
What I found when someone asked me to play a particular patch of Diablo 2 prior to the current battlenet version, what I found was that I could install from the CD and then use the wayback machine online archive, I believe it was, to download the patch upgrades from a 3rd party online archive replica of the original Blizzard FTP site containing all of the patch updaters. I worded everything so that it sounded like I was playing the Reforged beta, but obviously this was the 2002 beta instead.Ĭlick to expand.Although I have a personal backup of versions going back to 1.22 from when they were live, I do not have similar backups of all the versions of Diablo 2. 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.

Click to expand.Similar to other versions of Warcraft III however, our modding knowledge is still generally functional.
