WarCraft II: Battle Chest

aka: WC2BNE, WarCraft II: Battle.net Edition, WarCraft II: Platinum Edition, WarCraft II: Wersja Deluxe
Moby ID: 1575
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WarCraft II: Battle Chest (commonly known as WarCraft II: Battle.net Edition) contains both Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, and Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal. It's been updated, with re-sampled sounds, and is playable over Blizzard's Battle.net. New features, such as improved fog of war and shared vision, have also been added.

Some editions also include Prima's strategy guide.

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Critics

Average score: 69% (based on 9 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.9 out of 5 (based on 63 ratings with 7 reviews)

Blizzard delivers the goods worthy of the pricetag.

The Good
Ok folks, if you haven't played Beyond the Dark Portal I can forgive you, but if you haven't yet played Warcraft II Tides of Darkness you've been living under a cave.

The battle.net edition is sort of the ultimate Warcraft II battle chest, but 99% of the people who are thinking of buying this already have WarCraft II, so im going to skip what was already in WarCraft II and talk about the upgrades of the BNE (Battle.net Edition).

First of all, of course, is support for Blizzard's top notch matchmaking service, Battle.net, which has been used in previous titles such as StarCraft and Diablo. No longer must you go onto Microsoft's Internet Gaming Zone (shudder) or the high demand Heat.net to play Warcraft II multiplayer, which is a beautiful thing.

In addition, it's somewhat convenient to have both Tides of Darkness and Beyond the Dark Portal on the same CD, and another fine convenience is the BNE is windows native, fixing many compatibility issues that arose with the old dos versions running on windows systems.

But perhaps the most notable thing about the BNE besides the far better Multiplayer support is the AI, remember that goofus AI you used to watch build up his entire army only not to do anything with it? The way it just waited for you to come and stomp it whenever the mood struck you? Well now you actually have to rush to build defenses because the AI finally knows what to do, and plays so much more aggressively I couldn't help but think "StarCraft AI", still it's better than it used to be.

And as if it couldn't get any better... there's also several new multiplayer maps added and some BNE versions of old classics like Garden of War.

The Bad
It would've been nice to see Blizzard overstep expectations and make both races more unique, rather than the mirror images of each other they've always been, but it's no biggie.

The Bottom Line
For 20 dollars make the upgrade, you won't be disappointed!

Windows · by Andrew Romig (10) · 2000

A great game, which is more than you can say for the way in which it was updated

The Good
Even if you don't like this game, you have to admit it was an instant classic. Technically, it was no great achievement, but artistically it is almost unrivalled. Even now people marvel at Warcraft 2's (or just "War2" as it is known in many circles) incredible longevity. It predates the commercial release of Windows 95, but still has a fanbase larger than many games that have come and gone since.

This longevity is largely due to the fact that War2 was one of the first games to embrace Kali, a program that acted as an IPX emulator and allowed you to play games from a hosted server. Kali was the start of online gaming, more or less. Before long, War2 had a large group of players, many cash tournaments hosted, and several online leagues started. The online RTS gaming that people take for granted these days was such a joy back then that how could War2 miss? War2 was played fanatically for many years, but the release of Battle.net and Starcraft made people wonder why they were charged a subscription fee to play War2 on Kali while you could play Starcraft on Battle.net for free. I can imagine that Blizzard support received more than a few e-mails about the subject: "hey, is there any way I can play War2 on Battle.net?" I think this was the reason War2 Battle.net Edition was made in the first place. When you think about it, it had nothing new to add. A tired, 4-year-old engine, the same Human/Orc campaigns, the only changes were a few tweaks and a couple updated maps. War2BNE owes its existance to Battle.net.

When War2BNE was released, it effectively killed Kali. Kali was great, but it required money so you could play. Battle.net offered the same services, but for free. Soon War2 players were abandoning Kali in droves. Kali still exists -- with a handfull of die-hard gamers stubbornly continuing to play there -- but it has reached its proverbial nadir.

The updates made in War2BNE are mostly for the better. The "lumber bug" was fixed, double-clicking a unit selects all units of that type on the screen (well, up to nine of them, that is), and the music was resampled. It also addresses many balance issues in the maps. Most of War2's maps were inherantly unfair -- key symptoms include one player receiving less gold at his starting mine than the others, some people having hardly any room to build on, or only being able to build your Town Hall on a spot where it can get hit from the sea or is miles away from a gold mine. War2BNE corrects all but the most intricate of inbalances in these maps. An annoying strategy in classic War2 on high resources was the "rax first" tactic -- not building a Town Hall at all but just making a barracks, a farm, and a grunt/footman with your starting lumber and gold, and then attacking your enemy with the grunt -- is no longer viable, since you must build a Town Hall before you can build anything else. When you build your starting Town Hall, you no longer have to wait ages for it be completed, it will build as quickly as a farm.

And of course, the nostalgia value is overwhelming. The cute, cartoonish graphics and comical sound effects (an ogre farting and blaming it on his second head) almost completely eclipse any real faults with this game. Even in 2004, War2's great gameplay still shines through.

The Bad
Considering all the tweaks and fixes made in War2BNE, it is a bit Faustian that the game's most fundamental problems are still unfixed. In a 1vs1 game, humans are at a massive disadvantage against the orcs, who reign supreme due to their cheap blacksmith upgrades and lethal bloodlust spell. Bloodlust makes a single ogre do the damage of three, and there is nothing that the humans have to counter this.

Unit balance is also a bit lopsided. Archers are completely useless, and never get used. In a standard game over Battle.net, you see nothing except armies of knights and bloodlusted ogres (or maybe just bloodlusted ogres, since humans are too weak to be viable).

Pathfinding is as terrible as ever. Sending units off to distant corners of the map will result in many getting lost, confused, or killed by enemies. Sending large numbers of peasants to harvest gold and lumber means that many will bump into each other and get stuck. And since you can only select 9 units at a time, managing of troops on the fly is a nightmare.

For someone new to this game I suggest that you don't waste too much time playing the single player campaigns. They are long, they are boring, they teach you bad playing habits. They blow. Battle.net is the only reason you should own this game. And that's a struggle in itself.

Battle.net is a pretty good multiplayer gaming service, I've played on quite a few and Battle.net is streamlined and easy to use. Too bad the community is awful. The majority of players on the War2 server are either nasty, stupid, mean-spirited, or a combination of all three. But since it isn't the game's fault, and it is no different from most other online gaming services, I won't belabor it. Just keep in mind that you need a pretty thick skin if you want to play on Battle.net.

Far more serious is the problem of hacking. To put it in a nutshell, cheating is rampant in multiplayer games. Blizzard said that they had tried to make War2 difficult to reverse-engineer, but that hasn't stopped cheats and hacks from popping up like daisies after the rain. Some of the most common ones are the Resource Hack (gives you an unlimited lumber, gold and oil), the Map Hack (reveals the whole map at the start of the game), the DC Hack (causes the enemy(s) to disconnect at the start of a game), and the notorious Prelust Hack (all units have bloodlust cast on them as soon as they are created). It really isn't fun when you lose to someone of an inferior skill because they cheated. Blizzard has promised several times to release patches to stop the hacking, but nothing has come of it.

War2BNE didn't quite start a massive resurrection of the game (had it been released a year earlier, before Starcraft, it might have), and in most cases has been pensioned off to life in store bargain bins. Despite this, it still has quite an active fanbase on Battle.net...100-200 people playing at any one time. Sadly, it is pretty hard to find games there, especially decent ones. All anyone seems to play is Big Game Hunters (unlimited gold and lumber), Chop Chop (no need to defend against ground units) and other lame custom maps. Garden of War is the only "old skool" map that seems to be played with any regularity, but 99% of maps that shipped with the game are never touched.

(on a side note unrelated to this review, I recently heard from the grapevine that Blizzard has been considering removing War2 from Battle.net in order to make room for World of Warcraft. I'm hoping that this is just idle gossip, but only time will tell...)

The Bottom Line
I think Blizzard intended this to merely be an update of an old game, a "warts and all" showcase of classic gaming. But I wish some major gameplay changes had been implemented. Many people I know own DOS Warcraft: Tides of Darkness and Beyond the Dark Portal, play them happily, and have no reason to fork out another ten bucks (and considering how inflated the Australian dollar is, that's dirt cheap) or so for BNE. It's important to understand that the long due overhaul this game needs was not done.

Windows · by Maw (832) · 2005

This Update is from 1999 - remember that

The Good
The original War2 is a classic - this update was to get the game running in Windows as a 32-bit application (thankfully) and to add War2 to the list of games that can be played on b.net.

StarCraft functionality was added to the interface in the same way that War3 functionality has recently been added to the StarCraft interface. Consider this an added bonus, not an update.

In 1999, this game released at $14.99 US Dollars. It wasn't meant to be a remake, a huge upgrade, or anything of the kind - if anything, it was a marketing tool for War3 as it included the first trailer for the game. No matter how you look at it, Blizzard practically gave this game away because they knew it wasn't a true update - and so should you.

The Bad
Even in 1999, this game was on its last legs. It couldn't hold up to StarCraft or the soon to be released War3 - in fact, it was downright frustrating to work with the limitations that had been lifted in StarCraft.

The Bottom Line
The Warcraft world is known for its stylish, toon-like, feel. People have giant hands and feet because it makes everything larger than life.

If you take games so seriously that you think they're meant to be "real", you have much deeper issues than a cartoon battlefield. C&C is a great series in single player, however, C&C multiplayer has always been a joke when compared to any Blizzard title.

Windows · by Justin Joe (1) · 2005

[ View all 7 player reviews ]

Trivia

Content

The game has the first movie trailer for Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos.

Working title

At first it was called Warcraft 2 Platinum. and was going to have 2 all new campaigns, but the campaigns were dropped.

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Blackhandjr.

Macintosh added by Corn Popper.

Additional contributors: Warlock, samorris74, Alaka, Maw, Rola, MrFlibble.

Game added June 9, 2000. Last modified January 18, 2024.