These are also companies that have staff who know what they're doing when it comes to the Mac.
These are all companies whose Mac game products don't suck. Ask Aspyr, ask Feral, ask Telltale Games, ask Blizzard. That won't change Square Enix's decision to use crappy middleware and to make it someone else's problem in the process, rather than adopting good OS X development processes from the start. That won't fix the hardware spec issues Yoshida mentioned. If Metal's promise of much faster draw calls fixes a key performance area for FF XIV, maybe the right solution is to wait until 10.11 is released. Yoshida mentioned Metal, although he inaccurately paired it with the "adoption of DirectX 11 for Mac," which is something that is not, to the best of my knowledge, happening, from Microsoft or Apple or anyone else.
I'd rather see Square Enix not waste Mac users' time bringing a half-assed product to the platform. "Metal" in 10.11 is a fundamental change to make graphics draw much faster than they do now. There is hope: Apple is making big changes in OS X with the upcoming release of El Capitan, OS X 10.11. Either way, running games in OS X is only a solution for a small percentage of players.
#FFXIV MAC VERSION DIFFERENT INSTALL#
Mac users who are gamers are left with a couple of choices: Buy a Windows PC or console to play games on, or install Windows in Boot Camp and run games there. The problem, ultimately, is that people who are buying Macs are, by and large, not gamers. But Mac game development isn't growing proportionally to Apple's increased market share. Blizzard supports Mac gaming with its efforts like the recently released Heroes of the Storm. Game companies like Aspyr and Feral have managed to eke out a niche for themselves by making Mac games. You really can't argue with Apple's success over the years at building great hardware that consumers will buy in droves. That's another nagging problem: Apple specs its machines for what it wants them to do, not for gamers or performance enthusiasts. Yoshida also noted that Mac graphics performance varies widely depending on the model, and low-end Macs wouldn't be able to run the game nearly as well as low-end PCs would. The actual performance delta between Mac and Windows currently is much bigger, and that's why Square Enix pulled the game for sale right now. And mind you, Yoshida's talking about if FF XIV was remade as an OS X native game. Thirty percent is a big nut, and it's a pretty good indication of just how bad things are on the Mac today when it comes to performance parity with Windows games.
#FFXIV MAC VERSION DIFFERENT FOR MAC#
If FFXIV were to be developed in native OpenGL for Mac OS, it is expected that there would be a performance gap of approximately 30% compared the DirectX version. Yoshida confirmed this but went further, throwing under the bus OpenGL, the graphics technology employed by OS X: They have the reputation for not running as fast as a game that's been programmed with native support for OS X's graphics drivers. Mac gamers often look down their nose at Cider-based games. They made it someone else's problem in the process. That's why they did a Cider port, according to Yoshida. Square Enix knew from the start that not a lot of Mac users were going to play Final Fantasy XIV compared to their Windows counterparts, so they wanted to do the Mac version's development on the cheap. Cider has been used for years to make Mac game ports. It's a translation technology developed by a Canadian outfit called TransGaming, which recently sold Cider to Nvidia. Yoshida went pretty far down the rabbit hole to explain.Īmong the problems Yoshida cited is Final Fantasy XIV's reliance on Cider. There's a lot more to this than just a case of mistaken system requirements, though.
They're offering refunds to those Mac users who don't want to wait. He said that he plans to keep the Mac version from being sold until the company can better articulate Macs system requirements. Yoshida lays the problem at the feet of changing system requirements late in development.
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