<!—->
Studio Blizzard used to be known for strictly guarding the quality of its games. For this reason, roughly half of the projects never saw release. One of them was the adventure game Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans, which was supposed to tell the story of the young orc Thrall, who tries to unite the orc clans.
The game was supposed to be released in 1997, then it was delayed until the coming year and finally canceled. The adventure game genre was slowly on the decline, and Blizzard felt that it had missed the train with cartoony 2D adventure games in the coming era of 3D games.
Producer Bill Roper stated in an interview at the time, “I would say one of the problems with the game was that we were trying to make a traditional adventure game. But during development, what we and the players expected from adventure games changed. When we decided to cancel the project, we looked at the game and thought it would have been great three years ago.” In retrospect, Blizzard co-founder and longtime boss Mike Morhaime believes it was the right decision.
In 2016, of course basically the finished game leaked onto the internet. And here comes a modder going by the name DerSilver83, who spent six years remastering all available game videos.
He synchronized the audio, added a number of sound effects and music from previous Warcraft games, removed compression artifacts, manually redrew large parts of each frame, and more. For example, he remastered two videos that were not part of the original leak from a TV recording.
The Warcraft Adventures – Cutscenes Remaster Project
—
“Lord of the Clans was leaked in 2016. To my surprise, the game was completely playable from start to finish and even included (almost) all cutscenes. Still, the game suffered from missing sound effects and out-of-sync voices in almost all of these videos. In addition, it was encoded with a low bitrate and suffered from a lot of compression artifacts. A few weeks later, two missing scenes were found on DVD, but they were filmed from a TV screen and had even more flaws. The Warcraft Adventures – Cutscenes Remaster Project (WACRP) aims to change that. This pack contains all 20 scenes, including the two that were not included in the original leak,” writes DerSilver83.
You can download the remastered films on the project’s official website here. However, those interested will still need a leaked version of the game, which cannot be downloaded officially anywhere.
The video compares the source material and the remaster
“Version 1.0 is a turning point for me. I’ve been working on it for the last 6 years and in that time I’ve done almost everything I could do in a reasonable amount of time to complete and improve the cutscenes. For me, the game is now very enjoyable and I see no real point in further improving the cutscenes,” wrote DerSilver83 for the current issue.
“I want to remember this project as something fun before it turns into a burden. So that’s how it is. The final release of my Cutscenes Remaster project and I hope everyone who uses it enjoys it as much as I do. I’ve always wanted to make a substantial mod for a game I love, and I can finally say I’ve done it (or at least tried),” he concludes.
<!—->
–
:quality(80)/cdn-kiosk-api.telegraaf.nl/72e380be-1719-11ed-b922-0218eaf05005.jpg?resize=150%2C150&ssl=1)
