Brad Chan explained the Definitive Edition at the Warcraft III: Reforged Forsaken Kingdom What’s Next panel at BlizzCon 2026, answering what he called the big question most people watching would ask: which graphics the new campaign was made on. “Let’s just say Reforged has a complicated history,” he said.
Early in development the team asked whether to build Forsaken Kingdom in Classic or in Reforged, and the answer was neither. “In order to truly tell a brand new story in Warcraft 3, we really need to go beyond these two paths,” Chan said. “So we decided to make a completely brand new graphics mode called the Definitive Edition, which essentially captures the original Warcraft 3 spirit with a much higher fidelity.”
The campaign runs in the new mode, and the team has remade over 600 units for it. According to Chan it will be free to everyone who already owns Reforged.
He showed the throne room of Lordaeron, one of the first levels the team worked on, first in Classic and then in the Definitive Edition after what he described as engine improvements to lighting and shadows. For the multiplayer crowd he then ran side by side comparison slides, Classic as slide A and Definitive Edition as slide B, starting with a human base. The audience applauded the second slide.
Chan did not say whether the Definitive Edition sits alongside the Classic and Reforged modes as a toggle, or what owners of the original Warcraft III without Reforged get.