| Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness | |
|---|---|
 Boxart |
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| Developer(s) | Blizzard Entertainment |
| Publisher(s) | PC, Mac OS Blizzard Entertainment (North America) Ubisoft (Europe) Saturn, PlayStation Electronic Arts (North America, Europe) Electronic Arts Victor (Japan) |
| Designer(s) | Ron Millar |
| Platform(s) | MS-DOS, Linux, AmigaOS 4, Mac OS, Sega Saturn, PlayStation, Microsoft Windows |
| Release date(s) | PC, Mac OS NA December 9, 1995 EU 1996 Saturn, PlayStation NA August 31, 1997 EU August 31, 1997 JP November 27, 1997 |
| Genre(s) | Real-time strategy |
| Mode(s) | Single player, Multiplayer |
| Rating(s) | ESRB: T OFLC: G8+ ELSPA: 15+ |
| Media | CD-ROM |
| Input methods | Keyboard and mouse, gamepad, |
Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness is the sequel to the popular real-time strategy game Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, developed by Blizzard Entertainment and released in December of 1995. Users play as either orcs or humans in a fantasy medieval world full of swords and sorcery.
The game was originally written for MS-DOS; there was also a Mac OS version of the game. Blizzard also released an expansion pack, developed by Cyberlore Studios, known as Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal on April 30, 1996. Blizzard released Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness for Microsoft Windows, combined with its expansion, in 1999, under the name Warcraft II: Battle.net Edition. Changes made for this release included multiplayer support via Blizzard's online gaming service, Battle.net. There is also a sequel to this, Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, released in July 2002. The game has a linear single-player campaign for each side, and a multiplayer option via a LAN or the Internet, using existing or user-created maps. According to the README.TXT file included alongside the Warcraft II demo version, the graphics are pre-rendered 3D models.
Contents |
Story
The game is set six years after the fall of Azeroth (the orc campaign ending from Warcraft: Orcs & Humans) in the First War in Warcraft: Orcs & Humans. The Orcs decide to conquer the northern lands and acquire Lordaeron for their empire. The battles that follow will later be known as the Second War.
The Orcish Horde stages a renewed invasion against the Humans. The survivors of Azeroth have fled to Lordaeron and the remaining Human nations band together into the Alliance to withstand the Horde. They are joined by the High Elves of Quel'thalas and the Dwarves of Khaz Modan. The Alliance repels an assault on the southern shores of Lordaeron but comes under siege in Quel'thalas and Khaz Modan. Gradually, the Alliance armies repel the Horde. They face treachery from the Nation of Alterac, which had started working with the Horde when the invasion began.
The Horde itself has become divided when Gul'dan splits off from his Stormreaver clan. Together with Cho'gall and his Twilight's Hammer clan, he searches for the Tomb of Sargeras. Orgrim Doomhammer, Warchief of the Horde, needs to dispatch some of his forces to deal with Gul'dan, weakening the Horde's front.
Eventually, the armies of the Alliance press into Azeroth and lay waste to the Orcish main base at Blackrock Spire, a battle in which the Alliance loses Lord Anduin Lothar, their military commander. The final battle is fought at the Dark Portal, the gateway between Azeroth and the Orcish homeworld Draenor. The Archmage Khadgar destroys the portal but does not seal the rift between the two worlds. This enables Ner'zhul to stage a new invasion in the expansion pack Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal. The Orcs that had not fled to Draenor through the portal before its destruction are either killed or rounded up in internment camps. Orgrim Doomhammer, the leader of the Orcish Horde, is taken prisoner and escorted to Lordaeron.
Units and structures
Like Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, most of the game's units on the two sides are immediate counterparts to each other. For example, the basic fighting units, the Human Footman and the Orc Grunt, share the same statistics, as do the Elven Archer/Ranger and Troll Axethrower/Berserker. The armies are balanced by their similarity; the only real differences can be found in the spells used by some higher-level units. The number of units has been increased, and the units themselves have more elaborate abilities.
Naval combat was first introduced into the Warcraft series. Again, similar naval units for both sides have equal capabilities and statistics; only their name and graphic design are different. There are transports, oil tankers and attacking ships, such as the destroyer and battleship (the Orcs have their counterpart ships, too).
As an aesthetic change, both sides are allied with three minor races. Humans allied with Elves, Dwarves and Gnomes while Orcs allied with Ogres, Trolls and Goblins.
Some campaign missions feature hero units. Hero units have heightened statistics compared to their normal counterparts, cause mission failure when killed, and each have a unique picture and name.
Playable heroes in the Tides of Darkness campaigns include Uther the Lightbringer, a paladin, Zul'jin, an axethrower, and Cho’gall, an ogre mage. Non-playable characters in the campaigns are Sir Lothar, a knight, and Gul'dan, a death knight. In Beyond the Dark Portal, hero units are considerably more powerful than normal troops and play a greater part in the completion of missions.
Buildings
The player's base is constructed by the side's worker unit. The Peasant or Peon harvests lumber and gold to construct the buildings that are the foundation of Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness' technology tree, with new buildings enabling players to build new units and research new attributes. The buildings are again balanced by similarity; every building in one army has a counterpart in the other army.
The basic main structure is the town hall, without which other worker units may not be built. Gold (from any available Gold Mine) and lumber (from the forested areas) can be returned here to add to the player's stockpile. The town hall buildings can be upgraded to make more advanced structures available and increase the gold income. A lumber mill can also act as a local collection facility for wood. One important difference between Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness and Warcraft:Orcs and Humans is that buildings no longer need to be placed next to a road, but rather anywhere in the game map, this allowed players a greater degree of freedom when creating their home base and defensive structures. The new game also allows for the creation of walls, but only in multiplayer mode.
There are also buildings to train units, upgrade units or make available more advanced units or town hall upgrades. A third resource, oil, is collected in the sea and is vital to building a navy. Oil tankers can build the oil platform and transport the oil back to the shipyard or refinery.
Utilities, modifications and conversions
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Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness was an unusual game for the time because a large number of third-party utilities were written for it. Among the first things, Daniel Lemberg reverse-engineered the Warcraft II map file (*.pud) format and created the first third-party map editor, War2xEd, which could do numerous things the bundled map editor could not do, such as editing unit attributes. Although Lemberg did not make the source code for War2xEd public, he did publish the complete Warcraft II map file format, which led to a wealth of new tools, including a Macintosh version of the tool called PudMaster. More importantly, Blizzard began to use War2xEd internally, and it influenced them to bundle a feature-rich editor with their immensely popular game StarCraft, which was released later, in 1999.
The next important breakthrough came when Alexander Cech and Lemberg broke the encryption used in the base game data files. Cech went on to create a program called Wardraft, which allowed users to browse and modify the contents of the game data files, allowing comprehensive modifications. The spawn of extensive alterations became known as "Total Conversions", and a great many projects were in motion for a good long while.
Another important revolution was the introduction of a completely new engine called Stratagus. Instead of using the engine and modifying the images/animations/sounds that the engine uses, Stratagus is a completely re-written version of the Warcraft II gaming engine. (Wargus uses the original War2 units/sounds but it uses Stratagus instead of the Warcraft 2 engine.) Thus, writing a completely different game became possible and that game lives on today as Bos Wars (Battle of Survival). Stratagus and Wargus are no longer developed (although Wargus is essentially complete.) The developers have instead put their efforts into completing BOS.
Special features
- Humorous unit quotations are a feature of Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, following the tradition of the original Warcraft: Orcs & Humans. If a single unit is clicked on several times in a row, his or her voice samples change from regular to longer, emotional ones. He or she may start getting angry at the player, or quote lines in reference to movies or games. For example, a footman would say, "don't you have a kingdom to run?" or "are you still touching me?" These phrases differed in the game's demo for the Footman and Grunt units, and were mostly indignations to purchase the full version. In a pre-release version sent to magazines for reviews, these quotations included samples like "I love your publication!" or "Remember: A good review... for Warcraft 2."[1]
- Clicking on a non-playable critter such as a sheep enough times causes it to blow up.
- If the disk for Beyond the Dark Portal or the original demo is inserted into a CD player, the orchestrated music from the game can be played. In addition, there is a bonus 13th track called "I'm a Medieval Man" which features remixed sound bites from the first game. The track is also available in-game by typing "disco" as a cheat. (This however gives you the status cheater when you finish that mission.) "Medieval Man" is also a cheat code in Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness to play the song as background music or in StarCraft to obtain all unit upgrades for free. Also, in StarCraft, if one clicks on an observer while playing as the Protoss, a clip of the song will be played. The song is also a reference to the Command & Conquer song "Target", which is often mislabeled as "Mechanical Man" in reference to the only words one hears in the song.[citation needed]
- The script that was used in the book positioned in the background screen while the player was informed about mission objectives is the Cyrillic alphabet, but the language in which it is written is English. The text contains a small section of a game story text, mentioning how the Orcish hordes entered the forests of Lordaeron.
- The soundtrack by Glenn Stafford has been released in MP3 format by Blizzard.[2]
Online play
Although Warcraft II Battle.net Edition wasn't released until 1999, online play was widespread from the game's release using IPX Emulators such as Kali. Warcraft II (along with Command & Conquer) was one of the first real-time strategy games to be played widely online, and spawned several leagues, including the International Warcraft League (IWL) and singles and teams ladders on Case's Ladder.
The Mac release allowed multiplayer games over TCP/IP. The IRC channel MacWarCraft served as a gathering place for online play, before Battle.net was created (Bfitz was known to play within Irc, also known as Brian Fitzgerald of Blizzard). The AOWL (America Online Warcraft League) was a popular league created by the Macintosh AOL community, it provided a ranking system and helped players find opponents. Another league was later developed called MaG (short for Macintosh Gaming League) that further expanded the competitive network of Mac gaming to include Warcraft II and other games. As for online play today, competitive online play still exists on an independent player run server. Warcraft II Server
Ports
Tides of Darkness and Beyond the Dark Portal were released together for Sega Saturn and PlayStation under the title Warcraft II: The Dark Saga in 1997 by Electronic Arts.
There was also a reverse engineered free software game engine called Freecraft, which allowed users to import the actual game data from Warcraft II and play the game on different platforms and with additional features like queuing unit production, finding idle workers, an improved AI and network connectivity for up to 16 players. In addition to being compatible with Warcraft II, it could also be used with a set of artwork and scenarios made by the Freecraft Media Project (FcMP). Although the actual Freecraft program and FcMP used no art or code from Warcraft II, the project received a threatening cease-and-desist letter from Blizzard, apparently due to similarity to the Warcraft trademarks. Not willing to fight Blizzard, the maintainers canceled the whole project, later rekindling it under the name of Stratagus. By using this game engine through Wargus, the game is also playable on BSD, Linux, Mac OS X, AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS.
References
External links
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