But after that point, most of what I said was being facetious. As I said at the beginning I had been trying to play Reforged for 7 hours without success. It's worth mentioning that the video of myself playing that, if you listen to what I was saying, is very trollish. But seeing this old 2002 beta actually helps us to visualize how hacked together the internal game code might be and why that mistake would have been made on Reforged. In this same way, Reforged programmers busted the original Reforged Beta so that hero ability icons would load from the unit and not from the ability data, which was incredibly frustrated and messed up custom maps. UnitData.slk in the beta literally contained how much damage Storm Bolt would do as a field on the Mountain King for example, or how much wood the peasant would chop as a field on 'hpea'.

Instead, every unit had four sets of built-in ability data for the unit's abilities. As an example, there is no concept of abilities or AbilityData.slk on this 2002 beta like how we were used to it begin on Frozen Throne. This was actually really informative for understanding the game's roots, and the bugs and design flaws that resurfaced on Reforged when devs tried to change things.

In theory you could do the same with the Undead, although I don't think that I did. I was able to modify the beta and give the Night Elves a way to spawn Treants and give the Treants an ability to harvest lumber and change the techtrees and then I was able to play as the Night Elves and play the whole techtree. Ideally you could access the 1.27b full standalone installer, but at least this should allow you to patch from a Retail CD of TFT (or ROC) up to 1.27b without any DRM interference or forced updates.Click to expand.Similar to other versions of Warcraft III however, our modding knowledge is still generally functional. I haven't tested this yet, but this page provides direct links to Blizzard FTP servers to download 1.27b which is apparently the last 'standalone' version.

I'm not exactly sure which version this is, but some quick reading online suggests that it might be 1.27.

Go back to the last version that did the update check when you click the button, not on startup.

Running the war3.exe binary directly seems to fail with a CD check.

Find a way to make 1.31 skip the update check.

The two paths as I see it for truly preserving the classic game client (excepting the features) are: All it would take would be for them to remove this test version and suddenly this would update to Reforged, I think. The problem is that these latest versions check for updates when you start them. I wonder if this will continue to work long term.

Warcraft 3 1.31 patch download