I wasn’t able to post on the other Warcraft 3 reforged forums for some weird reason. It said that I could only post there if I “owned” the game, even though I bought it yesterday. I am guessing I have to own it for a few days for it to be officially mine or something.
Anywhooo, I started the prologue campaign with the horde with the retro graphics cause I wanted to playthrough the whole game how it originally looked. I finished the prologue and I thought it was weird that it would end there with Thrall and his brother going on those ships so I looked up the list of levels on a wiki and it said the prologue is kinda supposed to have 5 chapters but I only played through 2 when it ended? Apparently those extra three chapters are only for the reforged graphics which made me curious if I would miss any other chapters or other content if I only played with the retro graphics?
Yes. During the development of Reforged, its budget was cut by upper management (Activision) and the project only really managed to release because of the dedicated, reaching push for success by a few remaining individuals working at the company (Blizzard).
When push came to shove and the new people realized that they barely had time to accomplish their vision, they realized that there would not be time to develop the technology solution to be able to play the Reforged campaign on the old 2002 graphics. So, there are two entirely separate campaigns inside the game, and the one that you get depends on graphics mode. The Reforged campaign has about 5 new missions sprinkled throughout the campaign (not counting the prologue missions you were asking about, which are from 2002). But the rest of the original campaign missions have also been modified, sometimes substantially in their Reforged version.
If you play on the older graphics, what happens is that because Reforged release day on January 28, 2020 deleted the old Warcraft III from all user computers then the old graphics campaign missions are in the game basically in their unmodified form from 2003 so that those users who did not purchase Reforged can play their old game that is replaced by this one’s engine, but still get a similar experience.
As soon as you set your graphics to the Reforged graphics, campaign progress will be reset and then an entirely separate set of missions will be loaded.
Regarding your question about the 2 prologue missions versus 5 prologue missions, actually these 3 missions that are missing from the 2003 game campaign were only available in 2002-2003 era as one of the following:
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When Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos released in the year 2002, there was a separate Demo Disk available in certain regions and certain locations. This installed a separate game called Warcraft III: Demo that could not play online, could not make nor play custom maps, and could not do anything else except for to play the campaign missions. But it included the 5 mission prologue instead of the 2 mission prologue, thus including missions that official purchasers of Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos did not have!
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When Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne released in 2003, the developers wanted to give access to the missing 3 prologue missions from Warcraft III: Demo to their paying customers. What better way to offer this than to celebrate the new Custom Campaigns game system added by The Frozen Throne expansion? So, for official purchasers of Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne the game included this enhanced, longer prologue as a “custom campaign” file in user mode and not as a part of the game itself, in exactly the same form as if a player created a Custom Campaign in the World Editor.
So, despite the above elements of history, the “user mode” file of the custom campaign was eventually lost in the file management of various Activision game updates, and so because Reforged was missing the Custom Campaigns feature for the first few years after its release, the developers included the extra 3 missions as part of the official Reforged built-in campaign so that they would not be lost.
Campaign progress is seperate for Classic and Reforged graphics. Outside of the campaign, you don’t miss anything, but all of the maps were remade for Reforged so there are some differences, especially on Hard mode.
Specifically regarding the prologue, The three missions you speak of were not part of the game at its original launch. They were created especially for a demo version of the game. They were later included in The Frozen Throne as a custom campaign, but they still weren’t part of the main single player campaign.
At the launch of Reforged, the custom campaign feature was disabled, and we didn’t get it back until quite recently. Because of this, those additional prologue missions were added to the Reforged campaign.
This is the only difference in terms of specific missions being present or not. All other missions are in both classic and reforged.
As the poster above notes, the original intention was that you could freely switch between classic and reforged like you can in Starcraft and Diablo II, but this did not come to pass.