World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth on Mac (and maybe Fortnite): Apple Arcade episode 2

You want to know about Fortnite Battle Royale on iOS. I want to know about Fortnite Battle Royale on iOS. And if you don’t think you do, consider that Fortnite’s popularity is such that Epic Games’ beta sign-up page crashed hard for well over an hour this morning, so crazy was the flood of people wanting to sign up. Make no mistake: If we happen to get a code within the next couple of hours, we’re totally going to devote our show to Fortnite tomorrow.

But if that doesn’t happen, have no fear! We’ve got some other cool stuff in store when we go live tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific! We received an invite to the alpha for World of Warcraft’s upcoming Battle for Azeroth expansion last weekend, so co-host Dan Masaoka and I will hop in and showcase its current performance on both a 2017 MacBook Pro and an iMac. We’ll also do a general hands-on with some of the popular MMO’s new features, which includes two new continents, new races, and new PvP “warfronts” inspired by real-time strategy games.

For that matter, we’ll also spare a few moments to discuss how impressive it is that we’re even able to look at a game this early in the first place, as we Mac players are far too used to waiting months for Mac ports (if, indeed, we ever see them at all). Battle for Azeroth, meanwhile, won’t even release until September 21, but we’re already in.

Developer Blizzard Entertainment itself has a long and honored history of releasing its games for Mac at the same time as PC, which makes the continued omission of its popular shooter Overwatch from that lineup almost two years later all the more bizarre. We’ll discuss the reasons for this in light of the performance we see from WoW.

As always, if you have any questions or would like to pitch an iOS- or Mac-related topic for the show, just drop me a line on Twitter at @leifjohnson.

We’ll see you tomorrow!

Watch us live

Apple Arcade broadcasts live on the internet on Tuesdays at 11 a.m. Pacific. You can watch on the  Macworld Facebook page, on  Twitter via Periscope, or on YouTube.