WarCraft: Orcs & Humans

aka: WC1, WarCraft I
Moby ID: 371
DOS Specs
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Description official descriptions

The Kingdom of Azeroth was relatively peaceful and ruled by King Llane. That was until a powerful mage named Medivh commanded forces that opened up a portal in the Swamp of Sorrow, leading to another world. This ushered in the Age of Chaos, as Orcs were summoned to this world and attempted to establish an empire. As the Orcish hordes swarmed from the portal, they met with the Humans of Azeroth and battles ensured. Peaceful co-existence is not an option. Only one race will attain dominance over the land.

Warcraft: Orcs & Humans is the first real-time fantasy strategy game from Blizzard Entertainment Inc. By playing either the Humans or the Orcs in this saga, two separate story lines evolve with 12 scenarios per side telling the tale of the battle for Azeroth. Players must mine gold and chop wood in order to construct buildings and create new units. From swords to sorcery, all the elements of classic fantasy are here to explore: rich forests, dark dungeons and bubbling swamps await the stalwart troops amassed to fight for dominance. Command many unique armies and creatures including Knights, Archers, Clerics, Warlocks, Daemons, Elementals, and Necromancers who are able to raise the dead.

The multiplayer aspects of the game allow 2 players to challenge one another on over 20 custom maps and determine who is the supreme warlord. Head to head play is supported over modem, serial link, and IPX networks, and works cross-platform between the IBM-PC and Macintosh versions.

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72 People (32 developers, 40 thanks) · View all

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 82% (based on 26 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.6 out of 5 (based on 129 ratings with 6 reviews)

An alright game overshadowed by its sequel

The Good
Warcraft: Orcs & Humans introduced what is now considered, the "Blizzard RTS". The game features the battle between the Orcs and the Humans as they fight for control over the world. Right off the bat the menu for the game looks great and the music... is pretty nice considering this is 1994, this is dos, and most people lacked soundcards or even external speakers. You get the choice on either playing the Human or Orc campaign right away, both are pretty close to the same, although slight differences are noticeable. Warcraft was quite complex for its time and quite difficult. The graphics look great, even better then Command And Conquer, the smash RTS released just two years later, and the game has this really classic feeling like you are playing something that was from your childhood, even if it was not.

The Bad
To say Warcraft is a bad game would not be accurate, it's not a terribly bad game, it just suffers from one of the worst issues an RTS can have, it's slooooowwwww....

By slow I mean you click a unit, you click move on the sidebar, you click the ground, then he starts CREEPING forward at around a quarter a mile an hour. The units in this game could NOT in any way move any slower! Another thing I did not like that much is the unique road system, where you had to build roads and construct building next to them, although this was neat and made bases look professional, it slowed base construction and made it difficult to set up secondary bases near enemy bases for confusion and quick assaults. My final complaint is the lack of using the left mouse button for orders, although some mouses back then lacked it, it would have been a nice thing as it adds to the slow feeling having to click your unit, click move, and clicking the ground instead of pressing the right mouse button, come on Blizzard, Command and Conquer did it 2 years after you guys. Well I guess I can not really complain about it, it was added in Warcraft 2 and this was before it was a common RTS feature.

The Bottom Line
A great classic RTS with some faults, but it's still worth playing... If you have patience.

DOS · by Chris Jeremic (152) · 2011

The first installment in this series is clearly shadowed by the second.

The Good
Well, it's a decent game but nothing more. It was refreshing change from Dune II (simply because no other adequate RTS was released during that time) and the music/sound effects are OK.

The Bad
The game is slow - either badly programmed or simply meant to be slow. The enemy is stupid and the entire experience is lacking.

The Bottom Line
You should probably play this just to get an idea how much better the second game is.

DOS · by Tomer Gabel (4539) · 1999

A classic, albeit a flawed one

The Good
Warcraft was to Dune II as Doom was to Wolfenstein 3D...a step up for the whole genre. As the second real-time strategy game natively released for the PC, it improved upon its predecessor in almost every way, and began the long-running rivalry between Blizzard and Westwood as strategy developers.

Warcraft takes place in a fantasy setting. You can choose to play as either the humans or the orcs, with over a dozen unit, building and spell types for each side...each of which are equivalent. The human footman is the same as the orcish grunt. The human conjuror does the same tasks as the orcish warlock. While this might seem like a step backwards compared to Dune (and it is) it does make the game easy to play. And there are small differences between the humans and the orcs which serve to add strategic depth: for instance, the human archer can shoot one tile further than its orcish counterpart.

Warcraft was an extremely innovative RTS game on many levels. It was the first to have a random map generator, multiplayer support and a level editor, vastly extending the game's replay value. All three of which are taken for granted these days. But even without these Warcraft would have been a good game, as the campaign mode alone is superb. Each of the 12 missions per side are connected by an excellent story, and the level design is top notch. In Dune, each mission was basically the same as the one before it: build up a base and destroy the enemy. But in Warcraft you've got a lot more variety in your missions. Some of them start you with a fixed army and require you to conduct raids on orc encampments, or rescue peasants. Others have side quests that allow more powerful technologies to become available. They are a bit on the hard side and drop you off in the deep end of the pool relatively soon, but you certainly won't be bored playing the campaign mode. Warcraft also supports internet play via Kali, although it never became a hit multiplayer game like its sequel.

In Dune, you could pump out just one unit type and win. But Warcraft forces you to use combined arms, as making just one unit type will most likely lose you the game. Infantry are your primary unit type in the early game, but they can be killed easily by knights. Knights in turn are susceptible to massed archers. Archers get countered by catapults, and so on. It's a really subtle balance, every unit and building plays an important part. Even in the late game you'll still be making use of your most basic unit types, as the weak units make up for it by being quick training and cheap.

The game's AI is mediocre today, but back in Warcraft's time it was the best there was. Rather than just blindly attacking, a computer-controlled opponant would scout the perimeter of your base, searching for weak spots. If you piled all your troops near one entrance, the enemy would not attack there unless it was numerically superior. Decoy tactics wouldn't work against it, and it even singled out expensive/valuable units in battle to weaken you as much as possible. The AI had an annoying trick of slipping troops past your defenses and into your peasants. This was especially bad since peasants had no way of protecting themselves...you'd often lose half of your economy just because you left an entrance unguarded. :(

The game's graphics, though unremarkable, carry the point across well. I actually prefer them to those of its sequel. Warcraft II's graphics look too neat and organised, like a game board instead of a battlefield. Warcraft, on the other hand, manages to capture the rugged feel of real terrain. Audio is also a winner. Glen Stafford's music fits perfectly, and in the typical Blizzard style your units give you several different responses when you click on them. "Zug zug!"

The Bad
The game isn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination. Warcraft has a number of flaws that can't be justified just because it's old, and which probably prevented it from attaining the super-seller status of its sequel.

Saying that the controls are annoying would be an understatement. In Dune II, if you wanted to move a unit you'd click it and then click where you wanted it to go. Easy. But in Warcraft, you must click the unit, click the "Move" button on the left-hand side of the screen, and then click where you want it to go. Even when using the keyboard shortcuts this is time consuming, and it's amazing that Blizzard got away with such a user-hostile system, especially since a much better way of doing things had been implemented in a game two years older. Being able to move up to four units at a time is nice, but considering you have to group them manually by holding down Shift and then clicking units one at a time to add them to your group, it was actually quicker moving masses of units in Dune.

I won't belabor the standard complaints: the pathfinding is awful, the AI is retentive, etc. But there are many annoying design decisions that you'd never be able to get away with these days. The only building you can drop off gold at is the town hall, and you can only have one of those the entire game, so once you've exhausted the gold near your base you have to send your peasants on really long trips back and forth between the nearest available gold and the town hall, making it maddenlingly easy for your enemy to raid your gold-gathering lines. And the town hall is the only building you can create peasants at, so if you lose even ten peasants it takes a long, long time to replace them.

Like its sequel, Warcraft is orc-biased. The orcs have the most powerful unit in the game (the demon) which not only eats the human's elemental for lunch but can be spawned for free once you've got a Warlock. Demons can demolish a town with impunity, and the orcs also have a spell which grants invincibility to any unit for ten seconds. Did it ever occur to Blizzard that invincible demons might not be so good for the game's balance?

The Bottom Line
Today, there is absolutely no reason why you should own this game (except for collecting or nostalgia purposes), as its archaic controls and dated gameplay mechanics make it a rather unenjoyable for today's RTS gamer. but Warcraft was one of the most influential games the strategy genre has ever seen. It furthened the concept of RTS games by leaps and bounds. Its flaws are made up for by its innovation.

DOS · by Maw (832) · 2004

[ View all 6 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
map generator? Rola (8486) Sep 4, 2013
Title Spelling PCGamer77 (3158) Apr 10, 2012
More Macintosh madness Dae (7182) May 29, 2008
Demo's Third Level? Robert Classified (2) May 31, 2007

Trivia

Hybrid PC/MAC Version

When the game was ported to the Macintosh, it was released on a so-called "Hybrid Disc". A Hybrid Disc can be read by both a PC and a Mac, containing those respective computer's CD-ROM file systems. This disc contains audio tracks with the game's music, and can be played on any device which will play CD Audio. The music will only be heard in-game with the Macintosh version. PC-Only discs lack the CD Audio tracks.

Innovations

Warcraft was a game of many "firsts" in the RTS world. It was the first RTS game to support multiplayer capability, and the first to have multiple resource types to harvest.

Novels

In addition to a board game and Sword & Sorcery Studios' 2003 pen-and-paper RPG system, the Warcraft setting has yielded quite a number of novels. Pocket Books have published a handful of distinct titles: Day of the Dragon (2001), by Richard A. Knaak, set between Warcraft II and III * Lord of the Clans (2001), by Christie Golden * The Last Guardian (2001), by Jeff Grubb * Of Blood and Honour (2001), an e-book by Warcraft* developer Chris Metzen.

Two self-contained Warcraft trilogies have also been published. Richard A. Knaak's War of the Ancients trilogy features Azeroth's prehistory being subtly altered by visitors from its present:1. The Well of Eternity (2004) 2. The Demon Soul (2004) 3. The Sundering (2005)

He has also written the Sunwell Trilogy, graphic works in the Korean "manhwa" tradition, illustrated by Jae-Hwan Kim:1. Dragon Hunt (2005) 2. Shadows of Ice (2006) 3. Ghostlands (2007)

References

  • If you repeatedly click on any Orcish unit he will eventually say "zug zug!" A little known fact is that in the 1981 film Cavemen "zug zug" is caveman-speak for sexual intercourse.
  • The red banner visible during orc briefings is the same as banner of Sarlac in the game Blackthorne, also developed by Blizzard. You can see it in this screenshot.

Warhammer

In the beginning stages of development Blizzard did consider using the Warhammer license for Warcraft, and this was even pushed for by Ayman Adham to give the game brand recognition. However, after their terrible experiences with DC Comics during the development of Superman and Justice League games, the rest of the staff decided to instead create an original property.

Information also contributed by Chentzilla, Maw, Pseudo_Intellectual and xxxxxxxxxxx

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by MajorDad.

Windows added by Plok. PC-98, Macintosh added by Terok Nor.

Additional contributors: Trixter, MAT, Belboz, Andrew Hartnett, Jeanne, Great Hierophant, Chris Jeremic, Patrick Bregger, Lain Crowley, MrFlibble.

Game added November 3, 1999. Last modified March 19, 2024.