Warcraft: Orcs & Humans

Warcraft: Orcs & Humans is a real-time strategy game (RTS) developed and published by Blizzard Entertainment, and published by Interplay Productions in Europe. It was released for MS-DOS in North America on 15 November 1994, and for Mac OS in early 1996. The MS-DOS version was re-released by Sold-Out Software in 2002.

Although Warcraft: Orcs & Humans is not the first RTS game to have offered multiplayer gameplay, it persuaded a wider audience that multiplayer capabilities were essential for future RTS games. The game introduced innovations in its mission design and gameplay elements, which were adopted by other RTS developers.

Warcraft games emphasize skillful management of relatively small forces, and they maintain characters and storylines within a cohesive fictional universe. Sales were fairly high, reviewers were mostly impressed, and the game won three awards and was a finalist for three others. The game's sequel, Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, became the main rival to Command & Conquer series by Westwood Studios. This competition fostered an "RTS boom" in the mid– to late 1990s.

The game and its plot were later adapted as the 2016 film Warcraft.

Gameplay

Warcraft: Orcs & Humans is a real-time strategy game (RTS). The player takes the role of either the Human inhabitants of Azeroth, or the invading Orcs. In the single player campaign mode the player works through a series of missions, the objective of which varies, but usually involves building a small town, harvesting resources, building an army and then leading it to victory. In multiplayer games, the objective is always to destroy the enemy players' forces. Some scenarios are complicated by the presence of wild monsters, but sometimes these monsters can be used as troops.The game plays in a medieval setting with fantasy elements. Both sides have melee units and ranged units, and also spellcasters.

Modes

Gameplay of Warcraft: Orcs & Humans expands the Dune II "build base, build army, destroy enemy" paradigm to include other modes of game play.These include several new mission types, such as conquering rebels of the player's race, rescuing and rebuilding besieged towns, rescuing friendly forces from an enemy camp and then destroying the main enemy base, and limited-forces missions, in which neither side can make further units, and making efficient use of one's platoon is a key strategy element.In one mission, the player has to kill the Orc chief's daughter.The game allows two players to compete in multiplayer contests by dialup modem or local networks,and enables gamers with the MS-DOS and Macintosh version to play each other.Multiplayer and AI skirmishes that are not part of campaigns were supported by a random map generator. The game also allowed spawn installations to be made.

Blizzards style of RTS games

Warcraft: Orcs & Humans was a moderate critical and commercial success,and laid the ground for Blizzard's style of RTS, in which personality was a distinctive element. The increasingly humorous responses to clicking a unit repeatedly became a trademark of the company. The game introduced characters that also appeared in the enormously successful massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft. The company's manuals present detailed backstories and artwork.StarCraft has a futuristic theme, but places the same emphasis on characterization. In all the Blizzard RTS games and in World of Warcraft, units must be managed carefully, rather than treated as expendable hordes. Blizzard has produced fewer expansion packs than Westwood, but integrated the story of each with its predecessors.