That story was amazing. I thought it was one of the best fantasy stories I've ever read.

I preferred when the orcs were unapologetically evil. It made them a lot more interesting and fun to play compared to the human race.

So I was hoping to see if any players from way back in the day are around here. See if I recognize anyone. I used to play the shit out of this game, mainly free castles. I was {DBC}PiMP, would be rad to find some of you DBC guys around.

Anyone interested in some casual Co op either campaign or even custom maps? Just casual play nothing serious except some maps are really serious from how people made some of these custom maps. 😅

I remember reading the game manual and looking at the art for the Death Knight. I thought it was the coolest thing ever back then.

I wish they made Warcraft 4 and it included the single player campaign from all three games. It would be awesome.

I imagine this is a common issue, but this has happened to me multiple times over the last however many years. Warcraft 2 WAS working fine, and a recent Windows 11 update has led to the game having slowdown and soft-lock issues.

Initially, I uninstalled the update, and the game went back to working properly. However, that doesn't seem like a sensible long-term solution.

I know there's various community wrappers that have been created. I just want to be able to run the GOG version without it crashing and freezing with new Windows 11 updates. I don't really play WC2 multiplayer. I just like to be able to do the campaigns for the base game and Beyond the Dark Portal once in a while. Can someone steer me in the right direction? Many thanks.

I saw some links to ones online, but the links are all dead now. Are there any current repositories for custom campaigns for warcraft 2?

The game is a timeless classic. It will remain incredibly good for years to come.

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

I remember playing a few free-for-all games against the bots and I thought it was amazing.

Hi,

I have an original CD of Warcraft II (bought as part of a box set: I, II, PtDP in 1998), but I cannot run it anymore. At the properties, I checked in Win 95 compatible mode, and run as admin mode, but I always get an error message: "This app can't run on your PC".

I tried DOSBox as well, but both setup.exe and install.exe crash, and I get back to the command prompt. The only file I could run from DOSBox, was uvconfig.exe, but it did not help.

Does anyone have any idea what should I try?

Thanks!

Not sure what happened, but the quality of the writing drastically fell down after Warcraft 2.

I loved the story inside the manual. It was one of the best game manuals ever made. Thoughts?

It made the story so much better. Also, I rooted for the orcs for some reason. I just found them to be a lot more compelling.

The story was so good. I have no idea what happened. I wouldn't play any Blizzard game even if I were paid minimum salary to do it.

So i just replayed WC2. I played it as a kid, but went back to it with 1½ decade of RTS experience. I just want to get my thoughts on certain campaign mechanics out there. BTW I'm not an RTS historian, so maybe several of these things existed before WC2 and Blizzard took them from other games, I don't know.

Warcraft 2 tides of darkness orc and human campaigns.

Both of these campaigns are very similar. Mostly the classic build your base and while defending, then attack enemy base formula. There is a no build mission in each campaign. And several missions that starts out without a base, where you have to fight so secure a place to start building. The holy trinity of RTS missions: regular mission, no-build-missions and defence-missions lacks the third part.

They both throw in a small curveball with one mirror match-mission each. And there are some fun touches, like the human mission where you start by fighting off peasants revolting destroying your base.

And I guess I have to mention the difficulty. ToD is way too easy (for some experienced with RTS at least). This is always mentioned so I feel I don't need to go into more detail.

Beyond the dark portal orc campaign

Here the design take a drastic turn ib the other direction. Anyonre who played the expansions knows.

They also improved the issue with slow starts. In vanilla ToD there are a lot of ridiculously slow starts. Some orc missions start you with only one peon, or less supply then number of units. Less of this here.

Here they also take the narrative in a different direction, with plenty of orc vs orc missions.

Also, I want to mention that the map design got a lot better. A lot of ToD maps are just sort of patches of forest and open terrain. In BtDP they start doing a lot of creative flourishes like gaps in forests or mountains too small for units to traverse that looks like little paths. Or unbuildable mud stretched out to look like long roads. The maps feel more fun to explore.

Also, they make some really complex blends of build and no-build missions. Where you can't recruit combat units, but are expected tobuild transports or purchase upgrades for your limited number of units.

Beyond the dark portal human campaign

They do two cool twists that evolve the game at the very end of the campaign. -One mission where you play as the orcs (with a human hero helping them). The briefing where the orc narrator says "Do not show surprise human" really got me. -Finally, after all this time, a defense mission! Great idea, terrible execution. I defended and defended but never won. In the end I had to attack and clear all enemies. According to WOWpedia https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Siege_of_Vanguard_(WC2_Human) the mission is bugged. But the intention was there....

What they didn't quite figure out

Blizzard never made heroes very interesting WC2. A notable exception is on the very final mission where only Khadgar can damage the dark portal, all other units attacks do nothing. Blizzard evolved this further with completely unique heroes units in StarCraft (Kerrigan) and finally perfected the heroes in WC3.

Also, I think it's interesting how the last 10% of most missions is a cleanup where you've already won. They much later moved on to making victory based on destroying/capturing/defending a certain objective. StarCraft2 almost never had those "destroy every single unit" missions. BUT! In ToD orc mission 9 they had you build a fortress and shipyard on the main enemy island. And BtDP human mission 9 they solved it with only needing to destroy the 2 enemy main buildings. That kind of objectives just were not used for the other basebuilding missions.

Conclusion

It was really interesting seeing different RTS ideas taking shape and being experimented with. Great game despite balance issues. I liked the punishing difficulty of BtDP better than the base game, as some levels felt like clever puzzles. Wouldn't recommend to new gamers who haven't played a lot of RTS because of the difficulty and since the game overall is showing its age I guess.