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.
30 Year Anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness
181–190 of 210 posts
Re: 30 Year Anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness
#182I 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…
> 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 g…
Zug Zug
Re: 30 Year Anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness
#183Some 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,…
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?
Re: 30 Year Anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 Very clunky control, very outdated graphics, bad story telling.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.
Re: 30 Year Anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness
#185WarCraft 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
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.
Re: 30 Year Anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness
#186This 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!
Re: 30 Year Anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness
#187Still my favourite RTS to this day, with a fantastic soundtrack that I will never forget.
Re: 30 Year Anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness
#188I 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.
Re: 30 Year Anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness
#189> 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…
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.
Re: 30 Year Anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness
#190Your soundcard works perfectly