If you're talking about Starcraft 2 as being a "basic" RTS, it's not the same game it was at launch in 2010. There's so much content for it with a whole bunch of new Co-op commanders and the Arcade custom modes made by the community are stacking so many mechanics on top of each other it actually gets a bit too much sometimes.
-Infinite upgrades and blasting out the vanilla sc2 game mechanics by upgrading the abilities so many times that it breaks the gameplay, with added zombies which are usually jacked up to insane difficulty, on a tiny rush map with extra income.
-Hero maps that have a good 12-13 systems of powering up the hero.
-Some chill out maps that have you memorizing so many different unit combinations that automatically send in waves across the map and having to finely interpret massive unit battles with different many units and abilities and weekly changing bonuses clashing all at once. There's many more.
Totally agree Blizzard is dead in the water. The old "gritty" vibe in D2 really hinged on being able to unearth core, adult, western values and challenge them with scary demons. It was presented the evil on such a self-evident surface level too, it was great, you didn't have to interpret fine intricate characters, it just presented hateable figures to wrestle with. The narrative kept moving and getting bigger as you got deeper into the "East".
The pixelated look was so good. Like you could pick out individual spots on the map and the resolution was small enough that you could see the exact start and end to most game mechanics and animations. You could do pixel-perfect moves relatively easily and understand the world pieces intuitively, mostly from just looking at it. The late 90s and early 2000s had that sand-like pixelated look to all the monitors and low-res video games. CRTs helped blur it out, but you could still appreciate the grainy-ness and feel like you were in something a bit more concrete and grounded cause you could almost count the pixels on 640x480 (lol).
Ah nostalghia, thanks for the trip!