Tuthrick: There are no mods that "improve" the graphics quality as such. You can play around with mods for higher resolution + different scaling mods. The artstyle of WarCraft II is charming and still holds up to this day, so I would give it a try as it is first.
As for the gameplay, I would say that this game has all the core machanics of the RTS genre, without being too complex for beginner:
- Gathering resources: mostly gold from gold mines and lumber by chopping down trees + oil by building oil platforms on the oil patches in the water (required for naval combat).
- Building various structures - farms to feed your troops, barracks to train your fighting units and other ones to unlock new upgrades and units,
- Controlling different types of combat troops from melee fighters, to archers, siege weapons, ships, spellcasters and flying units.
I don't know how familiar you are with the RTS games, but if you run into any issues, you can ask here and me or other users will help you for sure - WarCraft II is being played by quite a few people still.
I actually used to play Warcraft III for quite some time, it was great, addictive and overall very well polished, a true testament of what the old Blzzard team can do. Nowadays modern RTS are simply...well I say dumbed down and designed to be younger audience friendly. A modern RTS nowadays must be, either dumbed down for console (CoH 3, Iron Harvest, Ancestors Legacy, The Valiant, etc) or designed to look disney-like art style (Age of Empires 4, etc).
There is no modern RTS that able to have the combination of : good gameplay, good story. gritty serious atmosphere and good long lasting replay value like the old days. Until I found Warcraft II. But what hold me so far to buy it, is the graphics.
Andreasqiao: I know that it's a very old game, yet I've seen that the review is very positive. But the graphics is extremely archaic, is there any mod or method to improve it ? Is GoG enhanced version bring better graphics ?
Still, if there is no way to mod the graphics, is the gameplay itself is enough to make up for the graphics deficiency ?
Thanks
Trogallart: Well Warcraft 2 has been out for 28 years now and yet despite the fact that Blizzard threw it under the bus as soon as they released Starcraft/Warcraft 3 players never stopped playing it.
Warcraft 2 features a unique game-play other more modern RTS simply do not feature:
- Units have grid based movements meaning instead of real positions and collisions they move on a grid like chess pieces tile by tile which makes their movements very predictable and the game board very readable at all time.
- Because of those grid based movements a lot of strategies revolve around those such as choke points/blocking/hopping.
- Terrain in that game is very very important and can be heavily modified you can remove trees and rocks and that mechanic is at the core of most maps played in multiplayer.
- Rather than rock paper scissors army compositing the units you produce can all be needed in one single game because all units have roles to play other units simply cannot fill. In WC2 you do not "counter" the army composition of your opponent you counter his placement his choke points and containment in that sense WC2 is more about managing a grid space than managing armies.
If you want to see more in practice what it looks like there are many Youtube and Twitch channels out there that feature 2023 Warcraft 2 content.
It sounds like better than Warcraft III ?