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Warcraft 2 was actually a really great game. If Warcraft 3 and StarCraft never came out and utterly eclipsed it, it would have been an all timer. Warcraft 1 was also good, but inferior to 2 in basically every way and never got time to shine.
Witcher 1 was incredibly tough to play through, but Witcher 2 was great.
WC1 was iconic at the time and we thought nothing could top it. Then WC2 absolutely blew our minds, and SC destroyed them as (I think) the first popular RTS with highly asymmetric but balanced factions.
Blizzard was absolutely on the top of their game then.
Of course nobody (including myself) realized that both games were just Warhammer / 40k in disguise, because those games were only for true nerds at the time. Only in the last few years as 40k has become mainstream did it become obvious where Blizzard got the lore and aesthetic to create such iconic games.
Yeah I really enjoyed WC2, it was epic and WC3 was a real disappointment to be honest. I still play WC2 every so often though
Same I never played much WC3 we mostly stuck to StarCraft and AoE2 in that era. StarCraft for a quick weeknight game and AoE2 for prolonged LAN party wars
I heard (so feel free to go down the rabbit hole and try to varify it, cause I am struggling to find a definitive source) that Blizzard was actually trying to make a 40k game but the deal fell through so they went for legally distinct lore. And one of the reasons all the cerabrates were killed between brood war and wings of liberty was because games workshop didn't feel they were legally distinct enough and blizzard didn't want to get in a protracted legal battle over them.
I've heard that it was Warcraft that was supposed to be a Warhammer licensed game but I don't believe it. I don't know what the armies looked like at the time when Warcraft 1 was being designed, but the Humans certainly don't look like anything in 5th Ed - TOW.
StarCraft is clearly inspired by WH40k, but it came out after they should have resolved any licensing issues with Warcraft.
I looked into it this morning because I was curious and it's all very blurred lines. However apparently Blizzard and GW do have an agreement about allowed content going forward so something happened between them.
It's like... There's only so many ways to draw a space marine but Terran marines are clearly Space Marines, right? And the Zerg and Tyranids are just too similar for it to be a coincidence.