MPQ Archives

Overview

MPQ Archives

MPQ (MoPaQ) is an archive format developed by Blizzard Entertainment, purposed for storing data files, images, sounds, music and videos for their games. The name MoPaQ comes from the author of the format, Mike O'Brien (Mike O'brien PaCK). So far, MPQ archives have been used for the following games:

Previous versions of archives

Before the game of Diablo was released, Blizzard used WAR format (Warcraft ARchive) for their stuff. This format was used with the game of Warcraft II (maybe also Warcraft I). This format was very simple, and average hacker was able to hack it in quite short time. Although it was not so great problem in Warcraft II, the newly coming game of Diablo needed to use a better archive format.

Requirements

MPQ archives can either be a standalone file, or can be appended to the end of another file, like an EXE file. Game patches are self-extracting MPQ archives. For more information about format of MPQ archives, see MPQ Format.

Files within MPQs

Images used in Blizzard games are in the following formats:

Animations used in Blizzard games are in the following formats:

Sounds used in Blizzard games are in the following formats:

Movies used in Blizzard games are in the following formats:

MPQ patches

For the possibility of patching existing games, Blizzard does not change existing MPQ archives (which can also be on CD). Instead of it, patching application creates a patch MPQ (like Patch_rt.mpq or War3patch.mpq). When opening game MPQs, the game creates a chain. Patch MPQs are first in that chain, and original MPQs are placed last. When a file is being open, the game searches the chain, so that patch MPQ are checked first and opens the file from an archive where is has been found first.

With the Warcraft III game is also possible to make the game use, locally stored (unarchived) files when you change this setting in the registry:

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Blizzard Entertainment\Warcraft III]
"Allow Local Files"=dword:00000001