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

This was one of the games that started it all!! Before Elden Ring comes out and consumes my entire existence, I decided to take a trip down memory lane and do the Warcraft 2 Campaign!
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[@Dragoonkain101]

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

[@busbee247]

its like you take turns playing the game and watching the other play the game. when you arent playing you're backseating. thats why sean doesnt mind backseating in this game. nick was backseating constantly

[@cubandarknez]

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

[@alexanderjmihalich8525]

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

[@fifthofascalante7311]

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.

[@YorenSt]

Same, brother! Warcraft was the first game I remember playing at like 3 or 4 years old on my dad's PC. Warcraft and Heroes 3, LEGENDS of games.

[@Takeshita_Sakakaki]

warcraft 2 music in the shower is crazy i'm proud of you

[@jdpietersma]

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

[@DyceFreak]

The DOS version in particular since you had your choice between CD audio and nostalgic SoundBlaster MIDI.

[@SilverKnightPCs]

Hey I love it so much I got it on vinyl. Kind of a rare vinyl to come by too. Warcraft 2 is my favorite RTS

[@joshuahensley9395]

having just played SC1 again there so much of that same feel, thinking about the tristram theme too, old blizzard had such amazing music

[@Jekubman]

I used the "disco" cheat so often to get the special track to play.

[@SilverKnightPCs]

@@Jekubman ironically enough a version of Mechanical Man from C&C.

[@DyceFreak]

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

[@DarkMoe]

isometric were like SC. WC is topdown, not isometric

[@Chubbajawa]

I played Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe recently on steam for quite a bit and it is so much fun. I grew up with that game not knowing english and going by feeling.

[@citizenhal]

Isometric is a very specific type of projection. Warcraft, Starcraft, Red Alert, TA and HoMM are all not isometric.

[@mvpmvp2980]

Man I love how zoo tycoon and roller coaster tycoon look compared to the newer ones. And the nice relaxing straight gridlines to build on. I actually cant play the newer ones at all.

[@jeremy____5747]

They came a little later but: Commandos and Desperados

[@coachleif]

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

[@duelisticnature6901]

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

[@redwings13400]

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.

[@trad5479]

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.

[@CaptWaffles]

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.

[@goro158]

Can't wait for the Human campaign with the music that was later used in Hearthstone when searching for an opponent!

[@UberZackson1]

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.

[@citizenhal]

You can’t believe that a gamer, who you’re watching because you also like games, grew up playing the same very popular RTS game that you did? I can believe it, it seems highly probable.

[@UberZackson1]

@@citizenhal I always thought of Warcraft II as the clunky beginning of the Warcraft series (though, of course, I know about Warcraft I.) I always thought that if anyone would play the Blizzard RTS', Warcraft II would be skipped in favor of Warcraft III or the Starcraft games. I also do know that Day9 has played these games, and I have watched them, but, like I said, I didn't expect him to play Warcraft II because, prior to watching this video, I didn't know he loved it so much. I didn't think anyone would want to play Warcraft II. That's my logic. But thank you for the passive aggression.

[@garenm7184]

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

[@Jackie54Fresh]

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.

[@user-dd6pc6ub3u]

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

[@Iptqwerty]

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

[@panbaiye]

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

[@lordscorch3167]

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.

[@Pidgey650]

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

[@Rudepetsclub]

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.

[@tonymontana822]

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.

[@synthetic240]

I hate to break it to you but Warcraft 2 music was originally on CD tracks. So your soundcard had little to do with how the music sounded.

[@Seiceros]

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

[@redwings13400]

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.

[@Helbovie]

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.

[@joegraham8979]

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.

[@demilung]

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.

[@MadsFeierskov]

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.

[@highelectricaltemperature]

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.

[@Lunarcheese72]

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

[@Kruudelis]

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

[@XxFarrinxXv2]

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

[@derricksmith8354]

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

[@furiousweasels]

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.

[@t0k3p0k3]

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.

[@SecondSince]

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

[@eydie__]

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

[@clearlypellucid]

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

[@CrimzonClover]

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:]

[@zaloisofsantiago2589]

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

[@bruinfan05]

1:32 so nostalgic I could cry

[@conorscrivener1924]

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

[@tracktain9492]

the audio clips are just so good lol

[@gssuper1438]

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

[@paulswift5196]

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

[@MrMacMan23]

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.

[@destrik4115]

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

[@notgay89]

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!

[@dmike3507]

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.

[@blu1mpact]

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

[@matthewgagnon9426]

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.

[@patrickhill8494]

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.

[@maxthompson907]

Classic, I replayed this a while back in an emulator. So good

[@wisconsinengines]

Hype for this, your wc3 playthrough is legendary to me

[@lothrazar]

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

[@thogarn_bob5930]

Yes Captain? You’re the Captain! ARG

[@SusaVile]

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

[@colinmartin9797]

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.

[@Trspence71]

Please play the Beyond the Dark Portal expansion too!

[@ratpongkraiwiwat5988]

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

[@1000DeadFlies]

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

[@robertstraughan6194]

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

[@ModdingNewbie]

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. 😀

[@bassbar3239]

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

[@clockwork1376]

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.

[@youbetterwakeup2449]

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

[@Draffut2003]

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

[@EnriqueDominguezProfile]

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

[@RealmRabbit]

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..."

[@SephonDK]

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).

[@ten_0199]

The power of nostalgia man

[@ModdingNewbie]

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

[@calmyourbeardson8259]

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

[@__Philip__311]

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.

[@CodySparksModes]

Oh boy.. I am excite

[@GuiltyKit]

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.

[@synthetic240]

'95 was just before the RAM pricing crashed. I had a PC with 4 mb of RAM and WC2 needed 8 mb. I don't recall exactly how much it cost me, but it was around $100. I was only a kid, so that took a long time to save up from allowance. The next year, RAM sizes and speeds exploded and the price per mb of RAM dropped dramatically. That same $100 could've gotten me 64 mb of RAM just 2 years later. 256 mb 2 years after that.

[@etherialaardvark9780]

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

[@jadoyon]

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

[@thunder____]

On the top of the programming language at around 1:12:00, as you probably know, this game was written in C, which is a language you can do literally anything in because it's basically the fundamental language of modern computing, but it's also an extremely simple language so building out event infrastructure in the code would have been probably a fair bit more work than just doing periodic checks. As I understand it, StarCraft is when Blizzard switched over to C++, and I hadn't begun learning programming (or even begun elementary school) by that time so I'm not sure just how many language features had been crammed into C++ by that point, but I can practically guarantee you that modern C++ has events pre-built somewhere in its ecosystem, if not in its standard library.

[@zulawoo]

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

[@thomasaktor6867]

This game stil has the best menu music ever made.

[@ModdingNewbie]

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

[@christophervansaghi8231]

Would love to see wc3 online play. Super nostalgic for me!!! Much love over the decade

[@dunadanjsr]

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

[@Musicpins]

Ny first RTS game aswell, I remember playing it when I was 6, I actually didn't complete the campaign because I didn't know I needed flying machines to detect subs!!! Haha

[@ModdingNewbie]

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! :)

[@Schuimp1e]

Insta like! Took hours to install back in the day. The game was spread over 4 floppy discs :D

[@rolandvanholst6912]

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

[@BookmansBlues]

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.

[@ModdingNewbie]

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...

[@Endelin]

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.

[@ModdingNewbie]

Human Campaign Mission #5 was always my favorite... the Orc side really didn't seem to have an equivalent.

[@Jebbis]

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

[@Wildhorn666]

This game made me start to learn english when i was a teen because killing everything was not enough to win... had to learn to read the mission objectives.

[@SusaVile]

Oh come on, Day9, I have 2 kids to attend to and wife and... oh, the music! The music!!!

[@joaosergiodearaujoneto4151]

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"

[@kurojima]

this catapults me back, the amount of care given to this game so long ago, i wish blizzard would have just stayed the path, they stood for quality, always an instant buy, but nowadays i cannot even look at their games, they have become so bad

[@nervousguy]

'Hope no one is watching me live' made me giggle. Does watching the replay make a difference? xD

[@Skorpse]

I love WC2 so muchhh

[@alanhersch4617]

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.

[@Nooneaskedforthis]

the best rts ever