[HN Gopher] 30 Year Anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness
___________________________________________________________________
30 Year Anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness
Author : sjoblomj
Score : 162 points
Date : 2025-12-09 09:13 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.jorsys.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.jorsys.org)
| newshackr wrote:
| Zug zug
| semitones wrote:
| swobu
| 7bit wrote:
| Train train
| mproud wrote:
| I'm convinced "zug zug" is a reference to a scene from the 1981
| movie /Caveman/[1].
|
| 1: https://youtu.be/5h2gVbLlwl8
| pfdietz wrote:
| Q: What kind of cigarettes do orcs smoke.
|
| A: Low tar, my friend.
| sparker72678 wrote:
| Job's Done
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| Ready to work!
| boringg wrote:
| 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.
| itsdrewmiller wrote:
| I think Brood War is the true apex - more than two races with
| significant differences and aggressive balancing. Warcraft II
| was what I LAN played the most so it has a special place in my
| heart though.
| iammjm wrote:
| Brood War IS the absolute apex. This is the game that started
| e-sports. It is what defined the modern RTS games. It is also
| the most difficult game. Flash, the best Brood War player, is
| arguably the best e-sports player of all time.
| PeterHolzwarth wrote:
| Oh goodness, Brood War most certainly is _not_ the game
| that started e-sports, tho I of course appreciate your
| enthusiasm for the game.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Technically I guess Spacewar! was the one who started
| e-sports, was the first game people competed in.
| Personally, growing up in Sweden, I think FPS (namely
| CS1.5/1.6) was the first game that enabled people to play
| games professionally on a international level, so I'll
| always associate CS with starting that, but again,
| technically I guess Quake was the first FPS people
| competed in professionally, at least in the US.
| 7bit wrote:
| But it certainly was the game that made it popular across
| the world.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| It started modern esports. There were gaming competitions
| in the 80s, but there weren't team houses, coaches,
| analysts, big money sponsors, regular huge events,
| dedicated TV channels, players in prime time commercials
| and dating actresses and pop stars, etc... Brood War hit
| in Korea like nothing before _or after it_. There were
| literally three full time, 24 /7 TV channels showing
| Starcraft content at it's peak. No other game has ever
| done that.
| baq wrote:
| the parallel world of FPS esports started with quake and
| was going strong for a good decade or so, before being
| ripped apart by mumorpegers, dotas, counterstrikes and,
| primarily, consoles (which I believe also ultimately
| killed starcraft and RTS in general, too).
| wredcoll wrote:
| There is, I think, a reasonable distinction between the
| semi-annual "tournament with prize money" situation that
| existed in america with quake and friends, and the
| constant, episodic nature of the broodwar scene in korea.
| Players being salaried is a pretty major shift in how the
| culture works.
| jquery wrote:
| Flash was an absolute legend.
|
| I do wonder if Brood War's long period without balance
| patches helped or hurt it as an esport. In modern games,
| it feels like developers "shake up the meta" on purpose,
| whereas in brood war, it was up to map designers to
| ensure balance. This made it easier for long time fans to
| appreciate tactics... in SC2, I have to be caught up on
| the latest balance patches to appreciate anything.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| It's a huge part of it's longevity. I still watch Brood
| War tournaments today and it's so cool to go back one,
| five, ten years and watch a classic game. Compare that to
| the other game I love, DOTA, it's hard to watch old games
| because everything is so different. BW really is
| lightning in a bottle.
|
| PS: Flash is coming back very soon apparently.
| antisthenes wrote:
| In the RTS niche, it is definitely the game that started
| e-sports that had any sort of weight and global audience.
|
| I'm honestly not even sure which other RTS game would be
| close? Age of Empires 1? I don't think it ever had the
| same traction or hype until AOE 2.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I loved the campaigns so much that I spent many dollars to
| play with the campaign editor in a net bar back then. I never
| figured out how to recreate the Corsair scene at the
| beginning of Protoss level 2. It was only after many years
| that I found out that it requires a script not in the
| official editor -- some modders created a new editor that
| includes all those "unofficial" scripts.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Personally I think Dawn of War is the apex. That game really
| fired on all cylinders. And then for whatever reason Relic
| completely abandoned the formula and made the next game
| something different entirely. Dawn of War 2 remains one of my
| greatest gaming disappointments to this day because of poorly
| it stood up to its predecessor.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| And it's still popular and actually playable today. Warcraft
| 2 is not really fun to play. Very clunky control, very
| outdated graphics, bad story telling. With Starcraft, my only
| real complain is terrible cinematics which just doesn't cut
| it today. Otherwise this game is as fun to play today, as it
| was 15 years ago.
| kergonath wrote:
| I quite like the StarCraft remaster. It plays just like the
| old one (to me, at least; I am not a competitive player),
| and it looks much better.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| The cinematics were the best part of Starcraft!
|
| I still get a kick out of the fact that the units look
| completely different in the cinematics as they do in the
| game and even the instruction manual
| hulitu wrote:
| > Warcraft 2 is not really fun to play.
|
| Compared with a lot of ptesent games is luxury: no updates,
| no bullshit introduction, just play.
| chollida1 wrote:
| Interesting, I think most RTS players would point to StarCraft
| 2 as the apex, and they'd probably be correct given how its
| still played so much today.
|
| What makes Warcraft 2 the apex for you over StarCraft 2?
| adinisom wrote:
| Buildings as walls and using spawn points to jump through
| terrain are fun mechanics in WC2.
| DarknessFalls wrote:
| I remember creating a moat of farms around my town hall.
| jandrese wrote:
| Funny how many people think Starcraft 2 isn't even better
| than Starcraft 1, especially when you add in Brood War.
| forgetfulness wrote:
| The game's campaign being what it was made it so people
| never warmed up to it, the big hero-focused storylines and
| then mishandling of said characters (Kerrigan's abortive
| humanization and then rushed redemption, the Protoss being
| framed in entirely the wrong tone, the half baked epilogue)
| just made it so that the campaign didn't stick as Brod
| War's did, even if the gameplay was superior.
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| I consider WCIII TFT the apex but that is because i really like
| the hero mechanic and it spawned so many amazing custom games,
| including the moba genre. I know AoS was first but dota really
| made it.
| mettamage wrote:
| Can't comment on this other than that I came in at WCIII RoC
| and played TFT. Before that, I played a lot of Command &
| Conquer. I loved those games, so for me WCIII is the apex. I
| didn't like StarCraft. But it's admittedly the apex for me
| without having ever played WCII. I've rarely seen it as well.
| ycombinete wrote:
| The smaller armies, heroes, economy management, and increased
| micro-control that came from these things really push w3 to
| the top of the pile for me as well.
| AngryData wrote:
| Footies was my favorite and I wish we got a new game out of
| that too.
| pa7ch wrote:
| I feel like wc3 is undersung. To me it achieved the perfect
| balance of allowing potentially mechanically worse players to
| win with brilliant tactics or strategy. It put the emphasis
| on strategy in rts more then anything else.
|
| As a kid I was shit at it and played customs maps and goofed
| with the editor. Now I've gone back to find grubby streaming
| and revealing the depths of the meta evolution, and counters.
|
| I like that even when a strong meta develops people can
| potentially counter with strategies that aren't as well
| rounded for long term use but upset the current meta.
| pfdietz wrote:
| > and mass appeal has driven games
|
| Oh no, large numbers of people were satisfied. The horror! Will
| no one think of the elitist minority???
| t_mahmood wrote:
| Large number of people were "satisfied" playing Clash of
| Titans too ...
| haunter wrote:
| Yet two of the most played games out there in 2025 are RTSes,
| Dota and League. The genre just progressed forward.
|
| WC3 was peak design with the mod support (maps) where Dota
| originates from and and it was also the bane of the company.
| They couldn't monetize it and IceFrog choose Valve instead of
| them. No wonder that later Blizz games has 0 community support.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Dota and League are not RTS games. They are Moba. These are
| completely different genres. Dota happened to utilise
| Warcraft engine and assets back in the days, but that doesn't
| make it RTS.
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| > IceFrog choose Valve instead of them
|
| Icefrog went to blizzard first if i remember correctly.
| Blizzard kinda told him to make a restricted game, maybe
| within the sc2 engine, almost for free. Valve saw the value
| and invested more.
| officeplant wrote:
| >WC3 was peak design with the mod support (maps) where DotA
| originates from
|
| Which first came from Starcraft custom game support and the
| popularity of Aeon of Strife (AoS) leading to Defense of the
| Ancients (DotA) in WC3.
| acheron wrote:
| Very distinct memory of getting this for Christmas, then
| installing and playing the first time that afternoon.
| mock-possum wrote:
| Lucky! my sister and I opened it Xmas morning, then had to wait
| all day agonizingly to be able to play jt because we hosted the
| family holiday, we were supposed to be socializing with
| relatives, not playing computer games upstairs.
|
| We had to wait until after mom and dad went to sleep that
| night, then snuck up the hall to install it and play it as
| quietly as possible.
| jajuuka wrote:
| 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.
| moribvndvs wrote:
| Warcraft II and C&C made me fall in love with the genre, all my
| friends and people on the internet that routinely roflstomped
| me made me go back to FPS.
| YesBox wrote:
| 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?
| thih9 wrote:
| Here is a comparison of the original vs the remaster:
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=KZ9Ac4WVW6Q&t=100s in case anyone
| else is interested too.
| moribvndvs wrote:
| Visually at least it looks like a pretty tasteful remaster.
| Mostly just sharpening things up. Thanks for posting
| amatecha wrote:
| Ah wow , rip the awesome fonts used in the original game. The
| new ones are so "clean" and boring :(
|
| Glad to see the art itself was not too badly modified. It's
| weird though, like the vegetation in the Farm building looks
| weird. The original version you can tell it's some kind of
| yellow fruit or vegetable but in the remaster the yellow dots
| are unusually small and don't really "feel right". Strikes me
| as AI upscaling rather than hand-crafted editing.
| rickcarlino wrote:
| Was this the one AOL charged me to play by the minute when I was
| a kid?
| recursive wrote:
| It is not and has never been an AOL game. Unless you were
| paying by the minute for internet access for multiplayer via
| Kali.
| rickcarlino wrote:
| I don't think I was using Kali. Did AOL partner with them? As
| I remember, I found it via AOL in a sponsored or semi
| official capacity. There were a number of RTS games available
| via the AOL gaming channel, integrated or closely aligned
| with the AOL app.
| nerdix wrote:
| It was a partnership through a multiplayer service called
| Engage.
| rickcarlino wrote:
| I found this: https://www.gamespot.com/articles/aol-
| initiates-new-game-pri...
| nerdix wrote:
| Yes it was!
|
| I just posted a comment about how amazing the warcraft 2
| community was on AOL. Couldn't remember if they charged per
| minute or per hour so you just confirmed it for me. I just
| remember that some kids were racking up insane bills. I had to
| play on Zone (and then Battle.net when Battle.net edition came
| out) but I loved the AOL war2 message boards.
| barfoure wrote:
| Some additional stuff:
|
| 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.
| mock-possum wrote:
| Soundtrack and game book art still solid too.
|
| 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.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| 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!
| I_am_tiberius wrote:
| I still remember the 3 level demo CD they made. Awesome demo
| levels that made me buy the game, which is still one of my
| favorite games of all time.
| amatecha wrote:
| Yeah! My intro to the series was the 3-level WC1 demo. I was
| absolutely blown away as I had never played any game like that
| before it. Instantly obsessed haha
| capitainenemo wrote:
| 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.
| guerby wrote:
| And now Beyond All Reason keeps it alive and free software
| capitainenemo wrote:
| Huh. I'm familiar with the Spring RTS FOSS project
| (https://springrts.com) which started as a reimplementation
| of TA, and of course Planetary Annihilation, but not "Beyond
| All Reason" - do you have an authoritative link?
| tshaddox wrote:
| The official website is https://www.beyondallreason.info/
|
| It's an open-source project that started as a fork of
| SpringRTS. To my eye it looks nearly like a clone of
| Supreme Commander.
|
| I watched a few ranked 1v1 games on uThermal's YouTube
| channel (he's a former Starcraft 2 pro who mostly makes
| YouTube videos about Starcraft 2). Here's the playlist.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_USFDBbymGUwLPiopP2
| q...
| capitainenemo wrote:
| Well, when I saw the first Supreme Commander video it
| looked a _lot_ like Sprint RTS running Balanced
| Annihilation to me. Right down to how the terrain
| deformation worked and the command queuing.
|
| Was there any particular reason for the fork? There's a
| lot of Spring RTS projects but they all use the same
| codebase. http://springrts.com/wiki/Games
| Lapsa wrote:
| BAR is a great RTS
| arscan wrote:
| 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).
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Kali was awesome!
| jquery wrote:
| I had a lot of fun using Cases Ladder to find matches.
|
| I know the game was horribly unbalanced against humans once
| bloodlust showed up, but I still quit after they "patched"
| bloodlust years later in Battle.net. Felt sacrilege, like
| patching the queen in chess. Yeah, the queen is imba, but
| that's chess. Beating an orc player as a human was a fun
| flex.
| recursive wrote:
| There are more high-quality single player campaigns coming out
| now than there were then. Single-player gaming seems to have
| grown since then. Just not as much as multi-player.
| seattle_spring wrote:
| Kali ruled. I played a modified version of Hellfire (unofficial
| Diablo expansion that technically didn't support multiplayer)
| on Kali for the longest time. GTX_Rage, if you're here, I want
| to talk to you!
| Cruncharoo wrote:
| Oh no way I didn't know Hellfire was unofficial. I don't even
| remember where I got it back in the day but I still remember
| the CD..
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| The poor floating point performance of many PCs at the time
| meant that a lot of code used ints rather than floats, making
| determinism much easier for multiplayer!
|
| I believe DOOM and Warcraft 2 simply did lockstep determinism
| across all clients. You could run the simulations forward
| completely deterministically due to use of its and fixed point
| math.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Quake did as well all the way up to Quake 3 I believe. The
| game was basically on a heartbeat based on the worst latency
| of the connected player. Everything got synchronized that
| way.
|
| Back in the day, your gaming could be super wrecked if
| someone with a 300ms latency joined :D.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| If TabithaS from Case's Ladder is out there somewhere, thank
| you for playing teaching games of Warcraft 2 with me!
| cortesoft wrote:
| Oh man. I remember having to send a check for $20 to some
| address to get my key.
|
| That was such a game changer for online play. Before that, to
| play Warcraft II my friend and I had to coordinate to set up a
| game, then call their model directly, and hope our parents
| didn't pick up the phone thinking it was a regular call.
|
| After Kali, we could just sign on and join games. We also got
| to play as a team, which was so much fun. Friends2v2 was the
| map and game type we played SO MUCH. We had various strategies
| that we got really good at (mostly grunt rushing and offensive
| towering). I miss those games.
| jonathanlydall wrote:
| A free alternative was MSN Gaming Zone.
|
| Ran inside IE using ActiveX or something. Was pretty neat.
| gdcbe wrote:
| Do you or someone reading this know who would be the best
| person that would be willing to come on a guest on a podcast
| and has the correct knowledge (ideally the person who
| implemented in WC3, or something similar enough).
|
| Asking as I'm the host of netstack.fm, a podcast about
| networking and rust, but some episodes are just about
| networking alone.
|
| Would love to devote an episode to the Kali TCP/IP IPX bridge
| as there's a lot to unpack there and that can be learned from.
| Any tips for a guest for such an episode are more than welcome!
| arscan wrote:
| In grad school 15+ years ago I took a 'user-centered
| innovation' class and I wrote a paper on the topic of Kali
| and its predecessor: how gamers, not the game devs, made
| games built for IPX work across the internet. What is neat is
| early collab on the first ipx->tcp/ip bridge happened on
| Usenet, so you can find a record of the first doom deathmatch
| coordinated and played over the internet. I think I reached
| out to jay cotton (author of kali) via email and he answered
| my questions, so I'd try to track him down if I were you.
|
| Sadly I didn't make a backup of my paper (not sure how I
| managed to screw that up), so I no longer have it.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| 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!
| crims0n wrote:
| And now that disco easter egg is stuck in my head... (although
| technically I think that was part of Beyond the Dark Portal).
| bfors wrote:
| This game lead me down a path that resulted in me becoming a
| software engineer. Good game.
| amatecha wrote:
| No doubt. My friend learned how to hex edit because of WC1 --
| editing his savegame files haha
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Two memorable things
|
| - "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.
| yoavm wrote:
| 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.
| amatecha wrote:
| 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.
| MobileVet wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://youtu.be/qaaWsRfbsls?si=EJ0WBvJ9hMmQCaNb
| theposey wrote:
| sub to the grub!
| chongli wrote:
| I would also recommend ArtosisCasts [1]. Dan 'Artosis'
| Stemkoski has been a professional StarCraft play-by-play
| commentator and colour analyst for decades. He's lived in South
| Korea (now in Canada) and cast countless professional matches
| and tournaments featuring the top Korean players.
|
| On his casting YouTube channel he uploads a new commentary and
| recording of a StarCraft game every day, as well as news about
| upcoming events and tournaments. He loves to do deep dives and
| detailed analysis of strategies and the shifting metagame of
| StarCraft: Brood War, a game that is still going stronger than
| ever despite closing in on its 3rd decade since release.
|
| [1] https://youtube.com/@artosiscasts
| u12 wrote:
| Grubby is good, but Back to Warcraft casts the highest level
| players these days. Grubby does not compete in the top league
| any more
| shoo wrote:
| i'd also recommend uthermal -- former pro sc2 player, he's got
| a really good attitude & makes a lot of entertaining videos
| publicdebates wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| WC2, SC1, and things like Heroes III (and somewhat today with
| Factorio) perfected that 2D art-style. It might not have as
| many pixels as WC3, but every single one of them was thought
| about and considered by someone with artistic merit.
|
| It wasn't until nearly 20 years after WC2 that a 3D game got
| "graphics that look almost 2D in quality (SC3)".
|
| I think it's also very telling that World of Warcraft made
| infinity money, but World of Starcraft never happened. High
| fantasy always lends itself to the "I can make a difference
| as a mortal man" but sci-fi seems to always trend toward "too
| big for human consumption."
| wredcoll wrote:
| > I can make a difference as a mortal man"
|
| Thinking of popular fantasy sci-fi, this seems like the
| exact opposite of what actually happens! With the notable
| exception of lotr (and how many early readers really
| focused on frodo's struggle anyways?) most fantasy has some
| kind of superhuman main character that can singlehandedly
| change the world.
|
| Scifi tends to be a lot more about people like Picard,
| important and respected but ultimately limited to
| influencing others to achieve major changes.
| officeplant wrote:
| 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.
| nerdix wrote:
| 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)
|
| https://forums.mmorpg.com/discussion/12955/splintered-orcs-c...
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| 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.
| u12 wrote:
| Age of empires always had naval combat. Supreme commander too.
| There's a bunch.
| rout39574 wrote:
| Try 'Beyond All Reason', a passionate FOSS recreation of the
| core of Total Annihilation.
|
| It's got really decent naval combat, with a distinct feel
| compared to the land and air.
| kulahan wrote:
| I remember being bummed when I played WC3 and there was no oil
| resource. Lots of sky and ground units, but I guess a navy just
| wasn't useful enough? Which I suppose I could see. A big
| benefit in militaries is the ability to quickly project power
| (from a carrier) or provide tons of logistics - supplies,
| blockades, etc.
|
| These just aren't considerations in RTS games - they move too
| fast and the maps are too small. There really isn't a benefit
| to having a ship with all your planes just outside of the
| enemy's range - they could sneak attack you, and sending units
| from your own base really just isn't that much farther.
|
| It's a shame to me that this isn't a more popular genre these
| days. It's easily my favorite.
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| 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...
| Ntrails wrote:
| I still have a bunch of the sound bites in my music folder.
| Nothing says playlist filler like "Leave Me Alone"
| black3r wrote:
| > Development stared in the first months of 1995, and the game
| was released in North America and Australia on December 9, 1995.
|
| 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.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| Additionally, the product was completed and released on CD, so
| no hundreds of bug fixes after the release.
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