WarCraft 2 Remastered: A Call for Help From Blizzard

Warcraft I & II General Discussion
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Blizzard,

This plea may be ignored, but it must be said: we need your help with WarCraft 2 Remastered.

While we sincerely appreciate the attention and effort given to this remaster, the current state of the game feels unfulfilled. A remaster should enhance the legacy of a classic, not diminish it. Deadlines and budgets are understandable, but months after release, we’re left with a game that has been stripped of the very features that sustained its community for decades: multiplayer functionality and custom games.

Several patches have consistently degraded the gameplay experience, suggesting a lack of proper testing and unfamiliarity with the original game’s design. Patches are frequently released with glaring issues, only to be hastily reverted. This cycle results in no meaningful progress and continues to erode the confidence of the remaining player base.

Below is a comprehensive breakdown of issues, missing features, and quality-of-life improvements that need attention; many of which have already been reported:

Issues

  • Text input scrolls to the top when making state changes in the game lobby.
  • Pausing the game disables chat functionality, unlike in the original.
  • Random start locations do not function, an ongoing issue since release.
  • Assets sometimes render on the map, then disappear when starting a game. It behaves as though assets from a prior game remain in memory and get rendered before being cleared or overwritten.
  • Right Shift + Click does not add a unit to the selection, unlike in the original.
  • Melee units can attack out of range under certain conditions. For example, if a unit attempts to path through a one-tile-wide cut tree tile and clips into an uncut masked tree, it can still attack another unit from three tiles away while remaining untargetable.
  • Multiplayer game list sometimes displays incorrect settings (e.g., showing “random resources” when it’s not).
  • The latency dialog does not indicate which player has high latency, leading to finger-pointing and unnecessary remakes.
  • Lobby chat text that exceeds the input width does not always word-wrap or display correctly.
  • The multiplayer game list occasionally includes games that no longer exist.
  • Intermittent asset loading errors (e.g., “outofmem”) occur despite available system memory.
  • No indication in the alliance dialog when a player has left.
  • HD units intermittently render their mask image incorrectly on certain systems. Classic sprites (F5) still display correctly.

Missing Features

  • Ability to download maps directly from the game lobby, as in the original.
  • A Battle.net chatroom to organize games. At minimum, an online player count in the multiplayer lobby would help gauge activity.

UI and Minor Bugs

  • Slider widget responds intermittently to mouse input.
  • A 1px horizontal gap appears in the scrollbar 9-slice under certain scroll positions.

Wish List

  • Display a map preview in both the game lobby and the Create Game UI.

We understand that WarCraft 2 is a legacy title and may not be a major focus for Blizzard. But we’re not asking for a full overhaul - just for core features to work properly, and for the game to function as well as the original.

We want WarCraft 2 Remastered to succeed. But to do so, it needs better quality control, proper testing, and direction from developers who truly understand and respect the game’s legacy. If that’s not possible, please consider releasing an open source variant even if it’s not the remastered version. The community would rally behind it.

WarCraft 2 deserves better

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Well said! Fully agreed.

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Good write up, I wonder if they could open source it and let us submit patch requests. This would allow for quality changes.

Blizzard is this something we could do?

I just tried wc2 and random locations is fixed order again.

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This is an excellent summarization and one that the War2 community collectively hopes Blizzard will acknowledge and get to work on.

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5

Good compilation of the current issues.

I wish the devs could also:

  • make the game remember the previous settings when creating a scenario or hosting multiplayer, so people won’t have to reselect them every time. Expecially the last position in the map subfolders, to make rehosting easier.
  • allow the host to set the teams and to kick\ban players from their games.
  • add a spectator mode, so we won’t have to waste player slots for watchers.
  • allow defeated players to spectate without the popup obstructing the view (and don’t make them stall the game).
  • fix the old problem of missing sound alerts, for example when your buildings or units get attacked elsewhere on the map. The unit speeches probably override them, but these should have a lower priority instead (and frankly a lower frequency).
  • ideally, add a way to choose between classic or new rules when hosting, so people who like the old ways won’t have to avoid the remaster.
  • improve the old pathfinding if possible, since units tend to get stuck a lot. When you move a group, if one of them temporarly obstructs the passage along the way, the others stop walking or wander off. Units should just queue behind the leader. Currently you have to spam click to make them move through tight passages.
  • maybe reduce the damage that archers do to buildings, since it seems a bit excessive at the moment.
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@Beau Well laid out!

Hope the basic BNE features, that are missing, come back to life. And the bugs resolved.

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Wow, amazing write up, agree 100% with everything!