The apex of RTS games -- what a great gaming era RIP. Since then graphics are way better but business models have just deteriorated and mass appeal has driven games.
Warcraft II was my introduction to the RTS genre and fell in love with it. Warcraft II really gave each unit a unique character and the strategies for almost endless. Spents tons of time playing and replaying it over the years and it's kinda crazy it still has a competitive scene.
So happy I bought this game on GOG before they replaced it with the revamped version (modern looking art, etc).
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?
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.
2. Indeed - I'm happy to hear someone know their Blizzard modding community history. To my knowledge, King Arthur never finished his studies as he got offered a job at Blizzard. He worked at Blizzard from around 2000 to 2020. He's now at Dreamhaven it seems, along with former Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime. And indeed - Jorsys is very much inspired by Camsys =)
3. I think my abuse of overplaying Diablo I on our old 56k modem is what made my parents invest in broadband. I'm happy they didn't make me pay the bills back then.
My long term goal with Jorsys is to put tutorials and mods and make the whole thing accessible for people today and tomorrow. It's all pretty arcane, with tools, mods and instructions barely accessible anymore. Time is limited though.
I don't anticipate creating a community, but if you have anecdotes or stories to share, or want to help out in any way, don't hesitate to get in touch. My email is on Jorsys.
I love Warcraft II. My first ever RTS, and one of the all time greats even now. The game just has soul oozing out of every pore; you can feel the excitement of the Blizzard guys for the game as you play it. The expansion was great too.
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!
WarCraft was a huge part of our LAN parties, but mechanics wise, Total Annihilation was a much bigger leap forward in terms of use of 3D terrain and ballistics and commands, so we played that a lot more.
Warcraft had more differentiable units and a better story though.
The Kali TCP/IP IPX bridge allowed you to play this multiplayer over the internet, and the style of game was tolerant to low bandwidth and high pings. Which made this one of the first games that really provided a glimpse of the future of gaming (for better or worse, much of gaming has moved away from single person campaigns to multiplayer). I have so many great memories of this era in gaming because of this game and the handful of others that Kali supported (descent, doom 2).
I spent many hours playing this, C&C, Red Alert, over null modem cables and kali with my friends growing up. One of the most satisfying things is to hit the unit limit!
(Yes, that was from Beyond the Dark Portal. Could play it in the game with a "cheat" code or it was at the end of the Redbook audio tracks if you put it in a music CD player.)
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.
This was the first game I was really obsessed with. I remember having one floppy disc and I wanted to copy the game from a friend, so we split the game to ~10 parts, and for a whole weekend I was going back and forth between our houses, "downloading" those 10mb.
I remember it felt like AGES for the Mac version to come out -- my friends with DOS/Win machines were playing and of course I was out of luck, still clinging to my precious WarCraft 1 in the meantime (apparently the Mac vers came out 8mo later)... I remember visiting a couple friends and playing the game at their house and being so jealous they can just play this amazing game any time. WC2 was such a leap forward and such an improved game (though I did miss the gritty/darker feel from WC1). Great memories of playing modem games with my friends in the area, and AppleTalk LAN games as well of course.
I get nostalgic thinking about WC2 on the Mac. I was a teen then, and loved Blizzard for putting the effort into a Mac release. I don't remember how I found IRC and #macwarcraft, but between dial-up internet, coordinating games on an IRC channel, trading IP's, and submitting game results to manual leaderboards, clan wars, trash talking, etc. What a great time it was :)
None of my PC friends had any kind of networking, but on our Macs we had an AppleTalk (PhoneNet) network between 3 Macs (WC2 ran on a 25 MHz 68040 so my old bedroom Mac would still suffice) making my home the WarCraft II gaming nexus.
If you still want to experience the joys of RTS... but struggle to play after so many years away, I highly recommend catching a few streams from Grubby. He plays WC3 and a few other games and is quite entertaining to watch. He is also crazy good... His typical APM during a game hovers between 200 and 250. He is an absolute beast at leveraging his items and maximizing his heroes' hp.
I miss the low res aesthetic of WC2. It's so sad that everything has to be high res nowadays. I never really liked WC3, maybe for that reason.
And although SC1/2 brought genuine improvements in the genre in many ways, there's something so much purer about the high fantasy tone of WC over the scifi tone of SC. Maybe it's just pure nostalgia, but it feels like something deeper, something more real.
Warcraft II was the first game I ever played over modem direct connect with a friend across town. Later on there was another friend that lived way outside of town where you could only get dial-up internet who I played Starcraft with over modem. Those were probably some of the most enjoyable moments I ever got out of dial up internet.
AOL had an amazing warcraft 2 community. There was an online games service in the 90s called Engage and AOL had a partnership with them that allowed AOL users to play multiplayer games through the AOL service. There was a additional charge and it was quite expensive (I believe there was a per minute but my memory is a little fuzzy on the details).
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)
I worked backwards from Starcraft, and to my mind WC2 still feels a bit archaic, insofar as the two races feel nearly identical. WC3 did a better job of differentiating the Human and Orc units, and then of course added Dark Elves and the Undead to the mix, too.
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.
C&C RA (1996) and RA2 (2000) both had significant naval units. RA3 (2008) went.. maybe a little overboard with naval units as well. That said, all other C&C games (Tiberium and Generals) both avoided naval units.
This is a really good and I think sadly under played and discussed game. It was very popular in the mid 1990s on release but it seems like it was immediately forgotten about once Starcraft arrived. It's unfortunate because yes it's a simpler and more straight forward game, and not as balanced, but it is very fun and pure.
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...
All the RTS games are underplayed nowadays. Starcraft 2 is maybe the most active still and has been all but abandoned by Blizzard.
A good RTS has an extremely harsh learning curve and is not super monetizable. Someone would have to rethink the genre: make it easier for casual players and figure out how to get the addicting money making patterns in. Otherwise big companies are gonna have no interest.
Sucks, I love Starcraft 2, but it is legitimately the most mentally demanding game I have ever played. Sometimes I procrastinate getting into a match because 1v1 is so stressful. I totally get why it has limited appeal.
I have great memories from the Warchest which had I, II and expansions. Personally though Warcraft III perfected the RPG elements and storytelling and completely overshadowed the earlier installments - it’s still probably the best game I’ve played
> The map editor was revolutionary at the time, and it was trivially easy to be making usable maps within minutes.
And within a year or two there were so. Many. Maps. Spread through gloriously fun CDs (quite a few in big boxes with cool artwork)! I have a collection of over 40 releases so far; it's a wild rabbit hole.
As I recall, WarCraft II was the first big box game I bought for my own money, ordered through paper catalogue. Amazing memories of the campaign, and online duels over dial-up - often interrupted because someone picked up the phone. Still have (somehow surviving) floppies with a few silly little maps made in early 1997. It's the ultimate feel-good nostalgia game for me. Just seeing the winter sprite of the Church with the green and red LED(?!) lights fills me with pure joy, every time. (It hits me, just now, that those single pixels might just be representing ball ornaments or something. ...I'm sticking with my headcanon of LEDs!)
Back then we were playing WarCraft II over a LAN with... The neighbors. We managed, as teenagers, to snatch some old 10BASE2 "ethernet over coax" gear: cables, BNC connectors and terminators, and most of all ethernet adapter cards.
We weren't fully geared though, so we'd assemble the cables manually, using whatever we could find to attach the connectors.
Then we'd use a long piece of string with something attached to it that we'd throw, from the 2nd or 3rd floor of the house, to the neighbor's house. And then we'd use the string to pull up the coax cable.
And then humans and little orcs would transit through the coax cables.
Oh the memories.
We'd also play and be ranked on Case's Ladder, for back then Battle.net didn't even exist yet. So it was all KALI to simulate a LAN over the Internet and play against strangers.
And we'd mod our WCII to use sound files from different languages: for the example for the flying machine I was fond of the italian version "machina volante".
It was... Our life? Only got dethroned as the best time-waster in our lives when the Counter-Strike beta came out (in 1999?). (I didn't like StarCraft but boy oh boy did I play Warcraft III a lot later on).
68 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 81.9 ms ] threadI 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?
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.
2. Indeed - I'm happy to hear someone know their Blizzard modding community history. To my knowledge, King Arthur never finished his studies as he got offered a job at Blizzard. He worked at Blizzard from around 2000 to 2020. He's now at Dreamhaven it seems, along with former Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime. And indeed - Jorsys is very much inspired by Camsys =)
3. I think my abuse of overplaying Diablo I on our old 56k modem is what made my parents invest in broadband. I'm happy they didn't make me pay the bills back then.
My long term goal with Jorsys is to put tutorials and mods and make the whole thing accessible for people today and tomorrow. It's all pretty arcane, with tools, mods and instructions barely accessible anymore. Time is limited though.
I don't anticipate creating a community, but if you have anecdotes or stories to share, or want to help out in any way, don't hesitate to get in touch. My email is on Jorsys.
[1]: https://archive.org/details/warcraftIIsourcecodePSX
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 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!
Warcraft had more differentiable units and a better story though.
(Yes, that was from Beyond the Dark Portal. Could play it in the game with a "cheat" code or it was at the end of the Redbook audio tracks if you put it in a music CD player.)
- "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.
https://youtu.be/qaaWsRfbsls?si=EJ0WBvJ9hMmQCaNb
And although SC1/2 brought genuine improvements in the genre in many ways, there's something so much purer about the high fantasy tone of WC over the scifi tone of SC. Maybe it's just pure nostalgia, but it feels like something deeper, something more real.
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...
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.
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...
A good RTS has an extremely harsh learning curve and is not super monetizable. Someone would have to rethink the genre: make it easier for casual players and figure out how to get the addicting money making patterns in. Otherwise big companies are gonna have no interest.
Sucks, I love Starcraft 2, but it is legitimately the most mentally demanding game I have ever played. Sometimes I procrastinate getting into a match because 1v1 is so stressful. I totally get why it has limited appeal.
WarCraft II sold 3M copies.
Ah yes, my friend groups favorite map to make: start at the corners and the rest of the map was trees.
And within a year or two there were so. Many. Maps. Spread through gloriously fun CDs (quite a few in big boxes with cool artwork)! I have a collection of over 40 releases so far; it's a wild rabbit hole.
As I recall, WarCraft II was the first big box game I bought for my own money, ordered through paper catalogue. Amazing memories of the campaign, and online duels over dial-up - often interrupted because someone picked up the phone. Still have (somehow surviving) floppies with a few silly little maps made in early 1997. It's the ultimate feel-good nostalgia game for me. Just seeing the winter sprite of the Church with the green and red LED(?!) lights fills me with pure joy, every time. (It hits me, just now, that those single pixels might just be representing ball ornaments or something. ...I'm sticking with my headcanon of LEDs!)
It simply reflects modern orc capitalism: a lifetime of servitude.
We weren't fully geared though, so we'd assemble the cables manually, using whatever we could find to attach the connectors.
Then we'd use a long piece of string with something attached to it that we'd throw, from the 2nd or 3rd floor of the house, to the neighbor's house. And then we'd use the string to pull up the coax cable.
And then humans and little orcs would transit through the coax cables.
Oh the memories.
We'd also play and be ranked on Case's Ladder, for back then Battle.net didn't even exist yet. So it was all KALI to simulate a LAN over the Internet and play against strangers.
And we'd mod our WCII to use sound files from different languages: for the example for the flying machine I was fond of the italian version "machina volante".
It was... Our life? Only got dethroned as the best time-waster in our lives when the Counter-Strike beta came out (in 1999?). (I didn't like StarCraft but boy oh boy did I play Warcraft III a lot later on).