Bloodlust on a control of ogres? anyone? anyone? this was nearly unstoppable.
30 Year Anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness
191–200 of 210 posts
Re: 30 Year Anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: 30 Year Anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
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.
Re: 30 Year Anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: 30 Year Anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness
#195I 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…
Loved the anecdote, very nicely CRAFTED
Re: 30 Year Anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness
#196Some 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,…
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…
Seeing neurons fire in recognizing the homage in the site appearance that haven't fired in 20 years was wild. Thanks for that.
Re: 30 Year Anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 r…
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 anyo…
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!
Re: 30 Year Anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Re: 30 Year Anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness
#199Some 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? [1]: https://archive.org/details/warcraftIIsourcecodePSX
I have a copy of it I think I’ll find it and upload.
Re: 30 Year Anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 anyo…
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.