Blizzard Has No Plans to Remaster Warcraft 1 or 2

"It's just not that fun anymore."

By Joe Skrebels

Diablo 1 may be coming to Diablo 3 (which remains a weird bit of temporal engineering in my head), but Blizzard doesn't have widespread plans to resurrect its oldest and most storied games.

At Blizzcon this weekend, a fan (as noted by Eurogamer) asked whether the first two Warcraft RTS games - which helped set the stage for World of Warcraft, Hearthstone and the entire MOBA genre - could see a remaster one day. The short answer: no.

"We are fortunate enough to have all of the original source code and assets to everything we've done in the past," explained Blizzard co-founder, Jack Pearce. "But actually, it turns out, it's really hard to access that stuff, unlock it, and figure out how it all works. Because we're old, we've forgotten.

"We had some dedicated folks that were passionate about the idea, dig up the Warcraft 1 assets and code. They got it working and they got it running in a window. And I played it. Warcraft: Orcs & Humans was awesome for its time. I promise you, in today's world, by today's standards, it's just not that fun any more."

While Blizzard president Mike Morhaime made sure to say that this was the plan "at this time", Blizzard's onus is very clearly on trying to make history, rather than wallowing in it:

"We have limited resources with everything that we choose to do," said Pearce. "We would much rather work on amazing content for World of Warcraft for you guys, or for Overwatch, or evaluating what a future project pipeline might be and devote our time to that, rather than going back and digging up those fossils."

Previous reports have suggested that Blizzard was hoping to re-release Warcraft 3, Diablo 2 and StarCraft, but with no sign of any of those three at Blizzcon this year either, it seems we have quite a wait on our hands if such a project was in the works.

Joe Skrebels is IGN's UK News Editor, and he has very fonmd memories of God Mode-ing his way through every Warcraft campaign just to watch the cutscenes. He is a cool guy. Follow him on Twitter.

Let's block ads! (Why?)