My Mac only supports up to Catalina. I just saw in the battle.net app’s store that minimum requirements for War Within is Mac OS 11.
I’m hoping I can still do Dragonflight content without buying War Within. Will that be possible?
I don’t think anybody can answer that yet. On the one hand, when War Within is released the game software will get updated for all players. If it no longer runs on Catalina, that’s going to affect you whether you buy the expansion or not.
But nobody can say at this point whether the game will actually not run on Catalina or if they’re just not officially supporting it anymore. It may be that the game will still run for you but we won’t really know that until people can start beta testing this summer.
Still, you might want to start thinking about getting a newer system before War Within is released this fall - a Mac that can’t upgrade past Catalina is getting pretty old.
Things are getting more complicated soon too actually with cataclysm launch. Based on current data mining they are doing away with each game version having a diff client, which means ALL game versions will run off a single client in the future, meaning if retail decides to raise specs, so too will vanilla and cataclysm.
Makes sense from an operational perspective since the “vanilla” and classic expansions all use modern Lua and engine code, just with different assets. It’s kind of crazy how it is now to be honest, with all the various versions and whatnot. That can’t be fun or easy to maintain, and certainly not cost effective from a business standpoint.
I’d be really surprised if War Within isn’t the last expansion to support any of the remaining usable Intel Macs as well. It’s just about the same timeframe in terms of going full ARM64 as it was when WoW transitioned from a fat PPC/Intel binary to just Intel only. I really need my docs to help sign off on long term disability so I can get some income to afford a Studio Max/Ultra.