We won’t be seeing remakes or remasters of Blizzard’s classic real-time strategy games, Warcraft: Orcs and Humans and Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness. Blizzard explains that the reason for that is simple: they just aren’t that fun anymore.
Given that the industry has moved on far beyond what the games of the early and mid-90s had to offer, it comes as little surprise that the studio has no intention of devoting any of its (however extensive) resources to remastering these games, which have only gotten worse with age.
Titles like the original Diablo, which is being remastered in Diablo 3, still remain fun in spite of their age due to their core gameplay, but other titles, including the aforementioned Warcraft games, are far less immersive or challenging when compared to newer real-time strategy games, including Blizzard’s own Warcraft 3, StarCraft, and numerous other strategy games.
In a Q&A session at BlizzCon 2016 (via Eurogamer), Blizzard co-founder Frank Pearce says that while the studio retain all of the original source code and assets for these titles, it would take a lot of work to figure out how to put it together and that the effort just wouldn’t be worth it.
“We had some dedicated folks that were passionate about the idea dig up the Warcraft 1 assets and code,” he said. “They got it working and they got it running in a window. And I played it. Warcraft: Orcs & Humans was awesome for its time. I promise you, in today’s world, by today’s standards, it’s just not that fun anymore.”
“We have limited resources with everything that we choose to do,” he added. “We would much rather work on amazing content for World of Warcraft for you guys, or for Overwatch, or evaluating what a future project pipeline might be and devote our time to that, rather than going back and digging up those fossils.”
This could of course change in the distant future, but for now, you’ll have to be content with downloading the original games and running some user-made fixes to get them working on a modern computer—if you even want to do that.
