Blizzard Entertainment’s beloved strategy game has been brought bang up to date with the release of Warcraft 3 Reforged, a remaster that’s available now via their proprietary Battle.net service. One of the driving features that’s helped to keep classic Warcraft 3 relevant for so long is mod support, and specifically the community-made custom maps. Naturally, many players are finding the potential prospect of losing access to their favorite Warcraft 3 maps cause for concern when considering a move to the remaster. Is that concern valid? Or can original WC3 maps automatically be used as Warcraft 3 Reforged custom maps? In this guide, we’ll fill you in on everything you need to know.
Does Warcraft 3 Reforged support classic Warcraft 3 maps?
Thankfully, in a majority of cases, the answer here is yes. It’s always been a goal of the Warcraft 3 Reforged development team to have all existing custom maps be compatible, as indicated in a Wowhead interview from way back at BlizzCon 2018.
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Reforged Executive Producer, Rob Bridenbecker, stated the following:
The original version of Warcraft 3 is still basically compatible with the reforged version, and that includes also the maps, custom mods . . .
Elaborating in response to a follow-up question, Bridenbecker said:
The way it should work is that if the maps existed before, they’ll just automatically load up.
Coming back to the “majority of cases” caveat we mentioned earlier, it’s also stated that, although supporting all custom maps is the goal, the developers can’t promise absolutely everything will be compatible.
There’s a LOT of maps out there, like there’s a lot, so we’re going to get hopefully all of them and if we don’t get all of them, we’re going to get a whole bunch of them.
With Warcraft 3 Reforged having just gone live and a swarm of players no doubt attempting to access their favorite WC3 custom maps, time will soon tell just how close Blizzard has come to its goal.