Back in the ’90s, a point-and-click adventure game take on Warcraft was in development, and though it was cancelled, a fan has remastered a build of the game that was leaked years ago.
The leak of the cancelled game, Warcraft: Lord of the Clans, appeared online back in 2016, though while very playable, cutscenes were very crunchy and low-resolution, with audio not quite synced, and some cutscenes were simply missing. However, as reported by PC Gamer and first spotted by IndieRetroNews, a fan has spent the past six years remastering all of the cutscenes to make it a bit more enjoyable to experience.
This particular project was led by modder DerSilver83, who paired the release of the mini-remaster with a blog post discussing it. “I have been working on it for the last 6 years and in that time I have done almost all I can do within a reasonable timeframe to complete and enhance the cutscenes,” wrote DerSilver83. “For me the game is very much enjoyable now and I see no real use in enhancing the cutscenes any further.”
As part of the remaster, all of the low-resolution cutscenes that would have originally been drawn by hand had compression artefacts removed by DerSilver83. And some frames and assets had to be redrawn entirely in Photoshop, a significant undertaking.
Some new transitional scenes have been created from the ground up too to make things flow a bit better, and all audio is properly synced up too. Missing voice lines were also created by using text to speech software, based on the original script too. And any continuity errors in the cutscenes have been removed too.
It should be noted that if you want to actually play the remaster, you’ll need the original files, which aren’t easily available due to a DMCA filing from Blizzard back when the leak took place. But you can download the remastered files here if you do have the original rummaging around somewhere, conveniently.