alt Hacker News30 Year Anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness
Comments
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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...
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!
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!
"...and awaits the coming of the tides of darkness"
l'chaim!
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.
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.
Very distinct memory of getting this for Christmas, then installing and playing the first time that afternoon.
This game lead me down a path that resulted in me becoming a software engineer. Good game.
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.
I still have a bunch of the sound bites in my music folder. Nothing says playlist filler like "Leave Me Alone"
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.
Was this the one AOL charged me to play by the minute when I was a kid?
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.
And now that disco easter egg is stuck in my head... (although technically I think that was part of Beyond the Dark Portal).
[dead]
[dead]
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...