Warcraft 2 Campaign!! - Revisiting One of My 1st RTSs | WC2 P1 

“My brother and I played so much Warcraft 2 as a kid…” Sean and Nick confirmed as a previous child archon

I was a little too young when this came out and didn’t speak English yet. StarCraft was the game of my childhood. This was my dad’s fav game. And yet the look and sound of it has stayed with me. I think it’s one of the most beautiful games ever. All of the sprites are so colourful, memorable and clear! Chris Metzens sketches are gorgeous. The music I still listen to when I want to get pumped in the shower.

Yes! I got this game handed to me by my dad after a painful orthodontist visit in ‘95. So many good memories. Can’t wait to watch this whole series!

So fun fact about warcraft 2 that I didn't know until I played through a bunch of challenge runs last year: Saving and reloading completely destroys the AI in this game. It just... makes the AI behave super weirdly, changes their attack patterns completely, makes them often stop training new units, changes their upgrade decisions, and often makes them forget to chop lumber. It's a little ridiculous that I never noticed this as a kid, but I guess the AI just breaks in other ways often enough that it felt normal enough to me. Its also not a consistent glitch, as it has different effects depending on where the AI currently is in their script, and reloading a save a second time can change the AI to new modes. It also doesn't completely turn off the AI, just makes them... weird, so it's not always super obvious.

As a low skill rts player, audio overlap wasn't a bug it was a feature. I remember games as a kid that were just a battery of things that animated when you click on them, so it was a positive that you could intentionally spam voicelines for the effect

Isometric 90's games were peak. From WarCraft, C&C, TA, Diablo to Fallout, Balders Gate, HoMM, The Sims & Roller Coaster Tycoon, ALL GOATs.

Best sound track ever. Used to listen to it as a kid, still do as an adult. So good.

As a kid, the red and white grey of the orc buildings just looked like a bunch of candy cane decorations to me.

The unit quotes from this game wormed their way into 6-year-old me's head and never left at any point.

I will never forget the excitement of playing this in the computer lab at school during lunch break. This was THE game growing up

Love those nostalgia vids man. Also it's pretty crazy how well Warcraft 2 aged for it's time. It's still a very much playable game with iconic voice acting and beautiful music despite it's age.

When I first saw my older brother playing this, I thought it was a fun christmas-themed game, set at the north pole, with red and white striped candy canes decorating the entrance to Santa's workshop.

The midi music on a nice sound card is phenomenal still . Masterpiece . The game is GOLD , freaking GOLD . Cartoony graphics,amazing sound , amazing story. Just a piece of my history i will forever remember.

1:05:24 The corpses were a mild resource in 2, also. Death Knights could raise them as really bad skeletons, lol.

I can't believe that Day9 and I had the same "first RTS" experience in the form of Warcraft II. Day9 says how nostalgic it is for him to be playing it and all I can think is "Oh yeah. Me, too." This game was, quite literally, my childhood and just seeing the missions and the maps again makes me so nostalgic.

You're an absolute hero for playing this! After a day of insufferable project management hassle in the healthcare sector. This is a gem!

Having never played the game, I never once realized that the hearthstone matchmaking music was actually from WC2!

To some this music sounds familiar, even though they’ve never played Warcraft before. That’s because the song is still used in the retail version of WoW. It’s the song that plays when you go into a pet battle. It’s sorta a little Easter egg.

I know the original experience hits the nostalgia, but even for 30 minutes I’d love for you to try chronicles of the second war which is an amazing Warcraft 3 remastered full conversion of Warcraft 2.

46:34 Makes me think of Age of Empires 1 since I remember I had this strategy... 1. Find a large forest. 2. Chop down a narrow path that ideally curves around deep through the forest. 3. Chop down a clearing deep in the center of the forest. (Can also use catapults for clearing things out). Make sure not to create any new entrances into the center accidentally. 4. Build a base deep in the middle of the forest. 5. The enemy will be so perplexed by what is going on that it'll be a long time before they find your secret base. I also had it in Warcraft 3 where in the human campaign where you're defending a city being attacked from 3 directions I'd just build houses and stuff on the long road behind the city I was meant to defend... And like, there I would basically win the game because I would be hanging out with a few units as the undead destroyed everything... And I'd just be praying that they didn't find me before Uther arrived to save the day... Legit just like one peasant or something hiding out in the back... And then when Uther does arrive he's like "GOOD JOB ARTHAS! YOU DEFENDED THE VILLAGE!" and I'm just thinking "Don't lie to me Uther..."

I played warcraft 1&2 so much as a child that I would experience audio hallucinations of the voice lines and building sounds while in school. Zug.

Aww sheep, pigs, and seals so cute 🥰 can still hear my dad saying “ive got a flying machineeeee!” Hahah classic

The nostalgia is overwhelming. We only had one computer in the house. My older brother played the human campaign when it was his turn on the computer. I played the orcs during my turn. So many memories.

such nostalgia for this game. the music was awesome. it didn't take itself too serious. it was so much fun

All the sounds bring back so many memories, this game is peak nostalgia for me

The voiceover/"narrator" was done by Bill Roper, I'm pretty sure. Legendary, peak 90s voice acting. And of course the soundtrack was done by Glenn Stafford. If you want to hear a modern WoW track that would be right at home in Warcraft 2, look up "pride of the seas"

Popping the compact disk in the the CD player and cranking your sound system to max gives you the largest goosebumbs

The audio overlapping is pretty funny honestly. Definitely helped out by the fact that the audio in this game is incredible, so I don’t get tired of hearing it.

Wow this brings me back!!! I remember my older brother getting me into this! Always playing together on the weekends and building my own maps

I played this last year for the first time in ages, and MY GOD is it hard (when you get to the later levels). I can't believe I used to play this as a kid. One of my most memorable games of all time.

Ahh yes, brings me back to the windows 95 days where having a computer meant your family had made it. I spent hundreds of hours playing this and the expansion Beyond the Dark Portal. To think games back in the day even came with a free map creator! Loved making my own maps and playing them with hero units.

I’m vibrating with excitement. Haven’t played these games since I was a kid but all the sounds are forever stuck inside my brain.

Man... I played this game before I knew how to read. There's this family anekdote of me calling my brother to tell me what I was missing to build something. I love the attention to detail in this game. Things like icons changing based not just on the side you play, but "Attack" and "Stop" Icons changing when you upgrade weapons and armor respectively, but only for units to whom it applies, the fact that when a worker enters a gold mine it not only lights up, but there's a little pickaxe near the cart on the sptire that disappears because the worker takes it - which you can see better when mousing over it because the little magnifying glass that the mouse pointer changed to when hovering over something selectable actually works and magnified the part of the sprite inside of it.

My dad gave me this game (i still have the actual discs) the minuet i learned how to read. The core memories I have of playing the campaign and then later on against my mom and my dad in a 1v1v1 deathmatch multiplayer game...ended up being my mother who absolutely wrecked face. I'm not sure how she managed it because to this day when i replay the missions i cant, managed to reach GOD rank before the end of the game. Id pay full price for a remaster of Warcraft 2 and its expansion, without QOL improvements of course. The amount of times ive had to hit restart campaign because i couldnt win due to resource attrition made me realize that you have to be VERY conscious of how you play each one. You could really screw yourself early on if you dont plan accordingly.

So much nostalgia I love it. This game was my first intro into RTS games. StarCraft and AOE shortly followed. Opened up such fun worlds of gaming at such a young age. Have to thank my dad who always had a computer and was loaded up with floppy disks and CDs of 80s-90s games.

You've been one of my favorite streamers since about the time this game was still popular :) Crazy that you're still going strong. Loving watching you play whatever games you feel like and hearing your takes on them. This is a good era

I spent so much time in the sound editor for the game just playing all the different sounds and voice lines. Pure nostalgia to watch this.

I recently discovered you as streamer through the WoW videos and I already love watching your content! ♥

2:14:46 best part to me is that a Stromgarde solder one-manning an orc base and chasing down a single troll for a full minute is 110% lore accurate.

I still remember all the cheat codes. glittering prizes make it so every little thing she does deck me out it is a good day to die I can type “it is a good day to die” fast enough to save “Lord lorthar” on the flying stage. The next stage still says “Lord lothare is dead”.

Dude, one of the key points was that we could build anywhere now. In Warcraft 1 you could only build near roads.

"What'chu want?!" "Work, work."

One really fun anachronism about Sean's talk about how much of a leap forward RTS had come since Dune 2 is that things have come full circle in a way and Dune 2's interface and unit control - which has been wildly out of date since basically the very next RTS - has since found a perfect platform again in touch interfaces. Someone ported it to android, and playing dune 2 on a tablet genuine, unironically feels astonishing. I beat ALL THREE campaigns on my Samsung tablet. It didn't feel frantic or unintuitive at all. I actually bet the limited unit control groups of WC2 with generally not super crucial to perform micro would translate to touch as well. We need more novel RTS UI controls to bring the RTS to devices like phones and tablets. I'd argue that the much slower, single unit (or very small control group) design with select -> task -> target of dune 2 could be used in all sorts of touchscreen RTS.

Day9 continually building workers when he has 9000 gold but refuses to build a second barracks so he can train grunts to support his catapults... Yea he's definitely gone back to playing as he would as a kid 😂

1:32 so nostalgic I could cry

Funny thing about orc mission 6 is that you can just rush all the way to the end past enemy units with your main guy and win it as you are slightly faster than everything else.

The nice thing about these "annihilation rounds" was that farns counted. So you could leave one enemy farm perpetually on fire and plunder every resource on the map, then go back and finish killing that farm to win the round. 😀

The Orc voice that does the mission intros sounds like Fozzie Bear! XD

I remember playing multiplayer Warcraft 1 with my older brother when I was 5-6 years old. If you don't recall, you could only select one unit at a time and I was a dingus, so my older brother would deploy his units on the other side of a bridge with his superior 7 year old hand eye coordination. Meanwhile I would slowly select units one by one and send them across to their doom. Good times!

Dude I would play this game so many times. I finished these campaigns so many times over I knew every level by heart.

I was 10 when this dropped. Playing over a 56k connection was wild.

Really hope Day9tv continues playing WoW and also finds things in WoW that give him the “Oh hey I remember that thing in WCII!!” Or “I remember that place I destroyed!!!” lol

I love the wc2 campaign the mirroring of the factions with some levels just being fovused on a slightly different part of the same location is so cool, and story wise it really feels like as the orcs you are on the assault where as the humans youre constantly running arounf putting out fires

It's funny how day9 started gaming with a mouse only and later discovering you could use the keyboard, whereas I started gaming keyboard only and then started using the mouse with Warcraft 2.

So one thing about the AI in this game is it believes in proportionality. You can see it with how EXTREMELY angry they get when you send a whole bunch of units to their island vs how they reacted to the one single catapult.

the audio clips are just so good lol

1:51:38 they are so cool, because there is water. It doesn't feel cramped.

I haven't watched you in so long, happy to watch some of this!

Back when Blizzard made good games

this game was everything to me as a kid. spend nights and nights messing around in map editor. amazing game

This game, after years of not thinking about video games, had me in its clutches from minute one. Still a game addict and proud of it:]

Sapperking shall live on forever in the ladder matches lol. Loved this game when I was a kid. Thanks for reminding me day9 😊

I have been waiting for this for so long you have absolutely no idea. Please finish the game!

Man, Grover was a heavy smoker back in the 90s. Quite impressive they got him in for the orc voice overs.

The manuals for these games were amazing. Used to collect them there were unfortunately all destroyed in a basement flood but man they were cool

Yes Captain? You’re the Captain! ARG

This warcraft artwork is so rooted in 80s and 90s heavy metal I think perhaps as that type of metal went out of fashion so too did the art style of warcraft.

I remember seeing this on my friends macintosh. And how he had to go into some menu somewhere to modify how much memory the operating system was using so he could even load the game. I eventually got to play it myself when I got a PC of my own and I had such a good time with the ships in this game.

The problem you describe as "supply blockage" is why I like playing on High resource custom maps.

I'm surprised the retro gaming movement never moved on to recreate these isometric RTS games. Bring in a smattering of the devs favorite modern RTS features, get the badass pixel art that artists have started getting really good at, keep the scale smaller, etc. I feel like there's something there

“We love oil and murder uraagh!” 😂😂

On biome-specific resources, in particular oil, with a lot of RTS naval combat... I've yet to try an RTS game where naval control isn't incredibly snowbally. Of course, there's a lot of popular RTS's I haven't played, but still. It's particularly insane in Warcraft 2, where they had the *brilliant* design direction that you need a naval-specific economic setup to even get the base naval military unit. So the force multipliers of winning naval gets even more insane. Completely nuts and makes for atrocious balance... But it was the Wild West of RTS's back then, and none of us really cared. It was so immersive for its time. I think people generally underappreciate how many strides Warcraft 2 did for gaming, just a lot of small touches and codified/seeded a lot of things we take for granted today. It tends to be overshadowed by Starcraft (which is admittedly just gameplaywise a better version of Warcraft 2) and Warcraft 3 (which is great, but has an entirely different feel).

When it comes to things like ships and aircraft, I think whether or not they add to the overall concept depends largely how they are used, and the scale of the map. For example, If you have large maps, and use concepts like fuel, loiter times (for air craft) where if you deploy an Air unit they can't just hang out over the terrain, and would have to come down to refuel/repair, etc. Similarly with ships, and motorized land units, if you have to maintain supply lines to the front, how you deploy your units, and have differing order types such as Strategic vs Tactical. So if for example you wanted to make the DCS of the RTS genre, you could even do things like have hierarchical levels of player inputs, where a General player makes the overall strategy, tells other players where to deploy their units, and those players then handle the more micro deployment of units, and of differing services, such as Army, Navy, Airforce, etc, all having to have supply chains maintained, and those roles could be subdivided based on the number of players in the game. Now for a WCII scale game, this does not make any sense, but WC, and SC to me are Arena games, where something like Civilization we know as 4X. However what I am describing would be an intermediate class RTS. Probably better suited for something that encompasses the best of both, and would be akin to a simulator.

Awesome nostalgia kick, love that we're not interested in good RTS gameplay but instead focus on making sheep and seals explode, may actually have to dig out Warcraft 3 again

Thank you Day9, this was also my first RTS and I loved watching this. I got the Warcraft Battlechest and played this before the original game, and have so many good memories of playing this with my siblings and friends! This got me into C&C and AoE and eventually everything that followed XD. Edit: Honestly, one of my biggest disappointments with WC3 when it first came out was the removal of the navy as a major part of the gameplay. It took me a while to get over that lollll.

The soundtrack arround 7:20 is the same as Hearthstone's when you're looking for an opponent!!

One of my favorite games when I was young. Spent so many hours on the map editor

Suddenly realizing how much the Orc narrator sounds like Fozzy Bear...

The power of nostalgia man

One of most beautiful graphic and best music out there during that time. Peak Blizzard. My PC was a big cube back then.

I learned that my optimal size for a "do-anything army" in this game was 41 people. So build enough farms to feed that many, and we were good to go! :)

omg when Warcraft 2 came out and all the lore built upon the world of the first game. 1 and 2 both had such great online multiplayer

I just replayed this and it has been a huge nostalgia blast. Good stuff

Please play the Beyond the Dark Portal expansion too!

I love how they have steel oil refineries and boats with cannons, yet the armies are still bow & arrow and armored knights with swords.

Ahhh, back when all the audio was recorded and put on the CD in WAV format. I use to put this CD into my stereo, skip track 1 (data track) and jam out to the soundtrack.

"It one-shots? IT ONE-SHOTS?!" - Day9, after his 15% health remaining Ogre got hit.

I think one of the big failures of water in games, is that a lot of times the maps are just a lot of open water and IF they have small islands etc, they arent worth doing anything with. So it makes big maps actually feel empty. The oil patches HELP in war2, with giving you a reason to have control of the seas, but I think it would be a lot cooler if they had other water features like some games have, Reefs/ocean mountains you could hide units it, with some slow VERY large range siegers. I simpler change would be to make oil a more versatile reasource outside of ships. if certain tech required big oil costs then it would help to, but as is, you want JSUT enough navy to move your units around, and otherwise it isnt worth it.

Ahh, this and CnC, Red Alert, Conquest of the new world deluxe... those were the days

Never stop building workers? Funny thing, I always found 5 gold gatherers and 2 woodcutters to be sufficient per each Town Hall regardless of side or rank...

„Noones ever aimed a cannon into the sky and been successfull!“ u sure about that, sean? 😂

I've been playing Wargus almost every day recently. It's an open sourceish version of Warcraft 2 with some modern niceties like widescreen, etc.

I played this again a few months ago! I spent hours in the map editor as a kid.

This game stil has the best menu music ever made.

Control groups were part of the original game. It was a keyboard command. You could have groups of 4.

Combine an Arrow Tower with fully upgraded Axethrowers/Archers, and you may never have to worry about coastal defense again... 😀

I used to intentionally damage some of my own buildings because they looked cooler with a fire on top 😂 BTW Starcraft 2 also has exploding critters... I saw a Harstem game where his opponent exploded a critter and accidentally gave away his units' position (because he must have been in range of the critter)

The best. I have recently replayed this and it's so good. loved watching you play it :)

Love watching you play of warcraft 2, but the whole video I'm like: Go build guard towers all over the place for defense haha

The animation is pretty terrible, but the sprites themselves are gorgeous. 2D is so much easier to read than 3D. The more fancy graphics effects they add, the harder it is to tell what’s happening. This is *clean*