It appears that Warcraft III reforged installed itself onto my system after release. it appears to have overwritten my classic Warcraft III install and my saved progress in the game. The new game is now unusable on my laptop because it does not meet the requirements for the new game.
This is upsetting because I did not want the new reforged client and I’ve lost the progress I had made on the classic game. The new install also seems to take more storage than the old client did and has used up most of my disk drive space.
Is is possible to install the old client without having the new reforged install over the top of the original? I have no desire to play the reforged client at this time and I don’t want the Blizzard launcher to make the decision to perform and significant, and apparently destructive install without my explicit permission.
From what I can understand, Reforged did, indeed, override Classic. However, you can’t play with Reforged graphics and stuff until you purchase a copy. Then in the options menu, you can switch between Classic and Reforged.
I have refunded my copy of Reforged, but I’m stuck with the Reforged menu. I have been thus far unsuccessful in reinstalling Classic on CDs. It seems that only the BNet version works. I’m still searching for ways to get Classic without Reforged. You can download the Public Test Realm from Blizzard’s download site. (Downloads – Blizzard Entertainment)
A lot of people who never purchased Reforged are upset about this too.
That sucks! I haven’t actually started a game yet (still upset my place in the missions is gone) but the menu pages are super slow to load on my laptop. I originally excited for the idea of the reforged version, but now all I have is a bad taste in my mouth from this experience. It seems unlikely that I’ll ever purchase the game in the future.
You can still play the pre-Reforged versions, you just need to have/find copies of them. Once installed, all features will be available except for multiplayer. This is because if you connect to Battlenet, it will require an update to Reforged.
Currently, the easiest method is to grab a copy of the v1.31.1 PTR from the Bliz download site. It’s down under “Classic Games” and is the one named “Public Test Realm”. It’s the final version before Reforged. This option may not be available forever, so I’d grab and install it asap if it’s something you are interested in.
Another method is to find older versions online. Here is a thread in General Discussion that has some good links. Just watch out for files that are full game installers vs patches.
A third option is to install off the original CDs and find a modern patch. The same thread linked above has information on that as well.
To clarify, your Warcraft III install updated to 1.32. This has raised the minimum requirements to play to fall in line with all modern Blizzard games. Specifically the GPU must support D3D11 and the OS must be 64bit.
This is not the first time a patch has raised the system requirements for a game. WoW, Diablo III, HotS and SC2 all had similar patches at some stage.
Use original CDs to install from. Then use stand alone patchers to update to 1.27 odd and play from there.
Of course there is no online support. One would need to play the latest update for that.
Most do not really care however. Since with exception of the change of main menu the latest update works about the same as Warcraft III always has. For example one can still play using a RoC CD key attached to a battlenet account and with classic graphics performance is still very good (300-400 FPS if uncapped).
Save files are only compatible with the version that made them. Hence why all 1.31 saves will not work in 1.32 and later. This has always been the case with updates breaking saves and replays.