Honouring 30 years of Warcraft: how remasters and classic Classic WoW will work

Blizzard is celebrating three decades of Warcraft, with remasters of the original two games and a reset of World Of Warcraft Classic.

World Of Warcraft celebrates its 20th anniversary on November 23, but the franchise is far older than that. It’s often forgotten nowadays, but World Of Warcraft is actually a spin-off, from a franchise that started off as a series of real-time strategy games. And so it was on November 15, 1994 that developer Blizzard released Warcraft: Orcs & Humans and took the first step towards a game that is only getting more popular with age.

With the original game now being 30 years old, that means the franchise is enjoying a double anniversary this month. To celebrate the fact, Blizzard has announced remasters of both the original game and its 1995 sequel, plus a new 2.0 update for the disastrous remaster of Warcraft 3, which was originally released in 2002.

Blizzard previously said the original two games were too old to be enjoyable anymore but the remaster of Orcs & Humans includes new ‘modern’ controls, a new interface, faster gameplay, and completely hand-drawn graphics – that you can toggle on and off at will.

Warcraft 2 is getting the same treatment, plus online multiplayer and backwards compatibility with all existing custom maps, which is certain to please fans. Meanwhile Warcraft 3: Reforge 2.0 will have a new UI, a new lighting system and improved environments, and various quality of life improvements.

The three games are currently only available via Battle.net (so not Steam) and cost £8.99 for Warcraft 1, £12.59 for Warcraft 2, and £24.99 for Warcraft 3. Or you can get them all in one Battle Chest for £34.99 (so a saving of £11.58).

It’s a very welcome way to celebrate the anniversary, especially as so many people today are likely to be unaware of the games and indeed the entire real-time strategy genre. Orcs & Humans was heavily influenced by Westwood Studios’ Dune 2 – which established the template for all future games, including both Warcraft 2 and Westwood’s follow-up Command & Conquer.

While turn-based strategy games have seen a resurgence in interest in recent years, real-time games never have, in large part because they don’t work well on consoles and greatly benefit from mouse and keyboard controls, and high resolution monitors.

Although Warcraft sister series Starcraft kept the real-time flag flying for a little while, thanks to its popularity as an esports game, by the mid-2000s the genre had completely fallen out of fashion, as new ideas dried up and even the most popular series experienced ever decreasing returns.

That’s ironic given that the MOBA genre, including games such as League Of Legends and Dota, were born from mods made for Warcraft 3. That success came years later though and in the meantime Blizzard tried to expand Warcraft with a point ‘n’ click graphic adventure. But that was also a dying genre at the time and production problems meant it was never completed.

However, its story did influence work on World Of Warcraft, especially in terms of orc character Thrall, and in late 2004 the massively multiplayer online (MMO) game became an instant hit and remains to this day one of the most popular video games in the world.

Technically, World Of Warcraft is an MMORPG, as most MMOs are, which means it works like a traditional action role-playing game but within a game world populated by hundreds of other human players, who you can co-operate with in group events or largely ignore if you want to play on your own. Although the setting and characters are the same, in gameplay terms World Of Warcraft has nothing in common with the original three games, so it’s going to be interesting to see what new players think of the remasters.

The moment World Of Warcraft became a hit every publisher immediately tried to emulate it with their own MMO, in a rush to jump on the bandwagon, which is highly reminiscent of current attempts to follow in the footsteps of Fortnite and other live service titles. Especially in the fact that it quickly became clear that there was only room at the top for a small handful of games.

At this point, World Of Warcraft has had 10 major expansions, with another two already announced. One of the secrets of the game’s success though, is that it also receives a constant stream of smaller, free updates that ensure there’s always new things to do and reasons to keep playing.

The 30th anniversary update, for example, is number 11.1 and called Undermined. It’ll be out later this year and involves goblin capital city Undermine, where it adds a new dungeon to explore, a new PvP competitive map, and a new raid zone with eight different bosses. More unexpectedly it also adds cars, in which you can race through the city streets.

That’s the sort of addition no one would’ve guessed at when World Of Warcraft first launched but given so much has changed over the last 20 years many players have begun to get nostalgic about how the game used to be, without all the modern additions. That led to the release of World Of Warcraft Classic in 2019, which has been slowly adding back in the new expansions in chronological order.

But that’s been going on for so long now that Blizzard has announced a ‘classic Classic’ version of the game, resetting it for a second time and meaning there’ll now be three different versions of the game running at the same time. Officially known as World Of Warcraft: Classic 20th Anniversary Edition, the new (old) version will start on November 21 and offers a chance to play the original game as it was in 2004, before any of the expansions were released.

Nevertheless, there will be some mod cons, such as the Chronoboon Displacer and the revamped honour ranking system. Plus, hardcore mode will be available from the start, where if you die that’s it and there’s no way to resurrect yourself – although you can stay and chat as just a ghost.

It’s very likely that in another five years there’ll be a need for a third Classic version of the game, because World Of Warcraft as a whole has never had more players than right now. That’s in part because China has really got into it in recent years but it’s also a testament to the fact that if you keep your audience satisfied, some games really can last forever.