Video Games

Warcraft 2: Remastered appears to be coming

According to an update to Blizzard's content delivery network

Marco Wutz

Blizzard Entertainment / Microsoft

It looks like Blizzard is gearing up for an announcement of Warcraft 2: Remastered in the near future. According to BlizzTrack, which monitors updates to the Battle.net platform, the studio is preparing for an internal alpha test of the game. WoWHead reported that the backend update contained background images and logos for the product’s depiction on the platform.

Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness was originally published in 1995 and was acclaimed by critics and users alike as one of the best RTS games ever made at the time, becoming the basis for 1998’s StarCraft and greatly enhancing Blizzard’s reputation as masters of the genre.

Aside from a campaign and multiplayer, the game notably featured a map editor that allows users to create custom scenarios – a culture that later gave rise to flourishing custom game scenes in StarCraft and Warcraft 3, which ultimately spawned the MOBA genre.

Some fans aren’t enthusiastic about the potential announcement of Warcraft 2: Remastered, though, remembering the absolutely disastrous launch of Warcraft 3: Reforged in 2020. The modernized take on Warcraft 3 was fraught with technical issues, lacked features present in the original game, and made some changes that players heavily disagreed with. Worst of all, many of these issues persist to this day and have never been fixed.

On the brighter side stands the treatment StarCraft got with StarCraft: Remastered in 2017. It kept the original’s gameplay and features faithfully intact, while providing modernized graphics and quality-of-life improvements to make the title more accessible on today’s systems.

In case you’ve missed the latest official news around Blizzard’s RTS games, StarCraft and StarCraft 2 are now on Xbox Game Pass. 

We’ll keep you posted on that potential confirmation of Warcraft 2: Remastered.

Published
Marco Wutz
MARCO WUTZ

Marco Wutz is a writer from Parkstetten, Germany. He has a degree in Ancient History and a particular love for real-time and turn-based strategy games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War, Age of Wonders, Crusader Kings, and Civilization as well as a soft spot for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. He began covering StarCraft 2 as a writer in 2011 for the largest German community around the game and hosted a live tournament on a stage at gamescom 2014 before he went on to work for Bonjwa, one of the country's biggest Twitch channels. He branched out to write in English in 2015 by joining tl.net, the global center of the StarCraft scene run by Team Liquid, which was nominated as the Best Coverage Website of the Year at the Esports Industry Awards in 2017. He worked as a translator on The Crusader Stands Watch, a biography in memory of Dennis "INTERNETHULK" Hawelka, and provided live coverage of many StarCraft 2 events on the social channels of tl.net as well as DreamHack, the world's largest gaming festival. From there, he transitioned into writing about the games industry in general after his graduation, joining GLHF, a content agency specializing in video games coverage for media partners across the globe, in 2021. He has also written for NGL.ONE, kicker, ComputerBild, USA Today's ForTheWin, The Sun, Men's Journal, and Parade. Email: marco.wutz@glhf.gg

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