30 Year Anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness

Summary

It has now been 30 years since WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness was released. After the great response to Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, released in November 1994, Blizzard began working on Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness. Development stared in the first months of 1995, and the game was released in North America and Australia on December 9, 1995. While WarCraft: Orcs and Humans had laid the foundations of the series — arguably even for the RTS genre at a whole — it was really WarCraft II that took things to new heights. More units could be selected at once, the player could right-click to issue commands, naval and aerial combat was introduced, and buildings and units could be upgraded. The graphics were more vivid and visually appealing, and features like the Fog of War was introduced, where you could only see in the vicinity of your own units — unlike in the first game, where you could indefinitely see any area you had previously visited, you now had to continuously scout the map. Many things still resembled the first game. The two factions — the Humans and the Orcs — were balanced through their similarites. For every unit and building of one faction, the other had one that was functionally equivalent, and so the sides largely mirrored each other. The only real differences lay in the spells available to their higher-level units. In that regard, the clear winners were the Orcs, who had a tremendous advantage thanks to the incredibly powerful and unbalanced Bloodlust spell of the Ogre-Magi. It is quite impressive that Blizzard managed to release a title of such quality in such a short span of time, especially considering that the overall design and gameplay evolved during development. Originally, Blizzard’s concept blended modern and fantasy elements, such as fighter pilots being ambushed by a fire-breathing dragon. In the Alpha version (it is still probably floating around somewhere on the Internet) which was given to magazines for review shortly before the game's release,...