by JR Cook - 8 years ago     show comments

A long-gestating effort among some SC2 modders is what produced Warcraft: Armies of Azeroth, a very sophisticated remake of the systems and units of Warcraft III using Starcraft II‘s map editor. A melee map for the game is already available on the Arcade if you want to check it out, but there’s certainly more to it than that.

The mod team wants to go further, to the extent of re-creating all of the campaigns from Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos and The Frozen Throne expansion while adding races to the multiplayer maps. It’s a pretty ambitious project, which is why they’ve launched a crowdfunding campaign to finance it.

Granted, the amounts they’re asking for seem a bit steep, but knowing the kind of code trickery and weirdness they have to do to get the Galaxy Editor to play like the WC3 editor from back in the day, I feel like it’s probably worth it.

“But waitasec, Crow,” you might be saying, “isn’t Blizzard going to HD-ify their own games at some point?” We’ve known for awhile that Blizzard has set up a Classic Games division that’s intent on doing something with their older titles like Diablo II, the Warcraft RTS games, and the original Starcraft, but aside from some recent job opportunities to that effect and the HD WC3 assets that were snuck into the editor last year, we haven’t really heard anything specific.

The recent patches for D2 and WC3 also seem to hint that something is afoot, but that could honestly be anything from “making these games play on modern operating systems” to “adding these games to the Battle.net launcher” all the way up to “full-on HD remakes like whoa.” Until we’ve got a clearer indication from Blizzard about what they’re planning, it’s impossible to say for sure.

One thing that IS certain is that if you want the ability to play Warcraft III in HD, you’ve got some of that functionality RIGHT NOW in the Arcade thanks to the mods behind Armies of Azeroth. If you want the entire experience, then the opportunity is there, but it won’t be 100% free.