Hi everyone,
I’m dealing with a very frustrating issue with War 3 reforged. The game keeps crashing (closing completely) right after I launch the application or in middle of games. I don’t even need to be in an online map or actively playing; just opening the program is enough for it to shut down out of nowhere, with no error message.
I have a solid rig with a good graphics card, so hardware shouldn’t be an issue here. I’ve also already tried all the standard troubleshooting steps:
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Added an exception for the game in my Antivirus/Firewall.
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Updated my graphics card drivers to the latest version.
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Completely uninstalled and reinstalled the game.
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Used compatibility mode
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Lauching in administrator mode
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Deactivated sync from drives
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Deleted the maps and user data directorys
Despite doing all of this, the game still crashes after launching. Has anyone else experienced this recently or knows any advanced fixes/workarounds?
Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance.
Did it open at all at any point? Many users expressed problems with the one time video you get when first booting the game. This can be disabled via the war3preferences.txt and going by the top of my head it is something as seenintromovie=0 should be seenintromovie=1
In that same file, set vsync to zero. Even set to open in windowed mode as especially in W11 that can avoid some problems with screens and overlays.
Did you add any command lines for startup? e.g. opengl, directx versions, etc?
Hey, thanks for the reply!
Regarding the intro video, it actually doesn’t show up anymore. It only played the very first time I launched the game, but never again. The crash happens randomly at any moment while the game is running — it could be between matches or just sitting on the main menu. The game just crashes to the desktop and doesn’t give me any error message at all.
As for the command-line arguments, no I don’t use any
Since the game can crash while sitting at the main menu as well as during gameplay, it doesn’t sound like it’s tied to a specific map or custom game. And with no error message appearing, it may be worth checking whether Windows is recording anything when the crash occurs.
If you haven’t already, could you provide a few additional details?
- Your Windows version (10 or 11).
- Your CPU and GPU models.
- Whether this started after a recent Warcraft III or Windows update.
- Whether Windows Event Viewer shows an Application Error for Warcraft III, including the faulting module, if one is listed.
Those details can often point toward whether the crashes are driver-related, a software conflict, or something specific to the game client.
The UI actually runs in Chrome, which isn’t resource friendly to the game. This generates the odd situation in which the game itself actually runs more solid than the menu’s and lobbies.. Blizzard has patched this. So they say. Equally we know what Blizzard said they fixed and what is fixed are not really related at all.
Can you try:
- Open the launcher. Click on the gear icon at the right side of the “Play” button. Click on Game Settings. In the Game Setting Submenu add: “-graphicsapi Direct3D11 -legacykerning -nowfpause -nativefullscr” without the “quotes”
- In game, go the option menu and at Video, set to “Windowed Fullscreen”. Turn off VSync.
- Open the windows “Device Manager”. Go to “Display Adators” and check if it shows multiple. For me it shows a Intel(R) UHD Graphics and a NVIDIA GeForce. If you have one, it is OK. If it shows two or more: right click the ones you don’t want to use and hit ‘disable device’.
- Go to your Documents / Warcraft III / Errors / Date ##### location and see if despite it randomly closes, it does save a error log there. Dump it in an LLM or get back to use here.
Hello! Thank you very much for the guidance.
I followed all the recommended checks and procedures, but unfortunately, the game keeps closing abruptly (silent crash, no error screen). Here are my system details and a report of what I found:
System Specifications:
Behavior and History:
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I believe the crashes started after a Warcraft III update. The game never crashed before, but I can’t say exactly how long ago or from which patch this started happening.
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When the crash occurs, the game simply closes out of nowhere. I checked the Documents/Warcraft III/Errors folder, but it is completely empty. There are no logs generated by the game there.
Troubleshooting Steps Taken (Unsuccessful):
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Added the command line arguments in the launcher (-graphicsapi Direct3D11 -legacykerning -nowfpause -nativefullscr).
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Changed the in-game video settings to “Windowed Fullscreen” and turned off VSync.
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Increased Windows virtual memory, disabled fullscreen optimizations, and ran the game as Administrator.
Event Viewer Diagnostics (Important): Since the game doesn’t generate an error, I investigated the Windows logs at the exact moment of the crash and found the following pattern:
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Windows Error Reporting registers a hidden event called RADAR_PRE_LEAK_64, with the “Problem signature” pointing directly to the Warcraft III.exe file.
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Right after that, the system registers Information logs from the “Chrome” source reporting “Garbage collection” processes.
This clearly indicates that the game (likely the Chromium-based UI) is suffering from a chronic memory leak, consuming resources until it silently collapses.
Knowing that the system is reporting this memory leak and that the workaround adjustments didn’t work, is there any other official procedure or an upcoming patch to fix this? Thank you for the help!
All I could argue for is to double check at device manager if not two or more video cards are listed. Disable the bad one. For many people this has solved the issue in the past. Equally, you can check for video card driver updates. Possibly: even a downgrade. Reforged is so insanely poorly coded that new updates from drivers can actually introduce problems rather than solve it. But if an upgrade or rollback is the preferred route to take in your case… that is virtually a coinflip.
Any other advice I can’t give you. The information you retrieved is quite specific, possibly an LLM such as Claude can give pointers. I could ask Claude if you run out of tokens on a free account, but I’d be virtually copy-pasting his answer here.