Yea, I know, just want to have a legal key since the game's out of print.

I guess I'll have to contact Blizzard again for a possible rerelease on Battle.net.

I can share you mine, if it means anything. Just promise real hard you won't give it further away. ;-)

Can't say how that would count as legal though...

Found you a boxed copy http://www.crovortex.com/webshop/igra-1057-Warcraft_II.html

Gothic? The cartoonish aspect was visible even then if you look closely, at briefing screens, unit responses... maybe not as apparent but still. The fact that the cancelled warcraft adventures were supposed to be a cartoon style game should tell you something.

and dragons, griffins, gnomes, undead, demons and draenei you forgot (though i don't know what else awaits in the exapnsion, as i haven't finished it yet).

BTW ogres are already in WC1.

goblins and gnomes, with explosives, lightbulbs (electricity!), aircraft; oil platforms, refineries, tanker ships, elven black-powder styled gunships - it was certainly wacky! As well as double headed split-personality ogres.

The manual has many pages of story detailing for example with the events that transpired in the original orcish world resulting in the invasion of azeroth, the demons, the warlocks, draenei, shamanistic roots of orcs, capturing of alexstrasza, the story of the guardian Medivh it's all already there. Some of it was already in the manual for the first Warcraft. And it's not completely excluded from campaigns themselves either, like in for example the mission with Gul'dan raising the isles with Sargeras' tomb, betraying the orcish warchief.

And of course you're forgetting Beyond the Dark Portal expansion.

Again I remind you of the whole store of Medivh as a Guardian presented as early as in the WC1 manual!

I'd say there's still a long way to reach the extreme diversity of races from Might and Magic universe... as well as the fact, that in might and magic you get sci-fi stuff, spaceships and all. (although most of it didn't make it to HoMM series, but it's still canon). Oh, I forget that Draenei came to Azeroth in a spaceship... which is awesome in my opinion.

Those few retcons here and there you call "rewriting"?

Not really a change in direction as a natural progression and expansion of the original themes as I tried to prove above.

All in all I think it's a case of selective memory - it was all there, just not that pronounced becouse of the technical specifications of the era as well as it being an RTS. Being able to actually walk the land forces the producers to fill in the gaps. The gaps were there so you filled it yourself beforehand with your imagination - and your imagination differed from that of the creators.

You want dark fantasy - look at Warhammer.

Game on...

The dungeon crawling missions from the first game to be precise and the fact that the adventures game was canceled could also tell you something.
The Wolf riders in the first game or Necrolytes, Damons, Warlocks, pretty dark and gothic even for 320x200.

Draenai weren't in game, manual only and the ogres were only large humans compared to the latter two-headed version. Again nothing exotic like pandas, nagas, murlocks, worgen (furry much?), goblin mechs, owlbears... the list could go on.

Holiday themed goblin/dwarven buildings were wacky and the multiple click responses are now a tradition, but nothing wacky about having naval and air units. Elves run the mill, so what's so strange that the smaller faster ship is build by them? Would it be much better if they shot arrows? Not a big counter to a troll ship with canons.

Yes the set pieces are set early on, but I'm talking about the missions themselves. Like build a foothold in the enemy territory, destroy oil platforms to cripple the enemy fleet, save the elven/troll hero to gain their allegiance.
If Gul'dan revolts your first logical step is to stop him, you can't continue your conquest with a large portion of your army in revolt and that is how it is handled.

I'm not forgetting the expansion pack, while it does introduce heroes as special units it never goes full retard like the spoiled prince seeking his destiny in the north with half the human army in tow.
Mission objectives were still decided by military logic, not some "grand destiny" logic.

Again you are confusing the game itself with the back story from the manual. I'm talking about how the story was handled in the game via missions and briefings.

What could I say to somehing like this?
http://gaming.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_Warcraft_miscellaneous_races
http://gaming.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_Warcraft_humanoid_races

Well some of it was there. Deamons for one, but no Night elves. Whole new landmasses were added.
You can say it's more adding than rewriting, but it is interfering with the established stuff, the most logical question being "Where does this stuff come from?".
Now it's a whole new Panda continent after the whole world map was revealed. Many new races in areas that were well explored in previous games.

Funny you mentioned Warhammer. Here's one for you: Did you know Warcraft I was first proposed to Games Workshop as a Warhammer computer game and was turned down?

I guess the first one is true, the second was just called out for plagiarism and with good right.

Good right? Lolwut? So anyone that has ever made a sci-fi RTS game is stealing / copying Warhammer?

So if you make an identical marine model and replace the helmet, that is original...

http://kofler.dot.at/40k/tyranid.html
See anything familiar here? Just remove the bioguns and swords.
Did you know they are also driven by a Hive mind? I guess the similarities never end :)

The Protoss as a combinations of Tau/Eldar are a bit more subtle though.

You've got to be kidding me, right? What's next, the humans in Starcraft look like the humans here on Earth, so that's copying too?

I've probably seen models like the Zerg in a hundred other games with aliens. Doesn't mean that anyone copied anything.

EDIT: This goes for all games / movies / stories / paintings / whatever. Not just about Blizzard.

We could say the same then for many things that continued up to World of Warcraft. Go to Felwood in WoW and hear the music there, and look at the corrupted animals... it could give you the creeps.

nothing wacky? the technology is wacky! The air gnome (not dwarf!) vehicle could not exist in the real world. ANd did you forget submarines and turtles with torpedo lunchers strapped on the back? You complained about goblin mechs yourself, and here is an example of simalrily crazy technology!

But why did he revolted? What was that Tomb of Sargeras? Who was this Gul'dan? All of this questions were in the background, though the engine did not permit answering them - it was in the manual. The game itself is just not telling everything just hinting, is all.

You're exaggerating, no mention of destiny there or taking half the army. And it's quite real, in times of monarchy politics many time rested upon personal whims, especially if some crazies got to power, and as the titles were inherited not earned...


Still Beyond the Dark Portal is a story of a heroic detachment of human troops going on a suicidal mission...

And you are ignoring the manual. It's an integral part of the game, designed by the creators, as an important storytelling device working along the game itself. Especially that we talk about the lore. There's not much difference between printing and putting it into the game (example: Dark Reign). If all WC3 did with WC2 was iintegrate the manual into the game how is it "destroying" the lore?

I assure you Might and Magic list is much larger. That's all I wanted to say.
better use wowwiki btw: http://www.wowwiki.com/Humanoid

I think everything got explained neatly in the mythos.... it was always "there", just we weren't told about it. Nobody said everything was well explored. It's only recently in our world that we don't have white spots on our maps, thanks to technology, though even now we hear of new explorations being done in places like the Amazonia. Pandaria is like america in our world - an undiscovered continent, what's wrong with that? I don't see how it is interfering.

Anyway, having played all WC games I definately see most of the changes as logical expansion, I don't see it as interfering. I understand someone not liking it, but I can't swallow conservative accusations of betrayal. Of course things could have evolved in a different way, but nothing in the original games privileged one way over the other. Warcraft is a world after all, and a world as such can hardly be summed up by a single book, or a game, and you sound like WC1 or WC2 was able to tell as everything about fauna, flora, societies, politics, architecture etc. of it. It's the end result that counts, and the end result is quite coherent, for a fantasy world.

Just off the top of my head:

-In Warcraft 3, Night Elves were presented as a fierce and savage race with a matriarchal society. Women were warriors and priestess, males were druids. After WoW they are nothing like that, more like a bunch of hippies and bouncy cheerleaders, and the gender-class division was scrapped.

-Thrall accepting warlocks into the Horde. I mean really? After annihilating the orc homeworld and threatening countless others? Sounds like a plan.

-Forsakens in the Horde. With Sylvanas' main advisor being a demon.

-Illidan and Kael'thas going mad for no apparent reason, except the charm of making them raid bosses, I suppose. Kael'thas even betrayed Illidan to ally himself with the very same demons he was fighting in Wc3.

-The million retcons about Sargeras and Draenei. I reccomend you to look this up, but as a recap: first Sargeras was corrupted by 'demons'. Then the demons weren't demons anymore, they were Eredar and in fact it's they who were corrupted by Sargeras. Some of them didn't want to be evil, so they fled on a giant crystal spaceship (YAY SPACESHIPS!) with the help of a benevolent race of giant crystal snowflakes. They landed on Draenor and called themselves Draenei.
Not the same draenei seen before WoW, mind you (wich the manual said were mutated by demonic energies when Draenor exploded). Nope, in truth those were mutated by the giant mushrooms from Zangamarsh. Don't ask.

-Blood Elves allying themselves with the Horde out of spite to the Alliance. Yeah, it's not like orcs and undeads didn't do even worse to their land and race in the previous wars... oh wait.

-In Wc2 high elves were mentioned to be druids, and their empathy with nature was a pretty strong trait of their race. In WoW there's no trace of that at all, except for (supposedly) a corrupted druid in Tempest Keep.

-Tauren paladins.

I love how you cut up parts of the post to pinpoint the problem, while leaving out parts you can't argument yourself out of. Other things you just won't let go of like the manual, while I'm talking about how the story is handled IN GAME (because whatever the back story is war is handled very different in War2 and War3, again IN GAME).

Enjoy the "rich" story and lore of the series. Funny how things get too complicated like in Avogadro6's post when so many things are stuffed into the game.

It's a travesty, they completely removed the singleplayer game and force people to play online. Which means that to play by yourself you still have to put up with the lag that comes from playing online. What's more, you can't cheat in singleplayer if you so choose either because the characters are the same as the ones you use online and subject to anticheating mechanisms.

You don't need to play the game to recognize what a travesty WoD is, Blizzard has pretty much destroyed the franchise with this overpriced crap.

If you want actual Diablo, TL2 is the way to go, that game feels and plays more or less the way that Diablo does without the condescension and arrogance that Blizzard has come to exemplify.

Besides, people said the same thing about SC2 and that turned out to be complete crap for anybody that isn't interested in high level competitive play. Blizzard still releases popular games, but they've lost the magic of what made them special and now they're trying desperately to bury things like the lost vikings and the original Diablo so people don't know how little they've progressed over the last 10 years.

The people who made the first two Diablo games aren't even in business anymore. Blizzard North went out in 2005, which also meant their top developers were no longer there to make the games.

I'm not even going to express why I hate Diablo III. The real money auction house is more than enough to hurt the game.

I think the mainstream companies have run their course. The creativity and innovation left in the world are more likely to come from indie companies rather than the big companies.

As it stands, Activision's top priority is money. They screwed over their Guitar Hero and Tony Hawk franchises, so it doesn't surprise me to see they're going to screw over Blizzard. A shame they merged together.

As gamers, our options to find innovative, long satisfactory games are greatly limited. I hate to sound this harsh, but many of the games I've enjoyed playing in the past couple years haven't come from the big companies. They've come from the smaller companies who haven't yet fallen swoop to bad corporate models. Unfortunately, Blizzard no longer applies as a company focused on making a game special. They might care, as someone else pointed out, but those who were responsible for making the games have mostly left. For now, they're more focused on marketing and hype.

Diablo III is a huge step down from the first two games, and overall numbers are slipping. After the disappointment of Starcraft II, I didn't expect the third title in the Diablo series to be that much better. It might as well be marked as one of the biggest disappointments in several years.

I didn't think anybody would remember Blackthorne and the Lost Vikings. Glad to see someone who does.

But it's the same story with me. Games from the mid 1980s to the late 1990s/early 2000s hold a charm that newer titles in comparison lack.

Then again, I grew up in the 1980s and early 1990s, so it was commonplace for me to enjoy such games as I was growing up in the world.

They're not in business, but IIRC a ton of them ended up over at Runic. Playing through the TL2 tech demo when they were stress testing the servers I felt like I was playing Diablo again. I think that's largely because they had the same music director handling the music and the interface felt like a Diablo game even though it's technically not.

I'll be getting a copy probably when I head home next year as I have more than enough games at this point to last me for years.

That's the way that Blizzard wants it apparently. Apart from a simple reference on their site, it's as if most of the games they made prior to SC didn't ever exist. Which is a shame because the games were much better than the ones they're releasing now.