The recent trend of announcing new expansions for older games—most notably Songs of the Past for The Witcher 3—makes total sense when you look at the long tail on some of yesterday’s classics. Beloved games now have a tendency to stick around for so long that new blockbusters are fighting for their lives against perennial Steam favourites that look like they could’ve been released yesterday.
The likes of Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur’s Gate 3 aren’t going anywhere, for example, and both would be great candidates for all-new DLC in 10 or so years because people will probably still be talking about them. Quake is a much older game, but its recently added episode is part of the same trend. So too is the newly-revealed Thief campaign in Nightdive’s upcoming remaster.
Exciting as these expansions are, it’s more thrilling to me when a real-time strategy game gets the same treatment. Is this because I love real-time strategy games? Yes. But it’s also because the genre has a slightly different relationship with nostalgia.
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The Warcraft 3 Reforged: Forsaken Kingdom expansion was by far the most exciting announcement to me at BlizzCon 2026. This is partly because I don’t play WoW, and partly because the announcement of a 2030 StarCraft open world game might as well be a note that says ‘IOU one bag of magic beans, dated 2030’. But it’s also because I feel spiritually seen on some level when developers make new content for an RTS game from the early ’00s. It’s such an unexpected treat.
More old RTS games deserve belated expansions. There’s already proof this is a good idea: Microsoft had been making hay for years with Age of Empires updates before this week’s layoffs at series steward World’s Edge—Age of Empires 2 is still vastly more popular than the far newer AoE4.
The arrival of a new Warcraft 3 expansion, even if it exists to salvage the legacy of a maligned remaster, potentially makes it a trend. God, I hope so! The RTS is a particularly good fit for this approach precisely because the genre has been stagnant for so many years.
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This is not a new observation. We’ve documented the ups and downs of the RTS on PCG numerous times—most recently in 2024, which saw a slew of disappointing games hit at once, like Company of Heroes 3, Stormgate and Homeworld 3. There are outliers like last year’s Tempest Rising, which ticks a lot of the right boxes, but that too is a nostalgia play for its remixing of Command & Conquer elements. Like adventure games or immersive sims, the RTS is a genre where a lot of old favourites loom large.
That’s exactly why reheating some of these games with new DLC is the right approach. Last month, Relic revealed that Dawn of War: Definitive Edition has sold 750,000 copies. The remaster is available at a budget price ($30/£24) and has a discount if you owned the original version, but that’s a great result for a lightly spruced up two-decade-old RTS. You have to imagine that a new faction and a slew of new missions and maps for $10-15 would probably go down pretty well, given the persistent interest in faction mods for the game.
Along similar lines: in an ideal world, we would’ve had a Red Alert 2 remaster long before now. We didn’t get one of those—but we did get a refresh of the original C&C and Red Alert back in 2020. May I controversially suggest that Yuri, the psychic commander from RA2, travel back in time to the events of Red Alert 1 to try and defeat that reality’s Stalin? Or for a less egregious suggestion: a whole expansion themed around the giant ants missions from Counterstrike?
A cheapish mission pack and additional faction would reheat interest in a game that hundreds of thousands of us have kicking around our Steam libraries. Of course, this would require EA to actually do something with one of its old franchises, which is a big ask.
Taking the approach of a re-release combined with new content would be a great fit for the likes of Rise of Nations, Supreme Commander, Dune 2 (another Westwood classic) or Star Wars: Empire at War. If the concept of a ‘remaster’ seems vague in an age where all the RTS games we bought 20 years ago still look and play fine on a modern PC, creating new stuff for them is a decent enough reason for a repackaged version to exist.
Warcraft 3 Reforged is roughly following the same playbook as Age of Empires, even if the focus of the content is getting something of a mixed response on Reddit. I hope that’s not the end of it.
Creating new RTS games that people can get excited about is a worthy cause, even though it doesn’t seem to be a profitable one. I wish King Art Games the very best as they try to satisfy the fickle Dawn of War fanbase with December’s fourth game. But if any genre has an excuse to ethically cash in on nostalgia, it’s the deeply dadcore RTS. Most of the games that players are still excited about, after all, are at least 15 years old now. Looking to the past may not be the worst path forwards.
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