The WarCraft 30th anniversary has come and gone, and along with it comes a celebration of the original game from 30 years ago.
WarCraft: Orcs & Humans, first released in 1994, has received a full remaster. But on top of that, WarCraft II, bundling both the original game, Tides of Darkness, and the expansion Beyond The Dark Portal, have also received remasters. And Blizzard has made upgrades to WarCraft III: Reforged, to bring us the WarCraft Remastered Battle Chest.
All three games evoke the 1990s era of PC gaming, as real time strategy came into vogue as far back as on the MS-DOS. WarCraft 1 & 2 were definitely in greater need of a remake or remaster, as they still come from the era of sprite graphics, on CRT monitors that would make those games look quaint on even the Switch screen today.
In this case, Blizzard chose to retain the gameplay and design, and offer remastered graphics, that you can toggle in real time. Both WarCraft 1 & 2 also received modernized UI and UX improvements, including health bars, mission select, and more selectable units. We imagine those of you who can even remember playing these games will also remember that there was a real difficulty curve most gamers couldn’t get past.
Impressively, WarCraft II still retains its Battle.net online functionality, and of course, all the maps and content from the expansions are all here.
As for WarCraft III: Reforged, you could be excused for forgetting that this was a remaster of the 2002 game, that Blizzard published in 2020. So it wouldn’t have made sense for Blizzard to remaster it again so soon, but they did release a new patch that raises the resolution for the game assets up to HD. There are also multiple graphical and QOL improvements.
Now, it may interest you to find out that the very original versions of WarCraft 1 & 2 are also still available on GOG, thanks to a working agreement that GOG made with Blizzard. So if you were thinking that this WarCraft Remastered Battle Chest isn’t really a proper preservation of those original games, Blizzard actually already covered that.
What this is, though, is an opportunity to reintroduce these original games to a newer generation of gamers. We did notice that there was something else that Blizzard wasn’t quite able to do for these games yet; adapt them to game controllers, thereby making it possible to play them on game consoles.
Maybe that’s a project that needs more time under the oven, but with Blizzard now under Microsoft, there’s greater motivation to make that happen. There’s already a ton of RTS games that have made the jump to console, including games Microsoft publishes.
In the meantime, you can enjoy the WarCraft Remastered Battle Chest trailer below, and buy the bundle or each games here.
