[rendall]

"During a milestone check-in with Cyberlore, however, Blizzard’s managers had deemed the work subpar. They cancelled the contract, finished the add-on pack, Beyond the Dark Portal, themselves, and resolved that only an in-house team could nurture a Blizzard property to an acceptable level of quality."

I was working at Cyberlore as a playtester when Blizzard pulled the plug on the Warcraft 2 expansion. It was baffling to us all. They never explained why, to us anyway. All these years later, to read that they felt the work was subpar is a surprise. We tried to get more info, but all we got was "Decision is made. Hand over all assets." We just thought it was some kind of internal political struggle.

These days everyone does agile, so these kind of big expectation mismatches don't happen so often anymore. In theory, anyway.

[electricslpnsld]

> These days everyone does agile

Is Agile common in game development?

[badlucklottery]

Anecdotal: from talking with my friends who still work in game dev, something management calls "agile" is relatively common. Lean developer staffing makes having much agility in practice kind of tough.

[UnoriginalGuy]

Varies by studio but some do.

[Darmani]

Wow. Must be quite a shock for you.

Do you know anything about the interactions between Cyberlore and NWC for The Price of Loyalty? I'm generally curious, as I lead a large modding project for that game. (I've gotten a couple case studies out of hacky Cyberlore code.)

[Apocryphon]

How was working on Majesty?

[rendall]

I didnt work on Majesty, myself, but I do remember when my friend Jim came up with the concept. We were walking down the street talking about games, and he said "I want to make an RPG game where the heroes control themselves."