It’s been more than four years since Blizzard Entertainment released Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, but it’s still a popular pastime for strategy game enthusiasts, largely because of its online replayability. Now Blizzard has released a Universal binary patch for Warcraft III, making the game playable on Intel-based Macs.
Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos was the last major installment of the Warcraft franchise to focus on real time strategy. More recently, Blizzard has focused its efforts on the hugely popular World of Warcraft online role playing game. Reign of Chaos later spawned an expansion pack called The Frozen Throne; they’ve been republished together as the Warcraft Battle Chest.
If you’re still an avid Warcraft III player and you use Blizzard’s Battle.net servers to find other opponents online, you’ll automatically be upgraded to version 1.21 the next time you connect. Otherwise you can download the full patch from Blizzard’s tech support pages.
In addition to Universal binary support for Intel Macs, the update also incorporates bug fixes, including some crash fixes, and some content changes — two new multiplayer maps have been added, and three maps have been changed. Players can also view their frames per second speed using the “/fps” chat command.
Blizzard also advises users that this patch has significantly changed the file layout inside the game folder. As a result, Blizzard advises that users who have the Frozen Throne expansion pack must install Reign of Chaos first, then the Frozen Throne from CD, then patch to 1.21. “If you patch to v1.21 and then attempt to install Frozen Throne after that, it will not install correctly,” said the company.