// PC GAMER — GAMING
After Warcraft 3's first new campaign in 23 years, let's normalize releasing new DLC for ancient RTS games
Age of Empires and Blizzard's RTS offer a playbook for how to keep the nostalgia fires burning.
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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.
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.
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.
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