WarCraft: Orcs & Humans (MS-DOS)

Developer:

Blizzard Entertainment

|

Release Date:

1994

|

Systems:

MS-DOS, Mac OS

---

This week on Super Adventures, I'm finally playing Blizzard's hit Warhammer-flavoured real-time strategy WarCraft: Orcs & Humans! 

I'm sorry, I know I promised this at the end of April and now it's October, but I suddenly had a new season of Doctor Who to review for my other site and I got sidetracked. Don't worry, I don't think I'll be having that problem next year... or the year after that.

Blizzard apparently tried to make a deal with Games Workshop to make this an actual Warhammer licenced product, for the brand recognition, though it didn't work out. I always assumed that Games Workshop went around to developers and forced the licence into their hands, considering how many Warhammer games there are, but I guess not! Going with a new IP worked out pretty well for Blizzard in the end, considering that the game got a franchise, a legendary MMO and a slightly less legendary movie adaption.

The game also got a shiny new Remastered version in 2024 with high resolution graphics... and Blizzard decided to take the original version off GOG so it wasn't competing with it! I wasn't about to miss out on DRM-free WarCraft, so I grabbed it right before it was delisted and now I want to get my money's worth out of it. So I'll be sticking with the GOG version of the game, which is the MS-DOS CD release v1.22h... not that there's much else to check out. The game was heavily inspired by Dune II (which makes sense as it's the foundation of the entire genre), but they decided not to follow its lead and make ports for the Amiga and Mega Drive/Genesis. In fact the RTS genre basically just took off and left those systems behind here.

Okay, this is going to be the same deal as always. I'll play the game for a couple of hours, quit while I'm ahead, and then write a bit about it afterwards.

---

The game has a bit of a CGI intro and it's got voiced narration even if you're playing the floppy disk release! Though if you want to see these subtitles it seems like you have to go into the DOS sound setup program and switch off your soundcard.

Basically all it says is that the humans were good and noble people who were living awesome lives until the nasty evil Orcs showed up with their dark magic to inflict terror and conquer the land of Azeroth. Welcome to the World of Warcraft. I feel like there's a bit of anti-Orc bios going on here.

It's not the most epic cinematic I've seen from Blizzard, the camera basically just zooms into a location and then waits for the narrator to finish before switching to the next one. There's a human castle, and an Orc castle, and a dungeon. No actual humans or Orcs though, they're not getting that ambitious with their CGI.

Alright, now I have to decide what kind of game I want to play. There are no difficulty options, which is weird, but I do have some other buttons to click.

It's asking me to choose between the Orc campaign, the human campaign, or a custom game. The idea of having a different campaign for each faction was already there in RTS pioneer Dune II, but this made sure it was a fundamental part of the genre going forward by introducing a new feature that requires both sides to be properly playable: multiplayer. That's a pretty major step on the road that eventually led to StarCraft becoming an actual eSport. But I'm not going to mess around with that.

I gotta be honest, I've always been a human at heart, but I'll check out the Orcs first.

ORC CAMPAIGN - LEVEL 1

I like how the background to the briefing is animated, but I can't show it off in a GIF as the characters are covered up by the scrolling text. The briefing narration has a bit of character to it as well, as the guy giving the orders clearly doesn't respect my guy.

The voice acting for the Orcs and humans were all done by one guy, producer Bill Roper, and he apparently didn't have a script to work from. He just improvised it, which I guess you can do when you're a producer.

I've been assigned to an outpost in the Swamps of Sorrow, where I need to construct 6 farms and a barracks.

Yeah, this definitely looks like a place you'd call the Swamps of Sorrow.

This is one of the one of the weirder looking maps I've seen in a video game, as it's some kind of scruffy board covered in scribbles. I'm starting in the bottom right slice, which has turned full 3D. That brown doughnut is the Orc town hall, where I can make my peon units and also roads if I feel like it.

That's a reasonably sized window I reckon. I can't complain that I'm not seeing enough, especially with that mini map up in the top left corner.

The first thing I'll do is spend 400 gold to train another peon at the town hall, because they're really useful. They mine gold, they chop trees and they even construct buildings. They don't kill enemies, but that's what the other guys are for.

Actually, the first thing I'll do is lower the screen scrolling speed and increase the game speed. Then I'll do a little scouting with my grunts. There's a black fog of uncertainty surrounding my base and I'd rather know what's there. It's not much fun when enemies appear out of nowhere and wreck all your stuff.

Dune II: The Battle for Arrakis (DOS)

WarCraft wasn't the first base building RTS, that would likely be Dune II from 1992, but we're right at the beginning of the genre here. I'm sure there were other games at the time which put the action in a window, with the mini map and unit commands in a sidebar, so WarCraft maybe didn't pull all its inspiration from Dune II, but it's done nothing to mess with what works. They got rid of the concrete slabs you have to put down under buildings though, so that's a change for the better.

I can spot a little SimCity influence in there too, with how the buildings need to be next to roads (no power lines though). I guess the idea there is that the roads limit your ability to expand your base. You could build a road across the map and set up an outpost somewhere else, but at 50 gold a tile it's going to cost you. And it won't make your troops move any faster.

Hey my scouting paid off, I found a gold mine! Gold is one of the two resources in the game and I need it if I'm going to train units or make buildings. I'll tell my peon to start digging up the gold to get some passive income, and then send my grunts further out to see what else is nearby.

Here's where the game reveals just how ancient it is: I can't just right click on the mine to start mining, I have to click the action I want him to take from the icons on the left. Thankfully there are shortcut keys, but this is really bloody frustrating if you're used to... basically any other RTS.

It gets worse though! I can drag a box to select multiple units as long as I remember to hold 'ctrl', but I can't assign them to a group, so I have to do this every single time I want to issue orders. Also, I can only only select four of them at a time, which was an intentional restriction. WarCraft 2 increased this to nine, which helped, while Command & Conquer just lets you grab everyone, for better or worse.

On the plus side: I can drag a box to select multiple units! It wasn't a new concept in 1994,  you could do this to select a bunch of icons on Amiga Workbench, but it might be the first time the feature ever appeared in a video game.

Crap, there's an archer here shooting arrows at my dudes. It took me a second to notice and my guys don't seem like they want to do anything about him themselves, so it's up to me! I'm sure if someone walked up to them with a sword they'd fight back, but archers seem a bit too much for their AI to deal with.

I want to hit pause and then issue orders, but it's not that kind of game. The best I can do is hit the '-' a few times to lower the game speed so that my units still have some health left by the time I've given them instructions. These are my only guys, I need them to last a while!

I clicked a place in the darkness for my patrol to walk to and then jumped back to base to get a new peon trained. Except that's not going to work, as I'm not producing enough food to feed an extra unit. Don't ask me why only trained peons need to eat.

It would've been nice if the game had a number for food up at the top next to 'lumber' and 'gold' to let me know what my unit limit is, though it tells you when you click a farm so the information isn't completely hidden.

Okay, so I need to build another farm. Time to spend some resources.

To make a farm I click a peon, select the 'farm' icon, then pick a spot next to a road to get the construction site progress bar going. They're very talented builders, they can do the whole thing single-handedly. Fortunately I get to use them again afterwards, as buildings operate autonomously with no need to assign anyone to run them. They don't even cost food.

Alright, now that I can feed my troops I need to make a barracks so I can start producing more grunts.

Hang on, where are the grunts I already have? I can't find their green dots on the mini map. This is weird.

Crap, they must have gotten killed by these two human soldiers off screen and now they're destroying my base!

It's taking them forever to hack the town hall down with a sword, but there's nothing I can do about it because I haven't built a barracks yet. I could train a new peon to replace the ones rapidly decomposing next to the road, but that wouldn't help as I don't have enough lumber to make buildings and if he walked back over with an armful of logs they'd kill him.

Wow, I think I just lost level 1!

Well at least I mined more gold than they did.

No really, this is a good sign as it means that the enemy don't have a base of their own. All I have to do is focus on getting my barracks built earlier and get some grunts trained, and I'll be able to clear the whole map.

Alright, time to switch to the human campaign instead. Actually no, I'm beating this level first. I'm not getting defeated by level 1! Especially not now that I have seen the future and know what I need to do.

SOON, BACK ON LEVEL 1

My gold mine just blew up! All my brilliant plans relied on having gold! It's absolutely crucial for making buildings and units, which are the two things I need to win. Damn these frustratingly finite resources.

I'm sure there's another gold mine somewhere on the map and it'll probably have more than enough gold in it to get me a bunch of farms and some troops, but unfortunately I didn't get the future knowledge of where it is from my last attempt.

Okay, this time I was at least able to get a barracks built so I'll use some of my precious gold reserves to make a healthy fourth grunt to back up the wounded grunts in my grunt squad. Then I shall explore the darkness very carefully, keeping an eye on the mini map for red dots appearing near my base.

Oh no, I'm an idiot, I'm an idiot! I found the second gold mine and sent my wounded grunts out to clear a bit of the fog of war around it, just to make sure no one jumped out of the darkness at my peons when I sent them over to mine. Trouble is that the enemy jumped out at my grunts instead, and they're in no condition to fight. 

The real problem is that I'm in no condition to produce more warriors, as I've only got 150 gold. If this human kills my dudes, he'll likely kill my peons next and that's it, game over again.

The moral of the story: build more troops. Have lots of troops.

That's a better outcome! Weirdly the humans have the dead human king as a victory screen as well, just with a stone border instead.

Now I can save the game and... oh, it just occurred to me that I could've saved at any time and avoided all that worry. I've been playing too many modern games with autosaves.

Okay, I'm switching over to the humans.

It seems that the humans use the same grotty map, they just start in the opposite corner and work their way to the right.

I wonder if this is going to give me a choice of levels later, like Command & Conquer does sometimes. Probably not.

HUMAN CAMPAIGN - LEVEL 2

Alright, the first human level was basically the same as the first Orc level, with each building having a human equivalent, but now the game's showing me something new: a lumber mill. This lets me build archer units at my barracks and increase their arrow strength. Archers aren't quite as tough as footmen, but stick them a bunch of them behind a defensive line and I'm sure the enemies will grow to hate them.

Hang on, there's a red dot under my town on the mini map! Crap, all my units are up at the top, I didn't think enemies would attack me where my defences were at their weakest!

Stop sniping my peasants you dick, they've got barely any health and cost 400 gold each! That's gold I'm not getting back while my miners are running around scared. C'mon troops, get down here and save the day already.

This could've been avoided if I'd spent more gold and food on troops instead of peasants and set up some guards, but then I'd be making gold more slowly. If these Orcs have a base somewhere, I don't want them to be capable of producing units quicker than I can.

Setting up a chokepoint here on this bridge seemed like an excellent tactical decision until an Orc with throwing spears showed up. It wouldn't be so bad if my units healed over time, or I could send a medic over to them, but if this Orc spearman takes even a tiny bit of health off my dudes, then they're no longer capable of defeating an equal enemy in a 1 on 1 fight. They're still capable of eating my food though.

While these guys have this bridge covered, I've got a second squad scouting the lower half of the map, looking for isolated enemy units and other routes the Orcs can get over to this side of the river. It's a bit of a risk, as I could end up triggering an attack I'm not prepared for, but once I secure my side of the map I can start sending peasants further out and get more resources to build up an unstoppable fighting force. Then I can launch a decisive strike on the enemy base!

Oh hang on, I've won. The Orcs never had a base, it was just a handful of enemies scattered around the forest the whole time.

HUMAN CAMPAIGN - LEVEL 3

Next time though, things are getting serious. There's an Orcish outpost in the Swamps of Sorrow and I'm being sent to give them something to really cry about.

It's funny seeing illustrated characters sitting in a blatantly 3D rendered room, but it kind of works. It feels right for this era of DOS games.

It seems like the Orcs are mostly coming from this location, so I'm feeling pretty comfortable keeping the bulk of my forces here instead of covering all the roads into my base. I just wish I was as comfortable issuing commands to my units. It's kind of a struggle getting the right people attacking the right enemies, especially as I can't pause to issue orders! That's why I've left the speed down at 'normal', even though it makes progress bars take forever.

Though right now I've got so many things to juggle that I'm not even thinking about how long things are taking. I'm constructing farms, building troops, getting new units into position (there no option to set a rally point), sending scouts to clear the darkness and I just unlocked something else to do: heal units!

I now have cleric units and I've researched a spell that can restore another unit's HP at the cost of their (regenerating) mana. That's something the Orcs can't do... I assume. They've been summoning skeletons, so I think that's their trick.

Healing is especially useful when my footmen keep rushing off to take on the enemy, even though I've got a line of six archers here that will obliterate them if we can just pull them a little closer to us. Footmen, please, just stop running toward them, you're messing up all my tactics.

Okay, fine, whatever, let's just go up there and hit them then if you're so damn eager. I'll bring the whole squad.

Oh crap, it's their base and they've got a whole bloody army waiting here!

Uh, clerics heal the... archers go shoot at the... oh forget it, I've walked into a slaughter, and not the fun kind. It's a shame the game doesn't have health bars, as at least then I'd know which units need urgent healing. Clerics have some decent range to their magic, they could've been useful here. Instead it all ended in tragedy.

Alright, now I have to begin rebuilding my whole army from scratch, which is going to take a while seeing as the peasants have to gather the resources first. Or I could just load my last save, which will be considerably faster.

I still have to make a lot more units and hope the enemy doesn't send their whole force to wipe me out while I'm doing it. You can't queue units sadly, so I have to keep an eye on the map to see if a new dot has appeared next to the barracks, and then get the next one cooking.

It's partially my fault that this is taking so long. I built the barracks in front of the town hall, so now the peasants have to walk around it while delivering their wood and gold, and pathfinding isn't their strong suit. Still, that's a problem that'll solve itself soon; the mine's about to explode and they've nearly finished deforesting the area, so they'll have to go left and hike halfway across the map to find more resources.

SOON, AFTER THE BATTLE

This is all that's left of my army after the big assault, but it's enough. I'm destroying their farms, killing their peons, systematically removing any possibility of them producing units to defend themselves. I never like killing peons, as they're basically civilians. They're entirely harmless and they're just gathering resources or doing repair work. In fact, they could repair all these buildings if I gave them the chance, so when my archers auto-target them I know what has to be done.

Alright, that's the first enemy base destroyed! I wonder what the game has for me next.

HUMAN CAMPAIGN - LEVEL 4

Oh no. It's one of those levels where you have to complete a dungeon with no base and no way of making new units. I've got five footmen, five archers, three clerics, and that's it, so I really need to keep on top of my healing. Hang on, thirteen troops... that's three squads of four, plus one spare just to be awkward.

We're on a rescue mission. A guy got a magical call for help and now we're going in to see if anyone's really alive. When I'm just controlling units like this, the game feels more like a RPG. Especially when I'm kiting enemies around for my archers to shoot. It just doesn't have the XP and the loot and all the other things RPGs throw in to make exploring caves more rewarding.

Baldur's Gate (PC)

I wonder if these levels helped inspire Baldur's Gate, as there couldn't have been many mouse-driven real-time fantasy games about sending a squad through a cave in the mid '90s. Except Baldur's Gate has a ton of interesting spells, you can select all your units at once, and you can pause to issue orders. Meanwhile WarCraft has units that will run off on their own and die. Well at least my clerics don't have to sleep before they can heal people again

Oh no, I just noticed that Dynaheir got killed! I guess I must have reloaded after that, as otherwise I would've had to do the rest of the cavern without her. So that's something WarCraft's cavern levels have in common.

Micromanaging my troops like this is making it really obvious that they only had the one voice actor doing all of the characters. And I mean they just reused the same sound clips. "Yes?" "Yes!" "Yes my lord!" "My liege" "Your will, sire?" "Your bidding?"

This cave wasn't actually so bad. The game had me fighting ogres, but they're nothing a squad of footmen can't handle, especially with archers backing them up. It works less well if it's the archers on the front line, as they tend to get splatted, but the footmen survive long enough to be healed. So much healing.

Speaking of healing, I've found Lothar and he's in bad shape. This guy's the protagonist of the movie I think, basically stealing my role. I've also found a chest and barrels and stuff, but that all seems to be part of the background, like those legs in the middle of the screen. I don't think healing is going to work on them.

Alright, what next? Oh no. I have to lead Lothar back to the entrance! The AI pathfinding is not going to handle that, I'll be lucky to get him to the next cavern with all these walls in the way. Units tend to get into dead ends and start running laps of the room. Fortunately I can click on the mini map to set a destination, so I can send them around one step at a time without too much scrolling the map.

HUMAN CAMPAIGN - LEVEL 5

These outside levels are kind of like caverns as well in a way, with the trees acting like the walls, forcing units to navigate passageways to get around.

The difference is that peasants and peons can chop the trees down, in fact they need to so they can get wood. The enemy will never deliberately cut through trees to get me, so this gold mine in my back yard should be entirely safe for me provided I'm not dumb enough to let my peasants cut a hole and let the Orcs in.

Also this level has horses on it! Plus whatever that guy's riding, looks a like a giant raccoon. Hey, this is the franchise with the kung fu panda continent, that wouldn't be the weirdest thing to show up in the games.

Well I'm back to building up a base from scratch, making a barracks and getting my clerics so I can heal people again, and so on. There's not much new to talk about really. In fact I think I'll stop here.


CONCLUSION

---

WarCraft: Orcs & Humans wasn't the first real-time strategy game with base building, but it feels like an unfinished beta version of the genre. You can see it coming together, but it's not ready yet.

Dune II came first and was the concrete slab that gave the genre a solid base, the WarCraft iterated on what it did to lay down the roads that later games would follow. Though those later games skipped concrete slabs and roads, because they were awkward and unnecessary and were just slowing everything down. WarCraft is full of little annoyances that come with being the Wolfenstein 3D of RTS games, like the way you have to press 'M' or 'A' after selecting units to make them move and attack, the way you can't group more than four units or give them a number, the rubbish pathfinding, the twitchy scrolling... though that one's more of a DOSBox issue to be fair.

This was actually Blizzard Entertainment's first game developed for DOS computers, as they'd spent the early '90s making Super Nintendo games under the name Silicon & Synapse. You can really tell as well, as this is as polished and slick as a console game. It's also very welcoming and intuitive for a strategy game, unlikely to make anyone run off in horror before they figure out the basics.

The graphics are only 320x200, but they look great, with bright clear pixels and colourful cartoon characters, and the music's pretty good too. Not quite on WarCraft 2 or Command & Conquer's level, but that's a bloody high bar to reach. I think that's true about the game in general really. Those two titles are the Doom of RTS games, the first time everything really clicked. They're still fun to play even now, while WarCraft takes a bit more understanding and patience.

It's far from the most frustrating DOS game I've played though and it's more than earned a little star.

---

Coming soon on Super Adventures in Gaming

I think I've always done better when there's a been a theme to the games I've been writing about. Like that time I went through the alphabet, starting with titles beginning with A, then moving onto B and so on. Or that time where every game had to have either 'Star' or 'Trek' in the name. It's not something I'd want to stick to 100% of the time, but I'm always happier doing side quests when I have a clearly defined main quest that I should be getting on with.

So I've come up with a plan to keep Super Adventures going with regular updates: for the next few months I'm going to be covering a certain mysterious long-running franchise, in chronological order. This won't be all I'm writing about, but it'll give the site a bit more structure. I'll always know what I should be doing.

Here, have a tiny hint of what's coming next:

What did you think about WarCraft 1, by the way? Still fun? Too archaic? Nothing you've ever been interested in? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Also, if you want to be notified about new posts, then you can follow me on sites like Bluesky, Mastodon, Discord etc. with the links on the right. RSS too. The Discord's pretty quiet these days, but I'll keep posting new links there.