Blizzard surprise launches Warcraft 2 and Warcraft 1 remasters today with 'hand-drawn visuals, UI improvements,' and more

We knew a Warcraft 2 remaster was coming, but Blizzard's still managed to pull off a surprise during its celebration of Warcraft's 30th anniversary. Not only is it remastering its mega hit RTS, but it's also remastering the original—and both are available today.

"These remasters have brand new, hand-drawn visuals that capture the original art style from each game, and you'll be able to swap between the original graphics and the remastered versions in real time," said Warcraft manager Brad Chan.

We'll have to spend some quality time with these remasters to get a real sense of how well the new artwork compares to the old pixels, but from a quick look in the trailer above I'd say they look great—the animations may be quite simple, but the clean cartoony drawings are a dead ringer for Warcraft 2's art as I remember it, just HD-ified.

Warcraft 1 is getting some much-needed changes to make it more palatable to the modern player: 16:9 resolution support, for starters, as well as control options that became standard in the years after its release. You can now right-click to move units instead of relying on hotkeys and also draw a box to select multiple units without having to hold down Ctrl.

Both Warcraft 1 and 2 have also received "various UI and UX improvements such as tooltips and health bars, mission select screens, and increased unit selection." If you remember the original versions of these games, you'll recall that they were pretty limited in how many units you could select at once, and you had to look at the unit icons in the sidebar to see how much health they had. Bringing that information into the playfield will be a very nice improvement.

The feature of the remasters that Chan seemed most excited to announce in today's 30th anniversary livestream was just for Warcraft 2, but it is a damn good one. "Warcraft 2 will still have multiplayer functionality and all legacy custom maps will still be fully compatible and playable," he said.

The remasters are available now by themselves—Warcraft 1 is $9.99 and Warcraft 2 is $14.99—as well as in a new Battle Chest alongside Warcraft 3: Reforged, which got its own major 2.0 update today, meant to address some of the community's longstanding criticisms of the disappointing remaster.