I read that you can get warcraft iii classic by buying reforged. I bought reforged mostly to be able to play classic. But I am not sure how to install classic now that I have bought it. I see the option to install the entire reforged game in the battle.net client, but I dont see an option to just install classic. Do I need to install the entire reforged game to play classic? If I install reforged will there be an option to play classic after I install it? Is there a way to just install the classic game? the file size for the reforged game is very large and I would prefer to just install the classic game for now.
Hi. I have been reading on these forums a lot so when I see your post actually my first instinct is to believe that you are a part of a propaganda campaign to make people hate this game, because it is so unbelievable to me that you would have gotten to this point to try to download and install this game after it’s been out for a year with no understanding of how it is formatted.
But let us assume you are a real human and that you really and truly read nothing on this forum and have no prior knowledge about the technicalities of Reforged. The answer to your question depends how you define “Classic”. In order to achieve crossplay between Reforged and Classic as promised, Blizzard decided to patch the Classic client to include all of the Reforged assets. As a result, at the time of writing, the only official and supported way to play Warcraft III Classic (online) is to download the latest patch which is 26 GB in size because it prefetches all of the Reforged assets even if you have not purchased them. Then, on this client, there is a slider bar in the options menu that will cause your computer to either use the Classic Graphics or the Reforged Graphics.
However, if you followed the development of Reforged, the last pre-patch prior to the release of Reforged was a ~1.5 GB game installation that could run in 16:9 modernized resolution, support the Reforged modding APIs, and included all of the old Warcraft III classic assets but with an engine that did not have the Reforged skin system (so, less bugs when playing older custom maps, basically). That last pre-patch, called 1.31, also included the old Warcraft III classic features that were removed in Patch 1.32 such as the Custom Campaigns menu in the in-game menu – because that version was prior to the addition of the new Reforged menu system.
So, the countercultural thing to do that some of the people do is to basically use their Reforged purchase or whatever to play the last pre-patch prior to Reforged. I do not personally do that but I have read many times about people doing that with success, although the servers for that version of the game are offline. So you would need your own LAN emulation solution in order to play it socially with someone over the internet.
Since the company making this game has completely abandoned any financial interest in the game given the negative reception, you can download the game clients of basically any version of the game prior to Reforged on major modding websites like the Hive Workshop. This is legal because they are mirroring backed up versions of the original Blizzard program binary, and then after you download it you will still need a CD key from a physical legacy CD for most of those versions. If you are particularly paranoid, one of the download links is a battle.net web URL that was left open and available to download the old 4:3 resolution version of Warcraft III, seemingly as if by accident, so although I never downloaded a bootleg version of the game myself, I did use this old 4:3 resolution version of the game’s downloader from battle.net from the obscure link – after Reforged released in 2020 – to make sure I would always have a copy of the older game version in my archives in case I wanted to play custom mod content that is no longer supported by the official version of the game.
You underestimate the level of not-smart in people
Yes you do need to install the Reforged client to play classic. This is a common complaint as classic players, such as those using their old RoC CD Key, still have to download the Reforged assets when they have no use of them outside the editor. Unfortunately this is modern game development practices, with games like Anno 1800 doing exactly the same for their DLCs.
Yes you can go to the game settings and turn graphics to classic “SD” mode. After restarting the client most of the old models will be used in game, although the menu will remain the same as that was changed for both classic and reforged mode. There are a few unexplained exceptions such as the removal of the chaos orc marine model from the game entirely (both classic and reforged graphics) but for the most part it will look exactly the same as it did all those years ago.
Some custom maps might be set to Reforged only, in this case you may need to change over to Reforged graphics to play them.
No you do not need.
Just go this way and follow the instructions:
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Not.
IF you download the reforged you will have the Reforgeds without graphics.
Not the classic.
The classic has custom campaigns, the Reforged does not.
Propaganda campaign? 99.9% of us don’t have our heads in the sand like you.
I must concur with Konstantin. Don’t wate your money on Reforged; Blizzard doesn’t deserve it.
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I got the battle chest set cd from amazon but as I noticed that all patches past 1.27b I believe started up the bnet launcher and automatically began to install reforge. So your best bet is to get your hands on the cd’s and patch it up to 1.27b that’s the farthest I would suggest to be safe (only for the “true classic” if that’s what your after).
A good friend of mine actually has a duel pc system setup and has the Old Classic WCIII on on pc and Reforge on the other. Allowing him to play both since their on to different Registries. though he does stream and that’s what it was meant for originally.