Warcraft Remastered is a trip through history that never was, and always will be

I played Warcraft II for the first time at a friend’s house, on LAN multiplayer. I didn’t know what Warcraft was; I didn’t even have much experience with the best real-time strategy games. I’d grow to love games like Age of Empires II and Starcraft, but at that point, I didn’t know what I was doing. I chose Orcs because they looked cool, had dragons (dragons were also cool), and probably lost all the games we played. I didn’t think about it again, until years later, my World of Warcraft-obsessed friends, convinced me to play that. I picked a mage because the one in the opening cinematic fighting an Infernal was, again, cool, and the rest is history.

I came to love Warcraft III after the fact because those same friends wouldn’t shut up about it. I bought a Battle Chest and everything. I still have it. And when I went back to Warcraft and Warcraft II out of curiosity, several years later, I remembered that I had seen all of this before. It was like watching a movie on TV, and then going back, years later, and watching all the sequels out of order.

Revisiting Blizzard’s new Warcraft and Warcraft II remasters is like seeing any old friend you haven’t thought much of after years away. Now they have a funny mustache, and it looks so out of place on their face that you have to avoid staring. In many ways, these games are just the way you remember them. In other ways, crucial ways that undermine the design of the original games, they aren’t. They are neither historical preservations nor remakes with better graphics, but something in-between.

Once more, with a slightly bigger group of Orcs

Like other remasters of this type (think EA’s excellent Command and Conquer Collection, the more-mixed Halo Anniversary releases, and Blizzard’s own Starcraft: Remastered), players can flip between the original graphics and the crisp, updated graphics with a more modern aspect ratio. The modern graphics, especially in the original Warcraft, sacrifice a coherent visual style for a more readable, and somehow less interesting, look. In Warcraft II, the updated graphics actually look worse than the Battle.net Edition. The refreshed visuals in both games look like what I imagine a shoddy mobile port might look like. At least there’s the remastered music, which if not out and out better beyond the obvious sound quality boost, is different in a meaningful way.

The real trick to these remasters — and the thing that will make it more appealing to a modern audience — are the quality-of-life changes. One of the core features of Starcraft: Remastered was that it did not, and would not, change the gameplay of the original. To do so would be to change what made StarCraft, a foundational esport whose competitive scene persists to this day, what it was. That would be a dangerous game.

The Warcraft remasters were not afforded the same reverence. There are many quality-of-life upgrades here, and like all powerful magics, they come at a cost. The original Warcraft’s four-units-at-a-time group limit is bumped to nine, which matches Warcraft II’s original number. Warcraft II was bumped to 12, mirroring Starcraft. These alterations fundamentally change Warcraft’s design and balance, especially for Warcraft II and its online multiplayer. The series has always focused on smaller unit selection limits, in the words of producer/programmer Patrick Wyatt, “based on the idea that users would be required to pay attention to their tactical deployments rather than simply gathering a mob and sending them into the fray all at once.” Even adding three to Warcraft II’s limit changes it.

You feel it in subtle ways. It’s in the smallness of some of the maps. I feel it when I force so many units to move as one with early RTS pathfinding, through a space not designed to hold so many of them moving at once. Change is apparent in fights that are less intricate and challenging when I control more units with a single command. I’m even aware of what’s new when I don’t need to click on a unit to see its health bars, which are toggleable, or add units to a group by shift-clicking them, as I must in the original Warcraft. Some of these smaller changes are nice, but the largest one is that players don’t have to run the original game in DOSBox, which feels like a revelation. Despite these changes, though, both games feel their age at every turn, and the changes make me wonder why Blizzard didn’t opt for more tweaks if the goal was to modernize the games and not preserve them.

If you’re going to mess with the number of selectable units to make these games more appealing to modern players, why not add the option to move the menu from the left side of the screen to the bottom, where it appears in every other Blizzard RTS since Starcraft? Why not show health and damage attributes in the original Warcraft? Why not redo the original cutscenes completely instead of up-rezzing them? Why keep the need to connect buildings with roads in the original Warcraft, a charming oddity in the realm of the modern RTS that dates it more than any selectable unit cap or visual limitation could in 2024? The list goes on.

Warcraft I: Remastered and Warcraft II: Remastered feel caught between eras, as if Blizzard couldn’t decide what these re-releases should be. There are not enough modernizations here, I’ll wager, to tempt fans who didn’t grow up with these games, and they aren’t historical artifacts, either. It’s a strange place for games that are so foundational to their genre, and yet so irrelevant to what the series they kick-started would eventually become. At least these remasters don’t replace the original games wholesale. You can still buy the originals and play them as they originally were.

Re-reforged in fire

The real prize in this Battle Chest is version 2.0 of Warcraft III: Reforged. Reforged was, at launch, a painfully unfinished, buggy remaster that replaced the original game wholesale, whether you wanted it to or not. It dropped many of the game’s original features in the process. Its launch was so disastrous that it was the subject of mass refunds (including one by yours truly), and several people (including your friendly neighborhood writer-man) resorted to manually patching their disc copies up to the version right before the Reforged update — that’s version 1.29.1.9160, if you’re nasty — so they wouldn’t have to deal with an update that made the game worse.

Blizzard could have given up on Reforged. Publishers and developers have scraped roadmaps for less. To its infinite credit, it hasn’t. Reforged 2.0 is a big leap forward, adding everything from new portraits and skins, music from the first two Warcraft games, and leveling in multiplayer, and a lot more. The big thing to me is the new Classic HD visuals for units, buildings, effects, icons, and so on. More importantly, players can mix and match between the Reforged and Classic HD graphics. If you prefer the original buildings but like Reforged’s character models, you can make that visual blend happen.

A lot has gone into version 2.0 of Reforged, and it shows, though there are still bugs Blizzard has had to hotfix since the update. It will likely never be the game we were initially promised, and this is probably the version of it we should have gotten at the jump, but WarCraft III is still an incredible game that’s worth playing. More to the point, the fact that these updates exist at all shows Blizzard still cares. That matters.

Had I known the impact Warcraft would have had on my life, I probably would have tried harder in those multiplayer games way back when. Now, I’m just happy Warcraft’s early days are getting their moment in the sun. These remasters aren’t history lessons, and I’m not sure anyone who isn’t already deeply into the series (or interested in what it used to be) will get much out of these re-releases. But it’s good that people can play them, and the originals, side-by-side. They’re a reminder of what Warcraft was before it became what it is, and what games were, many years ago, before they became what they are now. They represent what the industry at large might be again someday: a place where history, even changed and imperfectly preserved, is something we value, not bury when it stops making money.

These games aren’t perfect, nor are these releases. They won’t win many new fans, nor convert old enemies. They no longer represent what Warcraft is. But they are — in an industry that sells jingling keys, where careers are callously sacrificed by the tens of thousands so executives can give themselves yet another bonus; where anything that isn’t an instant success is delisted for a tax break; where medium-defining art is thrown aside like garbage when a music license expires; where games are left to die so publishers can sell what you “updated versions” of what you already own back to you; where art-as-a-product that is not an endlessly monetizable trend doesn’t matter — proof that someone, somewhere, in the midst of all that cares at least a little about how we got here. About the games that made us who we are and the medium what it is.

And right now, that’s enough.

Warcraft Remastered Battle Chest is available now on PC.