30 Year Anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness
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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...
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 Starcraft 2, but it is legitimately the most mentally demanding game I have ever played. Sometimes I procrastinate getting into a match because 1v1 is so stressful. I totally get why it has limited appeal.
I believe the RTS genre at a whole got superseded by the MOBA genre (with DotA and LoL). A genre I tried once (HotS) and was terrible at. If you're shit and you're not improving (I didn't enjoy it either, I felt forced to do it for a reward in another game), stop trying. I never tried any other MOBA, except maybe a touchscreen one, Warcraft Rumble? Either way, I got burned by Hearthstone Mercs and fell once more in the trap with Rumble. After Blizzard announced removed of addons from combat, I've finally said goodbye to the Warcraft franchise and Blizzard in general.
There's one game I really do like which has a kind of RTS with map feeling to it: Total War: Warhammer series (though I laud their BS with DLCs and multiple game versions). I suppose the whole Total War series is as good, I just like the Warhammer universe. The other day, Settlers II was discussed on here, including a FOSS clone. Settlers II is also a game I liked (III not so much though artwork was nice, never played the orig.). Supposedly it isn't RTS, tho I am pretty sure back then it was called RTS.
The better I got at competitive RTS's the less interesting the game got for me, it just kinda of felt like chess where there was only going to be one or two interesting interactions in the game if played well, otherwise its just a game of who makes a mistake too early.
Teamfight Tactics and Autochess are interesting newer entries though, allowing time to strategize and adding a lot of randomness to the games, where you can't just play one build. Even then though, as these games get more and more explored, "optimal" strategy gets eventually discovered and the game devs especially in TFT are in a race to try to keep things high variance but also seem fair - its definitely a difficult job!
I feel the exact same way. The ELO system saves you from getting steamrolled if you’re a casual player but improving just means the game becomes formulaic to the point of no longer being fun. Stronghold 2 was kind of interesting in that it was an unranked lobby with good variation in player ability and team-oriented maps. Most players knew the basic economic and combat metas, but you’d often end up in situations where one of your teammates dropped out on a 3 vs 3 and you’d still win.
Thinking that only their way is always right and there's no room for change.
Until somebody comes and builds something different that fucks their world upside down.
Suggestions for improvement and ease of use on their forums got shot down on their forums by the resident shitters like on every other community.
Now nobody cares about that genre, except those of us who grew up on it.
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 had a better chance if it could find its own voice, but it ended up feeling like a direct to home video sequel to a popular movie
Potentially that simplification hurts the genre too much though because then you don't have hardcore players sticking with it for years and years.
Maybe a game could have that as a "simple mode" that players can opt in to.
The potential addictive money making pattern is the same as other games imo. Skins. The units being smaller mean the developer is probably going to have to go to more effort to shove them in to peoples faces. Maybe a screen before/after the match where all the players units in their skins can be clear seen in a more zoomed in manner. Have them marching around the border of the end scoresheet or doing a little dance while waiting for players to load.
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.
And frankly, that's not fun for a lot of people.
I don't want to win by clicking and mashing hotkeys like a schizophrenic on speed.
Yes, really good players click fast, but they also have impeccable resource management. The group I played with did run the obvious experiment: the best one of us was forced to play against the rest (one at a time) with an artificial click frequency limit. He felt like his abilities were greatly reduced, but he still beat everyone else quite easily.
At the bottom to upper mid level all you need to win is to figure out the macro game of building construction while also getting enough workers and units. With enough of that no micro is needed, just attack-moving into the enemy is more than enough.
Then at the upper mid level you're going to run into people who often don't build as effectively but they'll micro every unit or they'll be constantly doing raids when you don't expect it, scouting better than you and/or just understanding which units are better vs which so as to counter you.
From that point on it becomes much more of an effort to play the game because then you need to become better in all of those fields, while also becoming faster. But to be honest that point is probably 2/3rd's up the tree of all the people playing.
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 anyone to sacrifice their economy to perform an early rush attack (most infamously with a ton of early zerglings).
To combat early rush attacks you need to be able to multitask: send out early scouts to see what your opponent is doing, if they have any hidden building on the map, how many workers they have, etc. You need to be able to do this while building your own workers, base facilities, and units for defence. This is the multitasking that so many struggle with and it’s required to be able to play at the most basic level!
Dealing with your opponent is a fact of every strategy game!
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.
And within a year or two there were so. Many. Maps. Spread through gloriously fun CDs (quite a few in big boxes with cool artwork)! I have a collection of over 40 releases so far; it's a wild rabbit hole.
As I recall, WarCraft II was the first big box game I bought for my own money, ordered through paper catalogue. Amazing memories of the campaign, and online duels over dial-up - often interrupted because someone picked up the phone. Still have (somehow surviving) floppies with a few silly little maps made in early 1997. It's the ultimate feel-good nostalgia game for me. Just seeing the winter sprite of the Church with the green and red LED(?!) lights fills me with pure joy, every time. (It hits me, just now, that those single pixels might just be representing ball ornaments or something. ...I'm sticking with my headcanon of LEDs!)
WarCraft II sold 3M copies.
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 obscure despite being a top tier best in class game on its release.
Tbh in general I think you could say the same of a lot of top tier successful PC games of that era.
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.
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.
I’m certainly disappointed that it hasn’t gotten more love, but it got its first balance patch in 25 years(!) last year, following a rerelease that added higher resolution graphics and better online play, so your information is out of date.
The community doesn’t exist on Reddit, it’s in communities like that one around war2combat, old Russian forums and discord rooms. It’s not big but there are still some folks keeping it alive.
Ah yes, my friend groups favorite map to make: start at the corners and the rest of the map was trees.
It simply reflects modern orc capitalism: a lifetime of servitude.
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.
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.
But you don't need to. Just sell it to Steam for a $39.99 or whatever and have much, much more sales than in '95. And as a bonus you would still recieve some sales years after.
Sure, you won't get in Top 100 and wouldn't earn bazillions...
Not necessarily, but you need to look at the indie (PC) game space instead of AAA and mobile.
Top level game development in the 90's is comparable to indie games today, although granted, in the 90's they made huge technological leaps and the developers needed a lot more in-depth knowledge. But I can guarantee that someone can build Warcraft 2 today within a year. Hell, you can get the basics set up in a weekend I'm sure.
That said, even indie games suffer a bit from scope creep, and few developers actually limit themselves by saying "we release within a year and that's it". If a game is successful, continued development is beneficial. And with Kickstarter they can get money upfront (like what a publisher would pay initially), and with early access they can start making revenue to fund continued development. Which is a self-reinforcing cycle - as long as they publish updates and new features, people will keep playing and buying the game. Some games (like Factorio) end up in early access and continuous development for 10 years.
https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Warcraft_II_patch_information#...
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.
That was such a game changer for online play. Before that, to play Warcraft II my friend and I had to coordinate to set up a game, then call their model directly, and hope our parents didn't pick up the phone thinking it was a regular call.
After Kali, we could just sign on and join games. We also got to play as a team, which was so much fun. Friends2v2 was the map and game type we played SO MUCH. We had various strategies that we got really good at (mostly grunt rushing and offensive towering). I miss those games.
I believe DOOM and Warcraft 2 simply did lockstep determinism across all clients. You could run the simulations forward completely deterministically due to use of its and fixed point math.
Back in the day, your gaming could be super wrecked if someone with a 300ms latency joined :D.
Asking as I'm the host of netstack.fm, a podcast about networking and rust, but some episodes are just about networking alone.
Would love to devote an episode to the Kali TCP/IP IPX bridge as there's a lot to unpack there and that can be learned from. Any tips for a guest for such an episode are more than welcome!
Sadly I didn’t make a backup of my paper (not sure how I managed to screw that up), so I no longer have it.
Both companies were owned by the same conglomorate (at the time?), and cooperation was limited.
Ran inside IE using ActiveX or something. Was pretty neat.
I know the game was horribly unbalanced against humans once bloodlust showed up, but I still quit after they "patched" bloodlust years later in Battle.net. Felt sacrilege, like patching the queen in chess. Yeah, the queen is imba, but that's chess. Beating an orc player as a human was a fun flex.
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.
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 games.
The graphics (looked like a high res SNES game, which at the time was quite unique on PC), the CD quality soundtrack, the booklet concept art, the unit voices and buildings sounds… as a kid discovering Fantasy it had everything.
And the attention to details, like Christmas string lights on building or a snowman when the map was in winter may seem insignificant, but as a kid it was wonderful.
Even my dad who was not into video games but had played tabletop war games in the past and got hooked and spent a few nights on it to complete a solo campaign.
This is by far the retro game I have the most nostalgia for.
I do wonder if Brood War's long period without balance patches helped or hurt it as an esport. In modern games, it feels like developers "shake up the meta" on purpose, whereas in brood war, it was up to map designers to ensure balance. This made it easier for long time fans to appreciate tactics... in SC2, I have to be caught up on the latest balance patches to appreciate anything.
In fact, during the era of Flash's dominance in ASL, the organizers actually started including maps that were heavily Zerg favored in order to put a stop to his reign.
The game is still alive and well, with a meta that continues to evolve, and every season of ASL[0] (the premier Brood War tournament), they include at least one new crazy experimental map. Last season the crazy map was Roaring Currents [1], one of the more ambitious designs in recent memory which has a large number of island bases. Basically if a strategy becomes a bit too oppressive, the map designers can always step in to make it a bit more balanced.
PS: Flash is coming back very soon apparently.
I wish medical science would get so much better that Flash could fully heal his wrist injuries. He's spoken at length about how he loves to dedicate himself wholeheartedly to playing, and how he doesn't like to compete if he's not able to give it his all.
You probably already know about it, but in case you or any other reader is unaware there's this great YouTube channel @jinjinBW that translates Korean BW clips into English. It's a huge boon for western fans.
... and uh, inveterate cheating and lying accompanied it. Brood War brought professionalism to esport.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell_(gamer)#Dispute...
The Korean Brood war scene was an entirely different level from anything that came before it though. The idea of announcers and gamers getting rich & famous from playing a video game live was unheard of before that.
I'm honestly not even sure which other RTS game would be close? Age of Empires 1? I don't think it ever had the same traction or hype until AOE 2.
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
Compared with a lot of ptesent games is luxury: no updates, no bullshit introduction, just play.
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.
As a kid I was shit at it and played customs maps and goofed with the editor. Now I've gone back to find grubby streaming and revealing the depths of the meta evolution, and counters.
I like that even when a strong meta develops people can potentially counter with strategies that aren't as well rounded for long term use but upset the current meta.
What makes Warcraft 2 the apex for you over StarCraft 2?
Oh no, large numbers of people were satisfied. The horror! Will no one think of the elitist minority???
WC3 was peak design with the mod support (maps) where Dota originates from and and it was also the bane of the company. They couldn't monetize it and IceFrog choose Valve instead of them. No wonder that later Blizz games has 0 community support.
Which first came from Starcraft custom game support and the popularity of Aeon of Strife (AoS) leading to Defense of the Ancients (DotA) in WC3.
Icefrog went to blizzard first if i remember correctly. Blizzard kinda told him to make a restricted game, maybe within the sc2 engine, almost for free. Valve saw the value and invested more.
On his casting YouTube channel he uploads a new commentary and recording of a StarCraft game every day, as well as news about upcoming events and tournaments. He loves to do deep dives and detailed analysis of strategies and the shifting metagame of StarCraft: Brood War, a game that is still going stronger than ever despite closing in on its 3rd decade since release.
And although SC1/2 brought genuine improvements in the genre in many ways, there's something so much purer about the high fantasy tone of WC over the scifi tone of SC. Maybe it's just pure nostalgia, but it feels like something deeper, something more real.
It wasn't until nearly 20 years after WC2 that a 3D game got "graphics that look almost 2D in quality (SC3)".
I think it's also very telling that World of Warcraft made infinity money, but World of Starcraft never happened. High fantasy always lends itself to the "I can make a difference as a mortal man" but sci-fi seems to always trend toward "too big for human consumption."
Thinking of popular fantasy sci-fi, this seems like the exact opposite of what actually happens! With the notable exception of lotr (and how many early readers really focused on frodo's struggle anyways?) most fantasy has some kind of superhuman main character that can singlehandedly change the world.
Scifi tends to be a lot more about people like Picard, important and respected but ultimately limited to influencing others to achieve major changes.
Warcraft had more differentiable units and a better story though.
It's an open-source project that started as a fork of SpringRTS. To my eye it looks nearly like a clone of Supreme Commander.
I watched a few ranked 1v1 games on uThermal's YouTube channel (he's a former Starcraft 2 pro who mostly makes YouTube videos about Starcraft 2). Here's the playlist.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_USFDBbymGUwLPiopP2q...
Was there any particular reason for the fork? There's a lot of Spring RTS projects but they all use the same codebase. http://springrts.com/wiki/Games
Recoil is a fork of the Spring engine (background: Spring made backward incompatible changes; Recoil forked to retain backward compatibility). Beyond All Reason uses the Recoil engine and supplies its own game code, shaders, and assets.
https://recoilengine.org/articles/choose-recoil/
https://recoilengine.org/ (list of games powered by Recoil)
https://github.com/beyond-all-reason
Source: been in the BAR Discord for about a year, have contributed tiny bits of server code to the project, and read a few pull request comments.
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.
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.
These just aren't considerations in RTS games - they move too fast and the maps are too small. There really isn't a benefit to having a ship with all your planes just outside of the enemy's range - they could sneak attack you, and sending units from your own base really just isn't that much farther.
It's a shame to me that this isn't a more popular genre these days. It's easily my favorite.
It's got really decent naval combat, with a distinct feel compared to the land and air.
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?
Glad to see the art itself was not too badly modified. It's weird though, like the vegetation in the Farm building looks weird. The original version you can tell it's some kind of yellow fruit or vegetable but in the remaster the yellow dots are unusually small and don't really "feel right". Strikes me as AI upscaling rather than hand-crafted editing.
The two posts since then look more to be some brief thanksgivings and a trivial correction/footnote to a work that mentions him :)
Maybe I need to re-download it, and check out the differences. I remember playing those six missions so many times before eventually saving up enough pocket money to buy the game, but I don't exactly remember them being different.
And it's actually six maps, three for each faction.
[1] https://www.mobygames.com/game/57961/warcraft-ii-tides-of-da...
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!
A: Low tar, my friend.
- "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.
We weren't fully geared though, so we'd assemble the cables manually, using whatever we could find to attach the connectors.
Then we'd use a long piece of string with something attached to it that we'd throw, from the 2nd or 3rd floor of the house, to the neighbor's house. And then we'd use the string to pull up the coax cable.
And then humans and little orcs would transit through the coax cables.
Oh the memories.
We'd also play and be ranked on Case's Ladder, for back then Battle.net didn't even exist yet. So it was all KALI to simulate a LAN over the Internet and play against strangers.
And we'd mod our WCII to use sound files from different languages: for the example for the flying machine I was fond of the italian version "machina volante".
It was... Our life? Only got dethroned as the best time-waster in our lives when the Counter-Strike beta came out (in 1999?). (I didn't like StarCraft but boy oh boy did I play Warcraft III a lot later on).
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...
We had to wait until after mom and dad went to sleep that night, then snuck up the hall to install it and play it as quietly as possible.
I'd love to introduce my kids to this game - but it is so difficult to get multiplayer licenses that "Just Plain Work" in our environment. I don't want to resort to piracy or emulation - I just want to install it on the 4 gaming PC's in our house, and fire up a game - just like we used to do in the good ol' days, the 90's.
But its just not so easy any more, alas.
If there were a "family license pack" for Warcraft2 and Starcraft, I'd be in, in a second. My CS:GO-trading kids need to learn these games. Zug Zug!
While I didn't intend Jorsys to be so much about Puds, it could be fun to host some there anyway, if you still have any good ones that you would be interested in sharing.
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.
I just posted a comment about how amazing the warcraft 2 community was on AOL. Couldn't remember if they charged per minute or per hour so you just confirmed it for me. I just remember that some kids were racking up insane bills. I had to play on Zone (and then Battle.net when Battle.net edition came out) but I loved the AOL war2 message boards.
l'chaim!
(Yes, that was from Beyond the Dark Portal. Could play it in the game with a "cheat" code or it was at the end of the Redbook audio tracks if you put it in a music CD player.)
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.
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 my abuse of overplaying Diablo I on our old 56k modem is what made my parents invest in broadband. I'm happy they didn't make me pay the bills back then.
My long term goal with Jorsys is to put tutorials and mods and make the whole thing accessible for people today and tomorrow. It's all pretty arcane, with tools, mods and instructions barely accessible anymore. Time is limited though.
I don't anticipate creating a community, but if you have anecdotes or stories to share, or want to help out in any way, don't hesitate to get in touch. My email is on Jorsys.
1) in addition to Kali, people played War2 on MSN Gaming Zone. It was available under the TCP/IP section.
2) before war2bne, you could use a program to change the color of your in game name, and use non-ASCII characters. So people went wild in multiplayer games.
3) I think MPlayer also supported War2? I don’t think anyone played it there.
4) StarCraft modding community was tight knit. Lots of great maps with tools available only to friends of the modders. We see the tail end of this when mappers finally get so good their maps are used by KeSPA and are not possible with stock editor.
5) Warcraft 3 alpha comes around. Warforge server is the first and only private server. The first map editor is leaked, janky but works for alpha. the first tower defense map ever for Warcraft 3 is made by a fellow called Mr123 on Warforge. The rest is history.
I remember playing a "Use Map Settings" map where you started out as a lone marine and then had to 'upgrade' your character over time. It felt like a very early prototype of later hero-style games that came to exist in Warcraft 3 and beyond.
Fun times.