Thanks to a group of dedicated fans, gamers can now enjoy a remake of Warcraft II‘s campaign made using the engine of Warcraft III: Reforged.
It is called Warcraft: Chronicles of the Second War. Designed to update the classic RTS, originally released in 1995, it appears to be closer to that of 2002’s Warcraft III in terms of presentation and gameplay.
LoreCraft Designs, the team behind the project, will be releasing the campaign in multiple parts. The first portion, entitled “Tides of Darkness”, focuses on the Horde. This custom campaign can be downloaded and played for free by those who own Warcraft III: Reforged, the 2020 remake of Warcraft III.
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In a Discord server post from Shadi, one of the mod’s creators, shared on X, the game has been in the works for more than three and a half years. This is due to the challenges behind the “sorry state” of Warcraft III: Reforged, which was released with a lot of issues.
According to Shadi, the team had to make the decision on whether to continue polishing and tweaking the remake or to simply release a playable version sooner. LoreCraft Designs decided on the second option, with the goal of regularly patching the project, addressing any critical crashes or bugs that may arise.
As of now, no new announcements regarding whether a remake of the human-focused second part of Warcraft II‘s campaign will come out.
The good news is the fan remake of Warcraft II is exactly what fans thought they were getting with Warcraft III: Reforged. It includes an updated and overhauled experience that brings a classic game to the modern era of gaming to appeal to fans.
Warcraft III: Reforged got major criticism at launch for lacking features found in the original version and a failure to deliver on expanded story elements and new cutscenes shown off during development but never made it into the final product.
Consequently, Blizzard temporarily relaxed its traditional refund policy, offering no-questions-asked refunds for the game to accommodate fans who weren’t provided with “the experience they wanted.” Reports later stated that the development of Warcraft III: Reforged was a victim of mismanagement and budget cuts.
Warcraft: Chronicles of the Second War is just another example of Blizzard fans taking things into their own hands to improve titles that Blizzard has let in the dust. A fan remake of Heroes of the Storm, Blizzard’s MOBA, complete with new content, was recently made playable for free using StarCraft II‘s engine. What’s more, fans have long dreamed of what a modern title set in the Warcraft universe would look like if it used Unreal Engine 5.