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.
The spiritual successor of Starcraft is Stormgate. I cannot comment on it, I have no idea how good it is. AFAIK it is multiplayer only. I played Dune II, Warcraft II, C&C, Red Alert, Starcraft (didn't like, I never understood the hype), Dark Reign, Total Annihilation, Warcraft III as kid, but... only single player (at various difficulties). That is just how games were generally played in the 90s. I do remember using a null modem cable at some point, but IIRC was only to play Doom and Duke3d.
I believe the RTS genre at a whole got superseded by the MOBA genre (with DotA and LoL). A genre I tried once (HotS) and was terrible at. If you're shit and you're not improving (I didn't enjoy it either, I felt forced to do it for a reward in another game), stop trying. I never tried any other MOBA, except maybe a touchscreen one, Warcraft Rumble? Either way, I got burned by Hearthstone Mercs and fell once more in the trap with Rumble. After Blizzard announced removed of addons from combat, I've finally said goodbye to the Warcraft franchise and Blizzard in general.
There's one game I really do like which has a kind of RTS with map feeling to it: Total War: Warhammer series (though I laud their BS with DLCs and multiple game versions). I suppose the whole Total War series is as good, I just like the Warhammer universe. The other day, Settlers II was discussed on here, including a FOSS clone. Settlers II is also a game I liked (III not so much though artwork was nice, never played the orig.). Supposedly it isn't RTS, tho I am pretty sure back then it was called RTS.
I agree, I think MOBAs superceded the "real time" part of RTS's, while the more turn based Civ/4x, Total War series strategy type games ended up taking a lot of the base building part. Having them both together was just straight up difficult and incredibly intense, like the game itself demanded you be on adderall because your attention cannot wane for a single moment.
The better I got at competitive RTS's the less interesting the game got for me, it just kinda of felt like chess where there was only going to be one or two interesting interactions in the game if played well, otherwise its just a game of who makes a mistake too early.
Teamfight Tactics and Autochess are interesting newer entries though, allowing time to strategize and adding a lot of randomness to the games, where you can't just play one build. Even then though, as these games get more and more explored, "optimal" strategy gets eventually discovered and the game devs especially in TFT are in a race to try to keep things high variance but also seem fair - its definitely a difficult job!
> The better I got at competitive RTS's the less interesting the game got for me, it just kinda of felt like chess where there was only going to be one or two interesting interactions in the game if played well, otherwise its just a game of who makes a mistake too early.
I feel the exact same way. The ELO system saves you from getting steamrolled if you’re a casual player but improving just means the game becomes formulaic to the point of no longer being fun. Stronghold 2 was kind of interesting in that it was an unranked lobby with good variation in player ability and team-oriented maps. Most players knew the basic economic and combat metas, but you’d often end up in situations where one of your teammates dropped out on a 3 vs 3 and you’d still win.
It had its time, but its just not accessible to people - shooters which require as much attention, mechanical skill and perseverance but at least matches are relatively quick and there's a team element. Starcraft can be just grind grind grind all of your openers and don't stop, don't sleep, don't eat, just queue
> The spiritual successor of Starcraft is Stormgate
This was their claim, but it did not pan out in reality. It flopped on launch, hard. Peak player count since launch has been less than 100, and is currently hovering around 25.
It was really proof that gameplay often takes a back seat to visual identity, ESPECIALLY if the gameplay is extremely derivative, which this was. They had a massive amount of goodwill from fans of the genre, but when they started sharing screenshots it deflated fast - its not a 2025 game, its a 2010 clone of a popular 2005 game. Its nigh impossible to make a spiritual successor to genre defining games in WC3 and SC2 - too many things need to go perfect.
It had a better chance if it could find its own voice, but it ended up feeling like a direct to home video sequel to a popular movie
Huh the gameplay was ass?
The units weren't interesting, the strategies derivative, the flow bad, the balance off, not even half finished campaign and 0 goodwill from kickstarters after rugpulling content that was promised and charging them for it
The sign for me was when the art style was announced. The last thing in the world I want from a modern RTS is Fortnite-style animation targeted towards tweens.
World in Conflict was an interesting take on making RTS easier for casuals. Basically took the resource gathering part out of it. You got a constant drip of points you could spend on units instead.
Potentially that simplification hurts the genre too much though because then you don't have hardcore players sticking with it for years and years.
Maybe a game could have that as a "simple mode" that players can opt in to.
The potential addictive money making pattern is the same as other games imo. Skins. The units being smaller mean the developer is probably going to have to go to more effort to shove them in to peoples faces. Maybe a screen before/after the match where all the players units in their skins can be clear seen in a more zoomed in manner. Have them marching around the border of the end scoresheet or doing a little dance while waiting for players to load.
Every time someone tries to re-think the genre they make it worse. Supreme Commander (and Forged Alliance) were near-perfect games, but SupCom 2 tried to simpify the game to appeal to console players and ruined it completely. Dawn of War 2, although not to everyone's taste, was in my view the peak of the series. For the third install they tried to simplify the game and bring it closer to a MOBA and it was an incredible flop.
In my view, if a develop MUST make the game more accessible, they should do so with alternate modes while still maintaining a strong competitive 1v1, 2v2 and 4v4 mode with the steep learning curve and competitive nature. Anything else is a betrayal of the genre.
I think the problem is simply that for a large part of the playerbase, increasing your APM is directly correlated with increasing your win rate/ranking.
And frankly, that's not fun for a lot of people.
I don't want to win by clicking and mashing hotkeys like a schizophrenic on speed.
I don't think this is true. Granted, last time I tried to get good at an RTS was toward the end of the Brood War era but the established wisdom at that time was very clear that hour-for-hour, time spent practicing resource management was much more effective than time spent practicing clicking quickly.
Yes, really good players click fast, but they also have impeccable resource management. The group I played with did run the obvious experiment: the best one of us was forced to play against the rest (one at a time) with an artificial click frequency limit. He felt like his abilities were greatly reduced, but he still beat everyone else quite easily.
Yeah, I played a lot of StarCraft 2. By myself, 2v2 with a really talented friend and 3v3 with two other friends that were total beginners that I could beat 1v2.
At the bottom to upper mid level all you need to win is to figure out the macro game of building construction while also getting enough workers and units. With enough of that no micro is needed, just attack-moving into the enemy is more than enough.
Then at the upper mid level you're going to run into people who often don't build as effectively but they'll micro every unit or they'll be constantly doing raids when you don't expect it, scouting better than you and/or just understanding which units are better vs which so as to counter you.
From that point on it becomes much more of an effort to play the game because then you need to become better in all of those fields, while also becoming faster. But to be honest that point is probably 2/3rd's up the tree of all the people playing.
When people complain about APM in an RTS like StarCraft, they’re really not complaining about the spam clicking done by players at the pro level. They’re talking about multitasking which is an essential skill at all levels of the game.
Not even at the lowest rankings are you permitted to ignore what your opponent is doing and focus on building workers and base facilities. StarCraft is infamous for the ability of anyone to sacrifice their economy to perform an early rush attack (most infamously with a ton of early zerglings).
To combat early rush attacks you need to be able to multitask: send out early scouts to see what your opponent is doing, if they have any hidden building on the map, how many workers they have, etc. You need to be able to do this while building your own workers, base facilities, and units for defence. This is the multitasking that so many struggle with and it’s required to be able to play at the most basic level!
Optimally queueing SCVs and marines and supply depots requires an APM of 11 or so in the early stages of a Brood War game on the fastest setting. Add a couple more APM for scouting, and we'ree still not talking crazy levels of multitasking.
Dealing with your opponent is a fact of every strategy game!
And yet if you watch low level players they’ll be fine with that until a bunch of zerglings show up at their base and then they panic trying to micro marines and repair bunkers while their minerals shoot up to 1000 and then they have no units and lose.
Keeping a scouting SCV alive in your opponent’s base while building more SCVs at home, building more barracks, building supply depots, killing the enemy scouting worker, and actually reading and correctly interpreting what your opponent is doing is non-trivial.
> 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!)
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
Yes it was one of the most successful PC games of the 1990s, but that doesn't say much today. Have a look at its subreddit and it's a ghost town. Wasn't remade and re-released often since and little to no effort has been put into growing the franchise.
In contrast contemporary SNES games have had more remakes and had their audiences grow remarkably over time. The franchise hasn't been cared for and so it's relatively obscure despite being a top tier best in class game on its release.
Tbh in general I think you could say the same of a lot of top tier successful PC games of that era.
How many 1995 games have active subreddits though? There was a 2024 remaster, and I believe that the game remained playable throughout.
Besides, the Warcraft franchise moved to WoW, which is still highly popular. Sure, I miss the RTS games, and the remaster of the 3rd bombed hard because it was low-effort, but it's not dead.
Probably not too many! Chronotrigger would be one.
But it is remarkable that Warcraft 2 would have been considered a game of the year contender for PC in that year, with similar acclaim to Chronotrigger, but these games have taken very, very different paths.
No doubt a part of it is that interest in RPGs has largely persisted with only minor declines, while RTS games spiked in popularity and then severely receded.
But stewardship from their owners likely played a role as well. Square has seen fit to keep Chronotrigger in the public eye a lot more often.
> Wasn't remade and re-released often since and little to no effort has been put into growing the franchise.
I’m certainly disappointed that it hasn’t gotten more love, but it got its first balance patch in 25 years(!) last year, following a rerelease that added higher resolution graphics and better online play, so your information is out of date.
The community doesn’t exist on Reddit, it’s in communities like that one around war2combat, old Russian forums and discord rooms. It’s not big but there are still some folks keeping it alive.
> 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.
What you are looking at is corporate environments; the studios of the past (Ex: Westwood and Blizzard) had a small headcounts, and people were direct decision makers.
> StarCraft was originally envisioned as a game with modest goals that could fit into a one-year development cycle so that it could be released for Christmas, 1996
> Warcraft II had only six core programmers and two support programmers; that was too few for the larger scope of StarCraft,
No boardrooms of PMs, and Directors, and VPs, and execs, chiming in every decision, leading to fast turnarounds.
Not at all crazy. You could very easily get a game with the same art style, features, number of missions done now in a month but people want much more. QOL features, multiple platforms, high quality graphics - $50 (average game price back then) is $105 now - you can't sell any game for that price nowadays, and a game at WC2 level of features wouldn't be accepted by customers for more than $5. A full price $59.99 game now needs a billion different side quests, character customisation, full VA, multiplayer servers, an orchestral score, etc etc or people just won't buy it.
> is $105 now - you can't sell any game for that price nowadays
But you don't need to. Just sell it to Steam for a $39.99 or whatever and have much, much more sales than in '95. And as a bonus you would still recieve some sales years after.
Sure, you won't get in Top 100 and wouldn't earn bazillions...
Crazy how much bigger modern games are … I wonder how many total pixels were shipped in the art assets of Warcraft 2 vs. StarCraft 2? My guess is at least 4 orders of magnitude higher for SC2
> 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
Not necessarily, but you need to look at the indie (PC) game space instead of AAA and mobile.
Top level game development in the 90's is comparable to indie games today, although granted, in the 90's they made huge technological leaps and the developers needed a lot more in-depth knowledge. But I can guarantee that someone can build Warcraft 2 today within a year. Hell, you can get the basics set up in a weekend I'm sure.
That said, even indie games suffer a bit from scope creep, and few developers actually limit themselves by saying "we release within a year and that's it". If a game is successful, continued development is beneficial. And with Kickstarter they can get money upfront (like what a publisher would pay initially), and with early access they can start making revenue to fund continued development. Which is a self-reinforcing cycle - as long as they publish updates and new features, people will keep playing and buying the game. Some games (like Factorio) end up in early access and continuous development for 10 years.
Yeah, 9 patches for the original game, then the Battle.net Edition in 1999 (which added support for TCP/IP networking and Battle.net matchmaking), and at least one downloadable patch for that.
Even smaller games now have ludicrously long development cycles as developers have learned they can exploit mentally challenged gamers by selling them "early access" (unfinished games).
Early access sometimes means unfinished, but in other cases they're fine - Factorio is an example, it had a fully fleshed out game in early access, then they spent another 5+ years adding features and fixes and the like. During that time, a lively modding community sprung up which added loads of playable content to the game.
I was 7 when Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness dropped.
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.
> 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.
I was 10 a the time and yes I’m not sure people realize how magical it felt at the time. When I got it in Christmas 96 on a 68k Mac it felt like it really opened a parallel universe compared to other games.
The graphics (looked like a high res SNES game, which at the time was quite unique on PC), the CD quality soundtrack, the booklet concept art, the unit voices and buildings sounds… as a kid discovering Fantasy it had everything.
And the attention to details, like Christmas string lights on building or a snowman when the map was in winter may seem insignificant, but as a kid it was wonderful.
Even my dad who was not into video games but had played tabletop war games in the past and got hooked and spent a few nights on it to complete a solo campaign.
This is by far the retro game I have the most nostalgia for.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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.
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) in addition to Kali, people played War2 on MSN Gaming Zone. It was available under the TCP/IP section.
2) before war2bne, you could use a program to change the color of your in game name, and use non-ASCII characters. So people went wild in multiplayer games.
3) I think MPlayer also supported War2? I don’t think anyone played it there.
4) StarCraft modding community was tight knit. Lots of great maps with tools available only to friends of the modders. We see the tail end of this when mappers finally get so good their maps are used by KeSPA and are not possible with stock editor.
5) Warcraft 3 alpha comes around. Warforge server is the first and only private server. The first map editor is leaked, janky but works for alpha. the first tower defense map ever for Warcraft 3 is made by a fellow called Mr123 on Warforge. The rest is history.
Battle.net's simple system of just downloading maps you didn't have helped a lot.
I remember playing a "Use Map Settings" map where you started out as a lone marine and then had to 'upgrade' your character over time. It felt like a very early prototype of later hero-style games that came to exist in Warcraft 3 and beyond.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Brood War's longevity is thanks to the map maker, which has allowed the game to be balanced around maps. The size of your spawn location, the ease with which you can expand, and the paths to different bases drastically impact what kinds of strategies are viable. If there's a high ground location, it becomes much harder to break that position as the attacker. The amount of resources per base (mineral patch count, mineral patch size, 1 gas spawn, 2 gas spawn, mineral only) all impact which strategies are viable.
In fact, during the era of Flash's dominance in ASL, the organizers actually started including maps that were heavily Zerg favored in order to put a stop to his reign.
The game is still alive and well, with a meta that continues to evolve, and every season of ASL[0] (the premier Brood War tournament), they include at least one new crazy experimental map. Last season the crazy map was Roaring Currents [1], one of the more ambitious designs in recent memory which has a large number of island bases. Basically if a strategy becomes a bit too oppressive, the map designers can always step in to make it a bit more balanced.
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.
Brood War has aged like fine-wine. As I mentioned in a parallel comment, the key to Brood War's longevity comes from the map maker. Every detail is carefully considered so that none of the races can get away with a crazy advantage. It's really a special game, and every new season of ASL still feels magical.
I wish medical science would get so much better that Flash could fully heal his wrist injuries. He's spoken at length about how he loves to dedicate himself wholeheartedly to playing, and how he doesn't like to compete if he's not able to give it his all.
You probably already know about it, but in case you or any other reader is unaware there's this great YouTube channel @jinjinBW that translates Korean BW clips into English. It's a huge boon for western fans.
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).
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.
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.
Of course it wasnt the first time someone watched people playing video games against eachother.
The Korean Brood war scene was an entirely different level from anything that came before it though. The idea of announcers and gamers getting rich & famous from playing a video game live was unheard of before that.
I agree. I think people underestimate the size of the Korean Brood War scene, even relatively early on. In my country, I had seen some huge LAN parties with associated competitions, but then I got introduced to Korean Brood War competitions; they were filling stadiums with audiences and had pyrotechnics and professional TV productions and everything. It was insane.
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.
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.
At the time those cinematics were top tier. Blizzard continued to have some of the best cinematics until Warcraft 3, after that I believe they and many other game developers switched to in-engine cutscenes because the engine visuals were good enough. That said, Blizzard does still make prerendered cutscenes for Diablo 4 and WoW, but they're just... not as impressive anymore as they used to be back then. And a big part of that is that they're not that much different from in-engine. There's some games (FFVII Remake/Rebirth) that have pre-rendered cutscenes that are visually indistinguishable from in-engine cutscenes, but they pre-rendered them because of e.g. wider / zoomed out camera angles or lots of effects.
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.
Dawn of War 3 made DoW 2 look like Game of the Decade by comparison. I hear they're making a DoW 4, and they're not even mentioning 3 when talking about the history.
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.
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.
I started playing at WCIII TFT too. it is personal for me too. so many good memories.
i did play some brood war after i played tft with some of my tft clan mates and i didn't really like it. i think i prefer micro over macro, at least at the time. whenever i play dota 2 nowadays, i am much more macro oriented but that might be because i got much better than 18 years ago lol.
i also kinda really emotionally, outside of gameplay, like wciii because of the dota connection if it wasn't obvious. seeing the OpenAi bots compete against pros live was such a surprise. I lost it at that TI.
wciii enabled this by being so open. the world editor was incredible. and the game allowed so much functionality cause it allowed integration with ghost++. the community was really in it. wcreplays was a wonderful website where the community was constantly sharing replays, and I loved to watch random FFAs and people doing their own casts. One of my coworkers at my first internship ever actually did his own casting as a hobby.
i just love the game. not just because it was fun, but also because it was such a huge part of my technical/creative life when i was a kid and it still kinda is through dota. i once did a blog post in 2017 showing a light demo of generating item builds with LSTMs, and dota plus the following year added it as a feature. in my mind i hope they saw my blog post, and it inspired them. at the time, it was such a huge validation that i had good ideas for game development, and it made me feel pretty proud that I could contribute something to the game like so many others did.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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."
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.
Honestly, he doesn’t need to be the best to make it enjoyable. He seems like a generally chill guy and he goes back and breaks down his games. Fascinating to hear what he was thinking and why he did what he did.
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.
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?
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.
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
The Spring RTS FOSS engine is an engine, but does not provide the game assets or game-specific code.
Recoil is a fork of the Spring engine (background: Spring made backward incompatible changes; Recoil forked to retain backward compatibility). Beyond All Reason uses the Recoil engine and supplies its own game code, shaders, and assets.
And Supreme Commander too, although it's a bit dated now / has some technical issues - although at the time, it was one of the first games that could use a multicore CPU. Not SupCom 2 though, that felt off in comparison.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
This is probably the best time as any I'll ever get to mention that Patrick Wyatt's[0] blog[1] is a gold mine of frontline, boots-on-the-ground accounts of making WarCraft II and other 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.
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.
One of the biggest features of this game for me as a youngin' wasn't that I could play dial-up co-op multiplayer with the neighbors down the way, but that the soundtrack audio was Redbook format on the cd-rom and I could pop the game disk itself into my CD player to listen to the what I still consider to be an amazing soundtrack. That Orc'ish harpsichord still lives rent free in my head.
Reflecting on retro compute more and more lately and it really makes me miss where we came from. I've been programming since about 1994 when I was about 12 years old (shout out q-basic). And today work at FAANG as an eng manager. But i am not proud of where we've gone as an industry. Makes me sad really.
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
MobyGames [1] claim they are unique missions. More or less the same story, but different maps, objectives and briefing text.
Maybe I need to re-download it, and check out the differences. I remember playing those six missions so many times before eventually saving up enough pocket money to buy the game, but I don't exactly remember them being different.
And it's actually six maps, three for each faction.
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 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!
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.
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)
The only RTS games I could truly enjoy were Warcraft II and III. Other games like StarCraft are too complex for me to fully engage with. I especially liked Warcraft III’s system of taxing large armies - it made battles small-scale and much easier to wrap my head around.
I've played this game so much, I still have muscle memory for group selection wired up ..
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!
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.
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.
WarCraft II was among the first games that I ever played "online" (direct connection via dial-up modem with my friends). I can't overstate how absolutely incredible that felt to me at the time - pure magic.
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.
I like WC1 and 2, but Dune II (1992) has to receive credit for laying the RTS foundations. And while WC1 predates it, in my opinion Command & Conquer evolved RTS much more. It's wild how much happened in such a short time, back then.
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 think it was a borders book store - they had a game shelf and I remember this one caught my eye. I was probably 11 or 12 and my mom said yes and the rest was history a life time of blizzard gaming
I love this topic and could read an article about War2 development that is 3x the length of this article. A lot of nostalgia coming up from this original article.
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.
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.
Good times, remember riding our bikes to Toys 'R' Us of all places to buy the game with a buddy. Paddled back, played through the Orc campaign until 4 a.m. in the morning. One of my all time favorites.
(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.)
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.
The spiritual successor of Starcraft is Stormgate. I cannot comment on it, I have no idea how good it is. AFAIK it is multiplayer only. I played Dune II, Warcraft II, C&C, Red Alert, Starcraft (didn't like, I never understood the hype), Dark Reign, Total Annihilation, Warcraft III as kid, but... only single player (at various difficulties). That is just how games were generally played in the 90s. I do remember using a null modem cable at some point, but IIRC was only to play Doom and Duke3d.
I believe the RTS genre at a whole got superseded by the MOBA genre (with DotA and LoL). A genre I tried once (HotS) and was terrible at. If you're shit and you're not improving (I didn't enjoy it either, I felt forced to do it for a reward in another game), stop trying. I never tried any other MOBA, except maybe a touchscreen one, Warcraft Rumble? Either way, I got burned by Hearthstone Mercs and fell once more in the trap with Rumble. After Blizzard announced removed of addons from combat, I've finally said goodbye to the Warcraft franchise and Blizzard in general.
There's one game I really do like which has a kind of RTS with map feeling to it: Total War: Warhammer series (though I laud their BS with DLCs and multiple game versions). I suppose the whole Total War series is as good, I just like the Warhammer universe. The other day, Settlers II was discussed on here, including a FOSS clone. Settlers II is also a game I liked (III not so much though artwork was nice, never played the orig.). Supposedly it isn't RTS, tho I am pretty sure back then it was called RTS.
I agree, I think MOBAs superceded the "real time" part of RTS's, while the more turn based Civ/4x, Total War series strategy type games ended up taking a lot of the base building part. Having them both together was just straight up difficult and incredibly intense, like the game itself demanded you be on adderall because your attention cannot wane for a single moment.
The better I got at competitive RTS's the less interesting the game got for me, it just kinda of felt like chess where there was only going to be one or two interesting interactions in the game if played well, otherwise its just a game of who makes a mistake too early.
Teamfight Tactics and Autochess are interesting newer entries though, allowing time to strategize and adding a lot of randomness to the games, where you can't just play one build. Even then though, as these games get more and more explored, "optimal" strategy gets eventually discovered and the game devs especially in TFT are in a race to try to keep things high variance but also seem fair - its definitely a difficult job!
> The better I got at competitive RTS's the less interesting the game got for me, it just kinda of felt like chess where there was only going to be one or two interesting interactions in the game if played well, otherwise its just a game of who makes a mistake too early.
I feel the exact same way. The ELO system saves you from getting steamrolled if you’re a casual player but improving just means the game becomes formulaic to the point of no longer being fun. Stronghold 2 was kind of interesting in that it was an unranked lobby with good variation in player ability and team-oriented maps. Most players knew the basic economic and combat metas, but you’d often end up in situations where one of your teammates dropped out on a 3 vs 3 and you’d still win.
Non-DotA style RTSes fell to the same trap that all long-established/entrenched products/franchises/entities/collectives do:
Thinking that only their way is always right and there's no room for change.
Until somebody comes and builds something different that fucks their world upside down.
Suggestions for improvement and ease of use on their forums got shot down on their forums by the resident shitters like on every other community.
Now nobody cares about that genre, except those of us who grew up on it.
It had its time, but its just not accessible to people - shooters which require as much attention, mechanical skill and perseverance but at least matches are relatively quick and there's a team element. Starcraft can be just grind grind grind all of your openers and don't stop, don't sleep, don't eat, just queue
With a few UI conveniences StarCraft 2 could have been just as accessible to newer players as League of Legends.
> The spiritual successor of Starcraft is Stormgate
This was their claim, but it did not pan out in reality. It flopped on launch, hard. Peak player count since launch has been less than 100, and is currently hovering around 25.
It was really proof that gameplay often takes a back seat to visual identity, ESPECIALLY if the gameplay is extremely derivative, which this was. They had a massive amount of goodwill from fans of the genre, but when they started sharing screenshots it deflated fast - its not a 2025 game, its a 2010 clone of a popular 2005 game. Its nigh impossible to make a spiritual successor to genre defining games in WC3 and SC2 - too many things need to go perfect.
It had a better chance if it could find its own voice, but it ended up feeling like a direct to home video sequel to a popular movie
Huh the gameplay was ass? The units weren't interesting, the strategies derivative, the flow bad, the balance off, not even half finished campaign and 0 goodwill from kickstarters after rugpulling content that was promised and charging them for it
The sign for me was when the art style was announced. The last thing in the world I want from a modern RTS is Fortnite-style animation targeted towards tweens.
World in Conflict was an interesting take on making RTS easier for casuals. Basically took the resource gathering part out of it. You got a constant drip of points you could spend on units instead.
Potentially that simplification hurts the genre too much though because then you don't have hardcore players sticking with it for years and years.
Maybe a game could have that as a "simple mode" that players can opt in to.
The potential addictive money making pattern is the same as other games imo. Skins. The units being smaller mean the developer is probably going to have to go to more effort to shove them in to peoples faces. Maybe a screen before/after the match where all the players units in their skins can be clear seen in a more zoomed in manner. Have them marching around the border of the end scoresheet or doing a little dance while waiting for players to load.
Every time someone tries to re-think the genre they make it worse. Supreme Commander (and Forged Alliance) were near-perfect games, but SupCom 2 tried to simpify the game to appeal to console players and ruined it completely. Dawn of War 2, although not to everyone's taste, was in my view the peak of the series. For the third install they tried to simplify the game and bring it closer to a MOBA and it was an incredible flop.
In my view, if a develop MUST make the game more accessible, they should do so with alternate modes while still maintaining a strong competitive 1v1, 2v2 and 4v4 mode with the steep learning curve and competitive nature. Anything else is a betrayal of the genre.
I think the problem is simply that for a large part of the playerbase, increasing your APM is directly correlated with increasing your win rate/ranking.
And frankly, that's not fun for a lot of people.
I don't want to win by clicking and mashing hotkeys like a schizophrenic on speed.
I don't think this is true. Granted, last time I tried to get good at an RTS was toward the end of the Brood War era but the established wisdom at that time was very clear that hour-for-hour, time spent practicing resource management was much more effective than time spent practicing clicking quickly.
Yes, really good players click fast, but they also have impeccable resource management. The group I played with did run the obvious experiment: the best one of us was forced to play against the rest (one at a time) with an artificial click frequency limit. He felt like his abilities were greatly reduced, but he still beat everyone else quite easily.
Yeah, I played a lot of StarCraft 2. By myself, 2v2 with a really talented friend and 3v3 with two other friends that were total beginners that I could beat 1v2.
At the bottom to upper mid level all you need to win is to figure out the macro game of building construction while also getting enough workers and units. With enough of that no micro is needed, just attack-moving into the enemy is more than enough.
Then at the upper mid level you're going to run into people who often don't build as effectively but they'll micro every unit or they'll be constantly doing raids when you don't expect it, scouting better than you and/or just understanding which units are better vs which so as to counter you.
From that point on it becomes much more of an effort to play the game because then you need to become better in all of those fields, while also becoming faster. But to be honest that point is probably 2/3rd's up the tree of all the people playing.
When people complain about APM in an RTS like StarCraft, they’re really not complaining about the spam clicking done by players at the pro level. They’re talking about multitasking which is an essential skill at all levels of the game.
Not even at the lowest rankings are you permitted to ignore what your opponent is doing and focus on building workers and base facilities. StarCraft is infamous for the ability of anyone to sacrifice their economy to perform an early rush attack (most infamously with a ton of early zerglings).
To combat early rush attacks you need to be able to multitask: send out early scouts to see what your opponent is doing, if they have any hidden building on the map, how many workers they have, etc. You need to be able to do this while building your own workers, base facilities, and units for defence. This is the multitasking that so many struggle with and it’s required to be able to play at the most basic level!
Optimally queueing SCVs and marines and supply depots requires an APM of 11 or so in the early stages of a Brood War game on the fastest setting. Add a couple more APM for scouting, and we'ree still not talking crazy levels of multitasking.
Dealing with your opponent is a fact of every strategy game!
And yet if you watch low level players they’ll be fine with that until a bunch of zerglings show up at their base and then they panic trying to micro marines and repair bunkers while their minerals shoot up to 1000 and then they have no units and lose.
Keeping a scouting SCV alive in your opponent’s base while building more SCVs at home, building more barracks, building supply depots, killing the enemy scouting worker, and actually reading and correctly interpreting what your opponent is doing is non-trivial.
StarCraft I still has a large community. And China has a giant WarCraft III community.
Perhaps a more 'casual' in the RTS genre, but AoE2 is still going very strong.
> 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!)
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
> This is a really good and I think sadly under played and discussed game
WarCraft II sold 3M copies.
Yes it was one of the most successful PC games of the 1990s, but that doesn't say much today. Have a look at its subreddit and it's a ghost town. Wasn't remade and re-released often since and little to no effort has been put into growing the franchise.
In contrast contemporary SNES games have had more remakes and had their audiences grow remarkably over time. The franchise hasn't been cared for and so it's relatively obscure despite being a top tier best in class game on its release.
Tbh in general I think you could say the same of a lot of top tier successful PC games of that era.
How many 1995 games have active subreddits though? There was a 2024 remaster, and I believe that the game remained playable throughout.
Besides, the Warcraft franchise moved to WoW, which is still highly popular. Sure, I miss the RTS games, and the remaster of the 3rd bombed hard because it was low-effort, but it's not dead.
Probably not too many! Chronotrigger would be one.
But it is remarkable that Warcraft 2 would have been considered a game of the year contender for PC in that year, with similar acclaim to Chronotrigger, but these games have taken very, very different paths.
No doubt a part of it is that interest in RPGs has largely persisted with only minor declines, while RTS games spiked in popularity and then severely receded.
But stewardship from their owners likely played a role as well. Square has seen fit to keep Chronotrigger in the public eye a lot more often.
> Wasn't remade and re-released often since and little to no effort has been put into growing the franchise.
I’m certainly disappointed that it hasn’t gotten more love, but it got its first balance patch in 25 years(!) last year, following a rerelease that added higher resolution graphics and better online play, so your information is out of date.
The community doesn’t exist on Reddit, it’s in communities like that one around war2combat, old Russian forums and discord rooms. It’s not big but there are still some folks keeping it alive.
> The map editor was revolutionary at the time, and it was trivially easy to be making usable maps within minutes.
Ah yes, my friend groups favorite map to make: start at the corners and the rest of the map was trees.
> and your peons would be impossible to remove from mining.
It simply reflects modern orc capitalism: a lifetime of servitude.
[dead]
> 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.
What you are looking at is corporate environments; the studios of the past (Ex: Westwood and Blizzard) had a small headcounts, and people were direct decision makers.
The story of Starcraft 1 is quite interesting as the devs copied the Warcraft 2 code and began changing it quickly[1](https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/tough-times-on-the-road-to-...).
> StarCraft was originally envisioned as a game with modest goals that could fit into a one-year development cycle so that it could be released for Christmas, 1996 > Warcraft II had only six core programmers and two support programmers; that was too few for the larger scope of StarCraft,
No boardrooms of PMs, and Directors, and VPs, and execs, chiming in every decision, leading to fast turnarounds.
Not at all crazy. You could very easily get a game with the same art style, features, number of missions done now in a month but people want much more. QOL features, multiple platforms, high quality graphics - $50 (average game price back then) is $105 now - you can't sell any game for that price nowadays, and a game at WC2 level of features wouldn't be accepted by customers for more than $5. A full price $59.99 game now needs a billion different side quests, character customisation, full VA, multiplayer servers, an orchestral score, etc etc or people just won't buy it.
> is $105 now - you can't sell any game for that price nowadays
But you don't need to. Just sell it to Steam for a $39.99 or whatever and have much, much more sales than in '95. And as a bonus you would still recieve some sales years after.
Sure, you won't get in Top 100 and wouldn't earn bazillions...
Crazy how much bigger modern games are … I wonder how many total pixels were shipped in the art assets of Warcraft 2 vs. StarCraft 2? My guess is at least 4 orders of magnitude higher for SC2
> 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
Not necessarily, but you need to look at the indie (PC) game space instead of AAA and mobile.
Top level game development in the 90's is comparable to indie games today, although granted, in the 90's they made huge technological leaps and the developers needed a lot more in-depth knowledge. But I can guarantee that someone can build Warcraft 2 today within a year. Hell, you can get the basics set up in a weekend I'm sure.
That said, even indie games suffer a bit from scope creep, and few developers actually limit themselves by saying "we release within a year and that's it". If a game is successful, continued development is beneficial. And with Kickstarter they can get money upfront (like what a publisher would pay initially), and with early access they can start making revenue to fund continued development. Which is a self-reinforcing cycle - as long as they publish updates and new features, people will keep playing and buying the game. Some games (like Factorio) end up in early access and continuous development for 10 years.
Additionally, the product was completed and released on CD, so no hundreds of bug fixes after the release.
They did have downloadable patches for WC2 though.
Yeah, 9 patches for the original game, then the Battle.net Edition in 1999 (which added support for TCP/IP networking and Battle.net matchmaking), and at least one downloadable patch for that.
https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Warcraft_II_patch_information#...
Not that it is any less impressive but they continued the development of their existing engine from WC1.
Even smaller games now have ludicrously long development cycles as developers have learned they can exploit mentally challenged gamers by selling them "early access" (unfinished games).
I resent the insult, you can do better.
Early access sometimes means unfinished, but in other cases they're fine - Factorio is an example, it had a fully fleshed out game in early access, then they spent another 5+ years adding features and fixes and the like. During that time, a lively modding community sprung up which added loads of playable content to the game.
Factorio is a clear exception here, not at all representative of the average experience.
I was 7 when Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness dropped.
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.
> 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.
I was 10 a the time and yes I’m not sure people realize how magical it felt at the time. When I got it in Christmas 96 on a 68k Mac it felt like it really opened a parallel universe compared to other games.
The graphics (looked like a high res SNES game, which at the time was quite unique on PC), the CD quality soundtrack, the booklet concept art, the unit voices and buildings sounds… as a kid discovering Fantasy it had everything.
And the attention to details, like Christmas string lights on building or a snowman when the map was in winter may seem insignificant, but as a kid it was wonderful.
Even my dad who was not into video games but had played tabletop war games in the past and got hooked and spent a few nights on it to complete a solo campaign.
This is by far the retro game I have the most nostalgia for.
Zug Zug
Loved the anecdote, very nicely CRAFTED
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).
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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!
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..
Hellfire was a released commercial product.... But it was released by Sierra On-Line, not Blizzard.
Both companies were owned by the same conglomorate (at the time?), and cooperation was limited.
If TabithaS from Case's Ladder is out there somewhere, thank you for playing teaching games of Warcraft 2 with me!
A free alternative was MSN Gaming Zone.
Ran inside IE using ActiveX or something. Was pretty neat.
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.
There was also WarCraft II Battle.net edition, launched in '99
Kali was awesome!
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.
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.
1. Wow, I did not know that. Thanks for sharing!
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.
Here’s a few more:
1) in addition to Kali, people played War2 on MSN Gaming Zone. It was available under the TCP/IP section.
2) before war2bne, you could use a program to change the color of your in game name, and use non-ASCII characters. So people went wild in multiplayer games.
3) I think MPlayer also supported War2? I don’t think anyone played it there.
4) StarCraft modding community was tight knit. Lots of great maps with tools available only to friends of the modders. We see the tail end of this when mappers finally get so good their maps are used by KeSPA and are not possible with stock editor.
5) Warcraft 3 alpha comes around. Warforge server is the first and only private server. The first map editor is leaked, janky but works for alpha. the first tower defense map ever for Warcraft 3 is made by a fellow called Mr123 on Warforge. The rest is history.
Battle.net's simple system of just downloading maps you didn't have helped a lot.
I remember playing a "Use Map Settings" map where you started out as a lone marine and then had to 'upgrade' your character over time. It felt like a very early prototype of later hero-style games that came to exist in Warcraft 3 and beyond.
Fun times.
Seeing neurons fire in recognizing the homage in the site appearance that haven't fired in 20 years was wild. Thanks for that.
I guess the Archive copy of the War 2 PSX source would be this[1] link which seems dead. I don't suppose you are aware of any live links to it?
[1]: https://archive.org/details/warcraftIIsourcecodePSX
This one works: https://archive.thedatadungeon.com/warcraft_ii_the_dark_saga...
I have a copy of it I think I’ll find it and upload.
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.
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.
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.
Oh goodness, Brood War most certainly is not the game that started e-sports, tho I of course appreciate your enthusiasm for the game.
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.
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.
Brood War's longevity is thanks to the map maker, which has allowed the game to be balanced around maps. The size of your spawn location, the ease with which you can expand, and the paths to different bases drastically impact what kinds of strategies are viable. If there's a high ground location, it becomes much harder to break that position as the attacker. The amount of resources per base (mineral patch count, mineral patch size, 1 gas spawn, 2 gas spawn, mineral only) all impact which strategies are viable.
In fact, during the era of Flash's dominance in ASL, the organizers actually started including maps that were heavily Zerg favored in order to put a stop to his reign.
The game is still alive and well, with a meta that continues to evolve, and every season of ASL[0] (the premier Brood War tournament), they include at least one new crazy experimental map. Last season the crazy map was Roaring Currents [1], one of the more ambitious designs in recent memory which has a large number of island bases. Basically if a strategy becomes a bit too oppressive, the map designers can always step in to make it a bit more balanced.
[0] https://liquipedia.net/starcraft/ASL
[1] https://liquipedia.net/starcraft/Roaring_Currents
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.
Brood War has aged like fine-wine. As I mentioned in a parallel comment, the key to Brood War's longevity comes from the map maker. Every detail is carefully considered so that none of the races can get away with a crazy advantage. It's really a special game, and every new season of ASL still feels magical.
I wish medical science would get so much better that Flash could fully heal his wrist injuries. He's spoken at length about how he loves to dedicate himself wholeheartedly to playing, and how he doesn't like to compete if he's not able to give it his all.
You probably already know about it, but in case you or any other reader is unaware there's this great YouTube channel @jinjinBW that translates Korean BW clips into English. It's a huge boon for western fans.
> There were gaming competitions in the 80s
... and uh, inveterate cheating and lying accompanied it. Brood War brought professionalism to esport.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell_(gamer)#Dispute...
True, but there will always be cheating. See the Savior scandal.
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).
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.
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.
Of course it wasnt the first time someone watched people playing video games against eachother.
The Korean Brood war scene was an entirely different level from anything that came before it though. The idea of announcers and gamers getting rich & famous from playing a video game live was unheard of before that.
I agree. I think people underestimate the size of the Korean Brood War scene, even relatively early on. In my country, I had seen some huge LAN parties with associated competitions, but then I got introduced to Korean Brood War competitions; they were filling stadiums with audiences and had pyrotechnics and professional TV productions and everything. It was insane.
But it certainly was the game that made it popular across the world.
StarCraft 2 tournaments broadcasts being watched in public venues pushed esports into the zeitgeist.
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.
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.
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.
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
At the time those cinematics were top tier. Blizzard continued to have some of the best cinematics until Warcraft 3, after that I believe they and many other game developers switched to in-engine cutscenes because the engine visuals were good enough. That said, Blizzard does still make prerendered cutscenes for Diablo 4 and WoW, but they're just... not as impressive anymore as they used to be back then. And a big part of that is that they're not that much different from in-engine. There's some games (FFVII Remake/Rebirth) that have pre-rendered cutscenes that are visually indistinguishable from in-engine cutscenes, but they pre-rendered them because of e.g. wider / zoomed out camera angles or lots of effects.
> Warcraft 2 is not really fun to play.
Compared with a lot of ptesent games is luxury: no updates, no bullshit introduction, just play.
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.
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.
Dawn of War 3 made DoW 2 look like Game of the Decade by comparison. I hear they're making a DoW 4, and they're not even mentioning 3 when talking about the history.
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.
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.
I started playing at WCIII TFT too. it is personal for me too. so many good memories.
i did play some brood war after i played tft with some of my tft clan mates and i didn't really like it. i think i prefer micro over macro, at least at the time. whenever i play dota 2 nowadays, i am much more macro oriented but that might be because i got much better than 18 years ago lol.
i also kinda really emotionally, outside of gameplay, like wciii because of the dota connection if it wasn't obvious. seeing the OpenAi bots compete against pros live was such a surprise. I lost it at that TI.
wciii enabled this by being so open. the world editor was incredible. and the game allowed so much functionality cause it allowed integration with ghost++. the community was really in it. wcreplays was a wonderful website where the community was constantly sharing replays, and I loved to watch random FFAs and people doing their own casts. One of my coworkers at my first internship ever actually did his own casting as a hobby.
i just love the game. not just because it was fun, but also because it was such a huge part of my technical/creative life when i was a kid and it still kinda is through dota. i once did a blog post in 2017 showing a light demo of generating item builds with LSTMs, and dota plus the following year added it as a feature. in my mind i hope they saw my blog post, and it inspired them. at the time, it was such a huge validation that i had good ideas for game development, and it made me feel pretty proud that I could contribute something to the game like so many others did.
lol i kinda ranted but man yeah I love that game.
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.
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.
Footies was my favorite and I wish we got a new game out of that too.
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?
Funny how many people think Starcraft 2 isn't even better than Starcraft 1, especially when you add in Brood War.
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.
Buildings as walls and using spawn points to jump through terrain are fun mechanics in WC2.
I remember creating a moat of farms around my town hall.
> and mass appeal has driven games
Oh no, large numbers of people were satisfied. The horror! Will no one think of the elitist minority???
Large number of people were "satisfied" playing Clash of Titans too ...
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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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
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
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.
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."
> 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.
Grubby is good, but Back to Warcraft casts the highest level players these days. Grubby does not compete in the top league any more
Honestly, he doesn’t need to be the best to make it enjoyable. He seems like a generally chill guy and he goes back and breaks down his games. Fascinating to hear what he was thinking and why he did what he did.
i'd also recommend uthermal -- former pro sc2 player, he's got a really good attitude & makes a lot of entertaining videos
sub to the grub!
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.
And now Beyond All Reason keeps it alive and free software
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?
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_USFDBbymGUwLPiopP2q...
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
The Spring RTS FOSS engine is an engine, but does not provide the game assets or game-specific code.
Recoil is a fork of the Spring engine (background: Spring made backward incompatible changes; Recoil forked to retain backward compatibility). Beyond All Reason uses the Recoil engine and supplies its own game code, shaders, and assets.
https://recoilengine.org/articles/choose-recoil/
https://recoilengine.org/ (list of games powered by Recoil)
https://github.com/beyond-all-reason
Source: been in the BAR Discord for about a year, have contributed tiny bits of server code to the project, and read a few pull request comments.
BAR is a great RTS
BAR is a really great RTS game. By far the best one today. It is very balanced and has a lot of depth. Highly recommended for any RTS enthusiast.
And Supreme Commander too, although it's a bit dated now / has some technical issues - although at the time, it was one of the first games that could use a multicore CPU. Not SupCom 2 though, that felt off in comparison.
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.
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.
Age of empires always had naval combat. Supreme commander too. There’s a bunch.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Visually at least it looks like a pretty tasteful remaster. Mostly just sharpening things up. Thanks for posting
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.
This is probably the best time as any I'll ever get to mention that Patrick Wyatt's[0] blog[1] is a gold mine of frontline, boots-on-the-ground accounts of making WarCraft II and other games.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Wyatt
[1]: https://www.codeofhonor.com/
I used to read this one but they stopped updating it, looks like they had a 10 year gap and started posting again in 2024 though!
I wish!
The two posts since then look more to be some brief thanksgivings and a trivial correction/footnote to a work that mentions him :)
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.
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.
One of the biggest features of this game for me as a youngin' wasn't that I could play dial-up co-op multiplayer with the neighbors down the way, but that the soundtrack audio was Redbook format on the cd-rom and I could pop the game disk itself into my CD player to listen to the what I still consider to be an amazing soundtrack. That Orc'ish harpsichord still lives rent free in my head.
Reflecting on retro compute more and more lately and it really makes me miss where we came from. I've been programming since about 1994 when I was about 12 years old (shout out q-basic). And today work at FAANG as an eng manager. But i am not proud of where we've gone as an industry. Makes me sad really.
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.
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
My parents never bought me the full game so I probably played those demo levels 100s of times. Thanks for the memory trigger haha.
Was the demo version a separate story campaign like the Starcraft one was?
MobyGames [1] claim they are unique missions. More or less the same story, but different maps, objectives and briefing text.
Maybe I need to re-download it, and check out the differences. I remember playing those six missions so many times before eventually saving up enough pocket money to buy the game, but I don't exactly remember them being different.
And it's actually six maps, three for each faction.
[1] https://www.mobygames.com/game/57961/warcraft-ii-tides-of-da...
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 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!
Zug zug
I’m convinced “zug zug” is a reference to a scene from the 1981 movie /Caveman/[1].
1: https://youtu.be/5h2gVbLlwl8
Q: What kind of cigarettes do orcs smoke.
A: Low tar, my friend.
Job's Done
Ready to work!
Train train
swobu
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.
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...
The only RTS games I could truly enjoy were Warcraft II and III. Other games like StarCraft are too complex for me to fully engage with. I especially liked Warcraft III’s system of taxing large armies - it made battles small-scale and much easier to wrap my head around.
I've played this game so much, I still have muscle memory for group selection wired up ..
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!
Very distinct memory of getting this for Christmas, then installing and playing the first time that afternoon.
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.
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.
Zug zug and dabu will forever be a part of my lexicon
WarCraft II was among the first games that I ever played "online" (direct connection via dial-up modem with my friends). I can't overstate how absolutely incredible that felt to me at the time - pure magic.
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.
I like WC1 and 2, but Dune II (1992) has to receive credit for laying the RTS foundations. And while WC1 predates it, in my opinion Command & Conquer evolved RTS much more. It's wild how much happened in such a short time, back then.
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 think it was a borders book store - they had a game shelf and I remember this one caught my eye. I was probably 11 or 12 and my mom said yes and the rest was history a life time of blizzard gaming
This game lead me down a path that resulted in me becoming a software engineer. Good game.
No doubt. My friend learned how to hex edit because of WC1 -- editing his savegame files haha
I was happy when I could skip the intro movie.
I love this topic and could read an article about War2 development that is 3x the length of this article. A lot of nostalgia coming up from this original article.
I still have a bunch of the sound bites in my music folder. Nothing says playlist filler like "Leave Me Alone"
Still my favourite RTS to this day, with a fantastic soundtrack that I will never forget.
Your soundcard works perfectly
Bloodlust on a control of ogres? anyone? anyone? this was nearly unstoppable.
Was this the one AOL charged me to play by the minute when I was a kid?
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.
It is not and has never been an AOL game. Unless you were paying by the minute for internet access for multiplayer via Kali.
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.
It was a partnership through a multiplayer service called Engage.
I found this: https://www.gamespot.com/articles/aol-initiates-new-game-pri...
"...and awaits the coming of the tides of darkness"
l'chaim!
Good times, remember riding our bikes to Toys 'R' Us of all places to buy the game with a buddy. Paddled back, played through the Orc campaign until 4 a.m. in the morning. One of my all time favorites.
Oh my... now I feel old. I still remember the cheat codes. "potofgold". "tigerlily".
And now that disco easter egg is stuck in my head... (although technically I think that was part of Beyond the Dark Portal).
wha-wha-wha-wha-what do you want
(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.)
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