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30 Year Anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness

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Re: 30 Year Anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness

#121

Post by 29athrowaway »

Tiktaalik wrote: post #93

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 playab…

> This is a really good and I think sadly under played and discussed game

WarCraft II sold 3M copies.

Re: 30 Year Anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness

#122

Post by 29athrowaway »

ericmcer wrote: post #116
Tiktaalik wrote: post #93

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 playab…

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 Sta…

StarCraft I still has a large community. And China has a giant WarCraft III community.

Re: 30 Year Anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness

#123

Post by 29athrowaway »

arscan wrote: post #41

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…

There was also WarCraft II Battle.net edition, launched in '99

Re: 30 Year Anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness

#124

Post by gmllama »

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.

Re: 30 Year Anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness

#125

Post by MobileVet »

u12 wrote: post #87
MobileVet wrote: post #72

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=EJ…

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.

Re: 30 Year Anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness

#126

Post by philistine »

thinkingtoilet wrote: post #14
PeterHolzwarth wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 othe…

> 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...

Re: 30 Year Anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness

#127

Post by javman »

amatecha wrote: post #67

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…

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 :)

Re: 30 Year Anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness

#128

Post by mvdtnz »

ericmcer wrote: post #116
Tiktaalik wrote: post #93

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 playab…

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 Sta…

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.

Re: 30 Year Anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness

#129

Post by mvdtnz »

black3r wrote: post #107

> 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 an…

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).

Re: 30 Year Anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness

#130

Post by japhib »

black3r wrote: post #107

> 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 an…

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
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