GOG: We’re deeply saddened to share the news that Warcraft: Orcs and Humans and Warcraft II will leave our store on December 13th, 2024.
This feels like that time Warcraft 3 was murdered.
Not so much a murder, but selling your kid and taking them back once you realize they can make you some money.
We are on lemmy, do not repost twitter/x thanks.
Seriously, I'm so tired of this shit.
There's definitely an exception to be made for linking announcements, but my personal solution is simple:
Don't follow the link
Why?
Work's done!
Whatchuwantmetokill
Before I rush to buy this before it disappears, two questions:
Do they sell a Mac version that will work on current OSes?
I still have my discs in a box. Would my CD keys be valid?
I’m off to find these answers on my own. Will report back.
Edit: looks like no and no.
Guess I might try to see if I can get those old discs to run on my Linux setup.
You can probably get it to work in Wine with some effort, and definitely should be able to get it to work in a virtual machine.
I’ve gotten some old games working in a Windows XP vm in VirtualBox, using disk images I made from the old disks.
The GOG release might be easier to get working (GOG themselves are updating it to work on modern OSes, and it’s DRM free so you don’t have to worry about the keys or anything).
Hmm, I have some nostalgia for these games, but I'm not sure they're worth playing today. That said, I may want to play them at some point.
Why can't Blizzard stop being terrible?
Online play has been broken for a long time for Warcraft 2 on gog. I complained like 2 years ago that they never sent me a code, and they said they were aware of the problem and were working on it. I complained again and they never answered.
I'm all for game preservation, but gog is kind of a shitty company. They can convince me otherwise by having better customer service (or by developing a launcher that actually works).
What's wrong with the launcher?
I've never used it because it doesn't work on Linux. However, Heroic works just fine w/ GOG, and apparently the Heroic dev gets a cut from purchases through Heroic, so not being able to properly use GOG Galaxy isn't really an issue anymore.
To each their own, I suppose. I love GOGs efforts, and I love the convenience of being able to purchase old games there and know they are pre-patched (sometimes with unofficial patches), made compatible with modern systems and play-ready. Their launcher/store is whatever, but I don't think I've ran into any game where it's required to run it to launch.
Bad customer service is unfortunate, however. I've never personally had to deal with them but that does suck.
Honestly I will likely continue to support them anyways - despite my grievances against them, they are still doing a better job at preservation than their competitors.
Alternative link for the same story:
https://www.gog.com/en/news/warcraft_12_will_be_delisted_from_gogwhat_does_this_mean_in_regard_to_the_gog_preservation_program