Long ago I remember thinking Warhammer was second rate, and I was totally locked in to Blizzard lore. I literally played Warcraft 3 almost every day, I was easily one of the top play times at least in RoC (yeah I was one of those), but now I can no longer play my first love without being sneaky. And I’m not a sneaky person. I don’t feel I should sneak around to play a game, not when there are companies that have made 10 billion dollars off their playerbase.
Also, I feel that if I lower my standards go online to play I am tacitly supporting their (in my opinion) wrong decisions.
I feel the only way to fix things at this point is to not play, unsub from the Reddits, and let Bobby Kotick look at a numbers spreadsheet somewhere and go, “We should sell this division [to someone who cares - maybe Morhaime’s new company!?]”
Haha good luck with that. So in the meantime, time to look at options.
Warhammer looks very vital and interesting. My favorite youtuber Mandalore Games has a lot of videos on it.
Any thoughts? Would Warhammer fulfill the itch?
(I also love the Age of Empires reboot, and I still love Starcraft 2 - although a few years apart i put SC2 and Warcraft 3 in the same mental box))
Er… I don’t know where’d you get this notion, but WFB was always significantly deeper and more complex lore-wise than Warcraft. Though these days with stupid decisions like Age of Sigmar and highfantasification of certain aspects of WFB lore, it gets lowered closer to Warcraft level.
If you consider purely gameplay aspects, WFB has only one good modern realization in Total War Warhammer I and II (with III being announced recently), and two good ones from ye older days (Shadow of the Horned Rat and Dark Omen) and these games have basically nothing to do with Warcraft in gameplay feel and play style - them all being slower, more tactical RTS games with focus on controlling larger formations, and in case of Total War with more or less advanced 4X/Grand Strategy element of overworld map with economy, diplomacy etc.
Same goes for 40k, which had significantly more games than WFB, but in majority of cases they were either bad, or meh, with stand out examples of Dawn of War 1 (which does have many similarities to Warcraft) and Dawn of War II in more recent examples, plus Slitherine games (Armageddon (which is a turn-based wargame), Relics of War(4X)), Battlefleet Gothic games, and Space Marine in action department, and of older titles - Final Liberation and Chaos Gate being the examples of WH40k game adaptions being actually good.
Good thing to remember that Warcraft as a franchise was created when the original creators wanted to make a Warhammer Fantasy game, but they got rejected by Games Workshop, so they instead made their own. That’s how the Warcraft universe was born.
As for the actual gameplay, yeah, Total Warhammer does not fulfill that same itch, not in my eyes anyway. Two completely different beasts, I wouldn’t buy it based on that itch scratching fulfilment. A comparable alternative would be They Are Billions, a zombie survival game with basebuilding and a similar gameplay style (Last I remember it also had heroes or hero-style units ie Starcraft 1).
And yes, the Age of Empires series also is a good consideration. Another would be the Command and Conquer series, specifically I’d recommend C&C: Generals and its expansion, Zero Hour, those I think are on Origin packaged with lots of other C&C games.
Now there are some other recent games that were potentially good but got abandoned by the developers, most notably A Year of Rain by Daedalic Entertainment. The others I can’t remember at the top of my head but I’m sure somebody’s gonna mention some of em.
All of that being said, I would keep an eye out on Dreamhaven, a company created by Mike Morhaime after he left Blizzard. They’ve got 2 studios and while they are still a long ways off, I’m interested in what they’ve got up their sleeves. Hopefully a new RTS in the same vein as Warcraft 3.
If nothing else, Retera’s Warsmash engine also exists 
Excellent, this is exactly the info I was looking for. Thanks so much guys. It’s taken me this long to get over this whole fiasco and now I’m ready to find a new wife, so to speak.
Warsmash + Frozen Throne Assets
New Waifu https ://www. pcgamesn. com/wp-content /uploads/2021/02/total-war-warhammer-3-announcement-900x506.jpg