Archive page 3 / 3 for Warcraft Retrospective

Warcraft Retrospective 10: Nobody Expects the Alliance Expedition!

We’re almost finished with Warcraft 2. All that’s left is the human campaign of Beyond the Dark Portal. But since this is my last chance to talk about that game, first I’d like to deal with a couple of topics about Warcraft 2 in general that don’t really fit anywhere specific.

Warcraft Retrospective 9: Grand Theft Artifact

So the orcs start the Beyond the Dark Portal story in a position mostly worse than they were in back at the start of Warcraft 1. Half their clans have been lost to the Second War, Orgrim Doomhammer has been captured, and the Dark Portal destroyed, so the remaining clans are left on a dying Draenor. One silver lining is that Gul’dan is dead too, so there’s nobody to drag the Horde back to its demonic days.

Warcraft Retrospective 8: Beyond the Dark Portal, the Manual

Beyond the Dark Portal is the first expansion pack ever released for a Blizzard game, and is in many ways an unusual one. For one, it doesn’t change the gameplay at all, introducing no new units1, buildings, or mechanics. It only adds two new campaigns, one per faction, and several multiplayer maps.

  1. Except for hero units in campaigns, a mechanic that I’ll cover separately. ↩

Warcraft Retrospective 6: Doomhammer Goes North

Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness was actually the first Warcraft game I ever played in my life, as a child in early school soon after it came out. I didn’t have a computer back then, so I played it on my friends’ computers. And I have a confession to make: when I played it, I didn’t know anything I’ve been talking about for the last four posts.

Warcraft Retrospective 3: Warcraft 1, the Orc Campaign

Based on the somber, detailed language of the Warcraft 1 manual, you might expect the game itself to have washed-out colors tending towards grey and brown, and an overall eerie, unsettling atmosphere slanted into horror.

Warcraft Retrospective 2: Warcraft 1, the Manual

One day, I did an interesting mental exercise. I rewatched the first Star Wars movie, Episode IV: A New Hope — or rather just Star Wars as it was known at release — pretending I was seeing it for the first time, and knew nothing whatsoever about the Star Wars setting as we’ve come to think of it.