I’ve had classic for sometime but haven’t played in a long time. Didn’t realize that they forced classic onto reforged. Was hoping to have a nice nostalgia day, but the game freezes after a shakey pass of the splash.
If you look up the FTP link from the legacy battle.net URL, one of their servers still lets you download the 2017 version of the game. It works fine on Windows 10 and Windows 11, and I still use it on there from time to time, often to cross-check what is and is not working versus the Reforged. But since Reforged keeps changing hands, it’s not as if Reforged was -3 features then -2 features then -1 features approaching back to zero. Instead it’s just totally random. The stuff that works the best is the stuff that has the attention of this year’s team. The current people play melee versus, I think, but probably don’t play campaign. So that’s probably what works OK on Reforged – if your PC is new enough to run the new Reforged Menu, which loads a web page embed. But it sounds like it isn’t.
If you download the old client from the old FTP links, you can get it (1) from Blizzard so that it’s not a security hole, and (2) play it offline as long as you don’t click the button to play online (which would cause it to delete itself and “update” to Reforged).
The only part of the old version that doesn’t work is World Editor. Technically World Editor works fine, but if you ever loaded Reforged on the computer it will write to the same Windows Registry entry in a way that causes the old program’s World Editor to crash, and the only way to clean it is with third party registry scripts or opening the registry yourself manually and modifying stuff - and then to never launch Reforged World Editor, else you would have to run the cleaner script again.
ftp link for non -reforged “Reign of Chaos”:
https://us.battle.net/download/getLegacy?product=WAR3&locale=enUS&os=WIN
ftp link for non-reforged “Frozen Throne” expansion:
https://us.battle.net/download/getLegacy?product=W3XP&locale=enUS&os=WIN
NOTE: The above versions are Patch 1.27 (2017 and prior era) game clients, which only support 4:3 resolution similar to old school monitors. If you want the 16:9 version of the game with 1080p support and upscaling – but that isn’t Reforged – unfortunately that version was made by the Reforged team (2018-2020) so they killed it after it was made. There’s not an official link to get it from, but some modding fan sites like Hive Workshop provide download links to those versions that are apparently allowed to still exist because the game only launches if you enter a CD key, or log in to a Reforged account login – because they were intended as “prepatches” to Reforged. On those game versions, which are called Patch 1.28, 1.29, 1.30, and 1.31, there is a provided Warcraft III Launcher.exe which destroys the game and replaces it with Reforged the moment you try to launch it, so it’s best to delete that launcher and then play the game from inside of the x86_64 folder.
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Or just accept that things are what they are and play the game we have now unless it entirely does not work. You can’t go online with old versions of the game, so it’s only good for solo custom games and the campaign. But if you insist on using an old version, best to disable your internet while playing so you can’t accidentally update.
Or block the game in your firewall so it can’t access the internet. Helps prevent mistakes more.