Warcraft 1 is maybe too slow paced and basic to be enjoyable, but Warcraft 2 remains very playable, as many of the usability of features core to modern RTS games developed here. There are a few things missing, but that just means you have to be more on the ball with the micro.

The map editor was revolutionary at the time, and it was trivially easy to be making usable maps within minutes.

One thing that was delightful about this game was how the community discovered that Farms made for better walls than the actual walls, and so an enormous variety of strategies developed around this. As players developed knowledge of how units were pushed out of buildings, walling off buildings to push units past forest was another strategy that developed from this, creating the potential for sneaky tricks.

One unfortunate thing about the game was that during the original battlenet edition they added a new extra fast speed, which everyone moved to, but that speed actually kinda broke the game in that it became entirely possible to accidentally put your townhall too close to the mine, and your peons would be impossible to remove from mining. So in actuality the second to fastest speed is the correct speed for this game.

I hope this got fixed in the remaster but I heard it was a pretty basic art refresh...

This feels absolutely insane for today's standards. And not just in the gaming world. Somehow with all the advancement of libraries, frameworks, coding tools, and even AI these days, development speeds seem so much slower and it seems like too much time is spent on eye candy, monetization and dark patterns and too few times on things people actually like to see - that's what made us buy games and software in the old days.

(But also in the gaming world, especially the past few years when almost no game studio develops its own engine, assets don't look more detailed than what was used 3 years ago, stories seem hastily written and it feels like 80% of developer's time is spent on making cosmetic items for purchase which often cost more than the base game price)

Also somehow we spend lots of times researching UX and developing tutorials (remember when software had the "?" button next to the close button and no software "tutorials" were needed?) and yet all the games and software are harder to learn than what we had in the 90s and 00s.

You cannot imagine the lengths we had to go to play this game in our home. We were lucky enough to have two apple computers and so my brother and I would play each other using the battle net technology over appletalk. The thing was, the only appletalk cable in our house was barely long enough to make it between the two bedrooms, so when we wanted to play the cable would hang in the air stretched across the hallway where the slightest tug would rip it out of the port killing the match.

The number of times that cable got unplugged mid-game and the inter-household rancor that would ensue is the stuff of legends. I honestly remember the fits we had about whose fault it was that the cord got unplugged more than I remember any specific aspect of those Warcraft games.

It just goes to show, networking topography matters.

WCII ToD is absolutely one of the most insane games to ever be birthed unto the world. It was so brain breaking compared to everything else we were playing at the. time. Just a real quantum leap in terms of dopeness.

Blizzard really hit it out of the park with Warcraft and Diablo.

1) you can find the War 2 for PSX source on Archive. It has all the Windows stuff commented out. It might be possible to uncomment and compile with something like Borland C or Watcom C or whatever they used.

2) the modding scene was phenomenal. Not mentioned is StarDraft for obvious reasons but a counterpart to WarDraft. This is where our story takes a turn and the name Camelot Systems emerges, along with a King Arthur (Andy Bond) who shortly after finishing his comp sci degree went to work for Blizzard and has been with them since. This website is a homage to CamSys (JorSys).

3) War2Bne is a thing to behold. Diablo, Warcraft 2 et al being able to seamlessly chat and DM players across games was pure magic.

Many stories to tell, but we will never step into that river again. Legends never die.

https://youtu.be/qaaWsRfbsls?si=EJ0WBvJ9hMmQCaNb

Warcraft had more differentiable units and a better story though.

But I will say that WC2 is the last major RTS I can think of with naval combat. After Starcraft streamlined it to be land and air only, it seems the entire industry followed suit. Even WC3 didn't bother bringing ships back, to my memory.

It really does pale by comparison to StarCraft, BroodWars, WC3, and of course the scion of the series, SC2.

It’s a shame how far Blizzard has fallen at this point - this era of RTS died a sad little death a decade ago with Nova Covert Ops.

I played through the orc campaign last year and had fun. It's definitely aged, but it makes me wonder if something like that could exist today. Story games are popular, and I think always will be (people like stories).

Instead of a solo protagonist, can we bring back the hero (a la WarCraft III) and their army? Or even the invisible god like WC2?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Wyatt

[1]: https://www.codeofhonor.com/

I played the battle.net rerelease of the game, which came out after Starcraft did. The main feature was (obviously) online play, but I believe it had some other SC features backported as well. Had great times as a kid playing in comp stomp lobbies on battle.net!

- "Your sound card works perfectly!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_A1GNx0M9M

- "I am a medieval man" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwWh1xy6gvU (https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/I%27m_a_Medieval_Man)

It was great to play this game when it came out. And it has aged well too. Good gameplay, OST, graphics... never experienced a glitch or performance issue. The only worry was keeping the CD unscratched.

There was a very active AOL message board dedicated to Warcraft 2. Most of the active community used other services (Kali, MSN Zone, and later Battlenet when BNE came out) to play the game since AOL's service was prohibitively expensive.

The best part of the community were the clans. Some of them ended up outliving AOL. The biggest one that I remember was a clan named Splintered Orcs Clan (SoC). Actually just found an old forum post written by the founder of SoC. Looks like they tried to branch out into WoW (I was way out of the scene by then)

https://forums.mmorpg.com/discussion/12955/splintered-orcs-c...

I'd love to introduce my kids to this game - but it is so difficult to get multiplayer licenses that "Just Plain Work" in our environment. I don't want to resort to piracy or emulation - I just want to install it on the 4 gaming PC's in our house, and fire up a game - just like we used to do in the good ol' days, the 90's.

But its just not so easy any more, alas.

If there were a "family license pack" for Warcraft2 and Starcraft, I'd be in, in a second. My CS:GO-trading kids need to learn these games. Zug Zug!

The other games we were playing at that time were Doom II and various other first-person shooters (Rise of the Triad, Hexen, etc) - which were also pretty incredible. But the WarCraft II experience really took things to the next level with far richer gameplay.

l'chaim!