Tech Shout!

On Tuesday Blizzard Entertainment released version 1.9.3 of its much-followed online role playing game World of Warcraft. The new version is a Universal Binary capable of running natively on PowerPC or Intel-based Macs.

World of Warcraft allows gamers to play together online as they discover the wartorn fantasy world of Azeroth, a land inhabited by humans, Orcs, Night Elves, gnomes, dwarves and other fantastic races, each with their own special abilities. Players can go on expeditions, form guilds, cooperatively play towards common goals and battle each other in head to head competitions.

Released simultaneously for Mac and PC in late 2004, World of Warcraft has been continuously updated for both platforms since then. At January 2006’s Macworld Expo in San Francisco, Blizzard showed off a development version of World of Warcraft running on an Intel-based iMac; the system exhibited constantly higher frame rates and richer graphics than its G5-based predecessor could manage.

Other changes in the 1.9.3 release include improvements to individual character classes including the Paladin, Rogue and Warrior; changes to Items, Professions, Quests and Reputation; improvements to Battlegrounds, Raid and Dungeons; and changes to the World Environment itself.

Blizzard warns Mac users that World of Warcraft v1.9.3 requires Mac OS X v10.3.9 or later; the game will not launch on older versions of Mac OS X.
World of Warcraft users will automatically be updated to the 1.9.3 version the next time they log on to the World of Warcraft servers.