Can you make the v2.0.x client can play the old replays?

now all the old replays v1.36.x can’t be played on the new v2.0.0,
or could i know any workaround on this problem?

SC2 had a system to be able to look old replays by charging dynamically old versions.

War3 should have same.

And same for game saves.

SC2 was built from the ground up for this and came out much later. The way war3 was designed originally doesn’t allow for this. It would require all the data from previous versions of the game which would make the game even bigger. Just play more games and use new replays.

War3 has always broke replay compatibility with significant version updates.

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The main difference is that before you had much better control on the version you have, you could install stand alone patches, you could make offline installs on seperate computers to see old replays.

Now, you must be connected, and always up to date, and you can’t install previous patches on offline installs.

You have to connect once a month. You can be offline as long as you’ve connected in the last 30 days.

I really don’t see the need for this. If there are balance changes, old replays lose most of their value anyway, because the parameters in play for that game were different. If there was a match you had that was truly special, screen record the replay and then you’ll always have it.

Imagine a wonderful eSport match which worth watch again and again through years, like for physical sports championship best matches.

You won’t be able to watch it in some months. Screen recording will always be a lower quality experience, due to compression, and lack of controls.

These add artificial constraints that didn’t exist before.

Clearly you’ve never heard of video recording. Or live streaming. There are no “artificial constraints.” If a particularly special match happens it is entirely worth recording a video of it. Yes, it takes up more space than a replay. But you’ll always be able to view it.

Version incompatibility has always been a thing and only a select few are actually pedantic enough to keep many versions on hand to view an old replay. For learning purposes, old replays are mostly useless for reasons I already stated. It’s only useful for memories, which can be served reasonably well by a video.

Record in good quality. Solves problem 1. Problem 2 mostly doesn’t exist, you can’t even rewind war3 replays, while you can rewind a video, as well as jump around freely. Sure, there are some aspects where a video isn’t as good but it’s still a workaround.

“Artificial constraints” are for me the 30 days limit for an offline version while you had none before Reforged. And even, in Starcraft 1, replays don’t have the version compatibility problem.

Being useless for you doesn’t mean being useless for everyone. I’m a collecting/archivist player and I value everything from the past. Losing video games playability through years is a major conservation problem worldwide. (and especially for online only games)

In a video, you are limited to the film-maker’s point of view while in a replay you can choose what to look at, resources at a moment, production at moment, spells/heroes at a moment, APM at a moment, switching a player’s fog of war when you want.

Also, you have to pay effort and time to make the video while you shouldn’t in my opinion, when Blizzard should give more tools for better conservation of productions from the past.

Another example of that logic annoying me these times :

well that’s not even new to reforged, your entire Steam library has a similar constraint. It’s just a sign of the times, it’s not Reforged specific or even Blizzard specific.

I must emphasize, I don’t blame you for being salty about stuff like this, even I am a little, but its pointless to fret about what isn’t going to go away.

But I’d wager they don’t even have the old version data that would be needed to make this possible, and even if they did, the RoI would be very weak with the number of people who even view replays at all likely being less than you think, and the number of people who need to play replays from anything but the most recent few versions a small subset of that.

In fairness a large amount of the games on Steam will work perfectly fine if Steam were to ever go down, as they never really had any launching requirements that included Steam. This wiki post has most of the ones that have been found - pretty sure some are still missing but that remains to be determined.