udder by making a new company or retired.

Not working in games
The industry is notoriously shitty, a competent programmer can easily find much better paying much less stressful work elsewhere

how do you stop this? where do you start?
>inb4. start small
where and how?

Good point, working at ActiBlizz at this point is the game dev equivalent of working at Wal-Mart.

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straws, spyro and crash are good remakes.

Coding is a dying art which is outsourced to Indians and Chinese people when not performed by Western diversity hires who didn't join the industry due to passion.

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Those are artistic changes to the design, the texturing itself is objectively higher resolution and therefore has more detail. I'm not at all claiming that it looks better, however, so I want to make it clear that it looks worse - but to say it has "less detail" is objectively incorrect.
Also, the grass is not a flat texture, it may be bland but there's no sign of a repeating pattern there and as far as I can see there is no tiling either.
The classic version uses literal noise in a few areas as filler, it was most likely drawn as pixel art and it's a common technique to fill blank areas with noise since it looks like detail from a distance, especially on a CRT

>everyone know it's terrible to work with and more terrible to bugfix.

None of that is even remotely accurate.
Regardless of what your gripes with the results may be, UE4 is probably one of the most practice oriented pieces of software ever made.
Both the profiler and the debugger are absolute life savers.

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Thinned out among diversity hires.

NTA but isn't their official documentation still unfinished?

OLD GOOD
NEW BAD

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>bottom looks better just because the texture resolution is higher
Good bait

crash is good but spyro no way, it could have been better

I did not say it looked better, I literally said the opposite. Learn to fucking read.

Exactly, and it has been this way since WoW became the single biggest cash cow in the entire entertainment business of it's time.

Want to see talented artists? Play something from Supergiant, or IPL, or Wube, or hell, even fucking CDPR games, as weak as they may be gameplay-wise, have at least great standard of art... for now. I'm sure their next game will change that.
But if you are expecting passion from studios like Blizzard, Ubi, EA, you are just barking on the wrong tree.