The content creators from Hive Workshop have been working on a dream to recreate Warcraft 2 campaigns using WC3 engine capabilities for years, creating maps and models, doing long pauses, quitting and remaking stuff. The release of Warcraft 3: Reforged inspired them enough to finish the campaign.
At that time in early 2020 new teammates that were driven by the same inner fire, contributed to the project significantly – Shadi, Moonman, Bagysta, Triceron and Antontama.
Chronicles of the Second War: Tides of Darkness – is the attempt to reforge the Warcraft 2 Tides of Darkness Campaign. This is very complicated and challenging task because of great discrepancies between WC2 and WC3/WOW lore, different game mechanics (Naval) and big amount of chapters to make.
At the Current moment the maps for Tides of Darkness Orc campaign are almost finished and the polishing, voice acting and bugfixing process is in progress.All the team is working on the project in its free time so we cannot set any deadline. Since Custom campaign feature is not available yet, the team decided to release first 4 missions of ACT 1 of Tides of Darkness Orc campaign as demo maps.
Warcraft – Chronicles of the Second War features:
Gameplay is vastly improved from WC2, now including sidequests, creeps and other mechanics from WC3.
- Warcraft 2 economy (prices and resource gain, no tax rates)
- Naval resource – Oil
- Naval buildings and ships
- Dual tech-trees for buildings (basic and advanced)
Custom Assets and more will feature both WarCraft II aesthetic as well as appearances from World of Warcraft.
- Custom models for most units and buildings
- Snowcaps system for all buildings in winter tileset for deeper immersion
- Dynamic weather and fog
- Bloodsplats during the fights as well as prolonged corpse decay time for more realism
- Voiced over dialogues (some still not final!)
Lore / Story will be heavy drawn from established lore in original games, World of Warcraft, Chronicles and other book series. While there are some discrepancies when it comes to certain events and characters, the team made sure to deliver a clean, straight and presentable series of events that transpired in the second war.
- In the book Teron’gor was kiled in the assault of Temple of the Dead, and Rakmar Sharpfang survived.
Later Rakmar was sacrificed by Gul’dan in a ritual to create Deathknights.
In the campaign the team switched their fates to pop up Teron, since he is more important character for the Warcraft 2 plot unfolding.
Rakmar will be shown as deathknight cameo. - In the official Lore Orgrim personally slayed the warlocks in the temple of the damned and imprisoned Gul’dan.
In the campaign Orgrim was busy with Stormwind siege and ordered Temple of the Damned siege to Blackhand sons that submitted to Orgrim after he killed their father. - In official lore of the second war the main leader of the missions is Utok Scratcher. In campaign he will be shown orc semi-hero (i.e. Naisha, Falric..), and in human campaign he will be a hero enemy boss during the siege of Lordaeron.
Characters from the original early games will be featured in the campaign:
- Rend Blackhand (available in demo)
- Maim Blackhand
- Zuljin (available in demo)
- Zuluhed the Whacked
- Cho’gall
- Gul’dan
- Orgrim Doomhammer
- Nekros Skullcrusher
