Blizzard: Warcraft III coming to Mac OS X

MacCentral recently brought readers a preview of Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, the forthcoming real-time strategy game from Blizzard Entertainment. The one question MacCentral couldn’t get answered when we talked with senior game designer Rob Pardo was whether and how the game would support Mac OS X. PR coordinator Beau Yarbrough has put those questions to rest — Warcraft III will be available for Mac OS X, and will run on older versions of Mac OS as well.

Yarbrough points out that the screenshots MacCentral readers have seen before now have been culled from the Windows version of the game, which was being demonstrated on PC-compatible systems at last week’s E3 expo in Los Angeles.

“Warcraft III is being simultaneously developed for Windows and Mac OS,” said Yarbrough. To prove the point, Yarbrough provided a trio of screenshots showing Warcraft III running in a window on what’s clearly a Mac OS X desktop.

Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos is the latest chapter in Blizzard’s hugely popular real-time strategy game series. Blizzard says the new game employs more role-playing game elements than its predecessors. Players can take the role of one of four different races in the game: Humans, Orcs, Night Elves and the Undead as they go head-to-head against each other in online play via Blizzard’s Battle.net gaming servers. Of course, a rich single-player mode is also included, with a multitude of challenging missions.

“The Macintosh versions (Classic and Carbon) are up-to-date and the carbonized version is shown running under Mac OS X in the screenshots,” said Yarbrough.