When Final Fantasy 14 launched on the PC, it was plagued with bugs and gameplay problems. It led to Square basically remaking the game and relaunching it as Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. The relaunch was highly successful, as Square learned from their inexperience with the PC. They recently decided to expand to the Mac alongside the release of their new expansion pack, Heavensward, for the PC. The published system requirements for the Mac version were later retracted by Square… and you can see where this is going.
They have since temporarily pulled game sales and offered full refunds. The game will go back on sale when they update “information on the product, system requirements, and screen resolution”.
The Mac will get the MMO, but Noctis time. Ignis wasn't in the cards.
I guess you could say they'll get on it Prompto? Yes I know I'm punning the wrong title…
In the forum post, Square lists a few reasons for the error. First, a handful of customers were accidentally provided a pre-release build ahead of the official launch, due to a “miscommunication with retailers”. As mentioned though, the official release had performance issues and Square blames that on OpenGL and how it tied into their project. They claim that Final Fantasy 14 developed for Mac OSX's implementation of OpenGL would perform 30% worse than Microsoft's DirectX counterpart. They quickly clarify that OpenGL is not 30% slower than DirectX, but that factor applies to OpenGL on Mac, DirectX on Windows, and specifically for Final Fantasy 14.
An interesting note is that Square claims to have outlined several system requirement candidates, and was waiting on QA and final engineering to “select the correct one”. Yikes. Talking about software coming in hot, they did not even know their target hardware until into the shipping process, if you take their word at face value.
Square intends to ship a functional Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn to OSX at some point.
I guess the moral of the
I guess the moral of the story is, if you wanna game, don’t buy a Mac.
Yet another developer burned
Yet another developer burned by the cruel reality of porting to OpenGL, and so the dreams of Linux gaming grow a bit dimmer.
I’m confused by that
I’m confused by that statement. Aren’t most “devices with a GPU” in the world using openGL? Playstations? Nintendo consoles? Android devices? iPhones? Hardly a small market.
Also, being that the Playstation is arguably the home turf of Final Fantasy games – and it happens to use openGL – why did Square have such a tough time with this one? Are Macs using a really old version of openGL? (seems unlikely..)
Judging by the post, they are
Judging by the post, they are looking at what improvements the next version of OS X will bring.
If OpenGL can be bypassed in favor of a better API, even if they just change the translation layer (from dx->opengl to dx->???) have potential to speed things up.
And it doesn’t look like they have closed the door to an actual native version, but that’s not likely before FFXIV 4.x, in a year and a half (estimated).