Star Wars: The Old Republic Might Be Heading to Macs

[mad825]

What a surprise?

For the sake of Mac users, lets hope that they are not using Cider.

 

[WMDogma]

Thank you for

"iOS" and "MacOS" are two notably different operating systems. Somehow I doubt I'll be playing SWTOR on my iPhone any time soon. >_>

Fixed my mistake - though that would be cool if you could play it on your iPad at least, eh?

 

[SenorNemo]

What a surprise?

For the sake of Mac users, lets hope that they are not using Cider.

I would laugh so hard if they did that.

 

[dweber77]

Trust me, I understand it every time I use a different computer. Using a Mac is pretty hassle-free. That was a big selling point back in 2008 when I would just get frustrated and confused every time something went wrong on my previous computer. But now I'm willing to learn more about it, and I know better people to contact when I do need help than I did back then.

It'll most likely be a machine for just gaming. I'll get a netbook or tablet for work/school stuff.

I am the laptop/desktop support guy at my company and I am switching to a Mac soon enough and running SWTOR in bootcamp. Why? Because I am sick and tired of doing support for 40+ hours at work, then coming home to my wife who tends to kill any PC she gets a hold of. And getting calls from my friends or family asking for advice. Now when something happens to mine or my wife's mac, I can just take it to the damn Apple Store.

The point, if you do go PC, be gentle on your friends when you ask for help. Especially if they are in the tech field. Reward them once in awhile with beer or something. They will appreciate it.

 

[Micalas]

Star Wars: The Old Republic Might Be Heading to Macs
While no specific release has been set, BioWare's intent to expand the game into that market undoubtly will lead to speculation as to if Mac users will have access to exclusive in-game items such as the iBlaster or iHolocommunicator.

Source: Joystiq [http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/01/02/bioware-mac-version-of-star-wars-the-old-republic-is-something/]

Permalink

Mac players who choose to play on the Republic side get to play the iJed. It's kind of like a Jedi but with 46% more gay.

 

[CapitalistPig]

Here's the real question. Does Mac even make good gaming gear? My hardcore gamer friend just bought a mouse with the num pad on the side. What say you one button Mac mouse with your fake wheel? And boy won't be a common thing in the game community when hotkeys dont line up and people get confused: "Whats the HK for (whatever). oh its ctrl k............oh you have a Mac. Why don't you have a PC?" lol yea I'm a Mac hater but thats cause i like building my comps with the hardware i want and not spending alot of money on them. And you know.....windows 7 without having to have OS X first

 

[Joel Dawson]

Here's the real question. Does Mac even make good gaming gear? My hardcore gamer friend just bought a mouse with the num pad on the side. What say you one button Mac mouse with your fake wheel? And boy won't be a common thing in the game community when hotkeys dont line up and people get confused: "Whats the HK for (whatever). oh its ctrl k............oh you have a Mac. Why don't you have a PC?" lol yea I'm a Mac hater but thats cause i like building my comps with the hardware i want and not spending alot of money on them. And you know.....windows 7 without having to have OS X first

You do realize you can own a Mac and buy a non-Apple mouse right?

 

[Vrach]

I mean more access to more people is great an all but you can install it now. It's better to play games on bootcamp/windows then it is on osx anyway.

^This. They should launch the game worldwide (or at least cover the whole of NA/EU/Oceania) first imo.

 

[CapitalistPig]

Here's the real question. Does Mac even make good gaming gear? My hardcore gamer friend just bought a mouse with the num pad on the side. What say you one button Mac mouse with your fake wheel? And boy won't be a common thing in the game community when hotkeys dont line up and people get confused: "Whats the HK for (whatever). oh its ctrl k............oh you have a Mac. Why don't you have a PC?" lol yea I'm a Mac hater but thats cause i like building my comps with the hardware i want and not spending alot of money on them. And you know.....windows 7 without having to have OS X first

You do realize you can own a Mac and buy a non-Apple mouse right?

Ah well i suppose i do now. I was mostly poking fun anyway. PCs to me are easy to work with and dont require much learning curve. As well as being very adaptable. Not to mention i find apple in general to be in the opposite camp of my computing choices. Other then their MP3 players of course. They got those right.

 

[Vrach]

I mean more access to more people is great an all but you can install it now. It's better to play games on bootcamp/windows then it is on osx anyway.

^This. They should launch the game worldwide (or at least cover the whole of NA/EU/Oceania) first imo.

My guess is that it's much easier and cheaper for them to do a Mac version than it would be to do a worldwide release.

I could be really off base here, but that sounds like one of the most ridiculous things I've heard to date. How is porting an entire game (and an MMO at that) easier than launching in several more countries - again, I'm not saying Asia/South America, that's a whole other market that's not too easy to get into, but covering Europe and launching in Australia isn't really much of a challenge. Yes, Australia will require another server hub, but Europe as a whole is pretty much good with Irish servers, it's just the publisher doing their job (which, post game launch is something that should be easier than dumping extra work on developers, especially for a game that still needs quite a bit of polish and features and isn't something you can just leave and flip off the base because you're depending on them staying subscribed to make profit).

 

[enzilewulf]

Wohoo! That's exactly what TOR needs right?
Even more customers to not listen too. Even more suspensions and bans to hand out because the programmers don't feel like writing an extra line of code to prevent low-leveled characters to access high-level zones and chests. Even more people to show that it's just WoW in space and nothing else.

Now, I play the game and I find it loads of fun. But I have so far been suspended for one week because I gave a friend some credits, so that he could buy the weapon he wanted, and for "camping" mobs.. It's not like I according to the quests HAD to kill 20 of those buggers? Nooooo, not at all! That would be insane! Then perhaps someone else would come along and have to wait for thirty seconds for respawns! THAT'S INSANITY!!!

I'm going to play the time I have paid for, then it's bye-bye TOR.
Sure, it's a new game, but it's not the bugs that make me rage. There are always bugs and I can deal with that without a problem. What I can't deal with is the god-awful community, the worst I've ever experienced. I can't deal with the fact that the GM's assigned to help with bugs and such have no grasp of the english language at all. I refuse to accept the fact that my friend got banned because he dropped the F-bomb in guild-chat ONCE.
I hate the fact that people actually have gotten suspended and banned because they have tried to help their friends by giving them items/credits that according to Bioware are not to be held by their friends because they havn't been of the correct level. Or people getting banned because they try to sell something at the auction house...

/rant

Like it is now the game is going the way of WAR which is really sad. So much potential, and actually a good game in core, it's just that Bioware can't run it for shit.

Where is all of this going on? Like can you point to a forum post or something? I've been playing a week now and my guild has been very helpful in providing items and credits to me and none of us have been banned. I haven't even heard of this.

Edit: after reading up a bit it turns out you are just grossly exaggerating a situation.

Exactly. Maybe its just the GM's on that server but I have been grinding like no tomorrow with at lest wiping a public area about 15 times (farming for commendations and XP) and no one even said a word to me. I have seen the same dude as well cuss like no tomorrow on General in all areas I have been into and he is still going strong from the seems of it. Phh I don't see it.

 

[mad825]

While I'm not an expert, porting the game over to Mac doesn't sound nearly as complicated and can be done by right here where the game was developed. Doesn't require the additional space, or logistics that would be involved. It's probably not of super high priority that they get the mac version out very quickly and it certainly wouldn't take front seat out from the development of new content (which is coming later this month btw).

Remember two things:
1.Direct X (officially) is a Windows exclusive
2.The game is likely being rendered in Direct X

In previous EA games in which have been "ported" to Mac still used Direct X however because the Mac OS cannot use Direct X they need to somehow get it to OpenGL. There a two main ways, recoding the damn game in OpenGL or convert it to OpenGL The latter has been so, my last post I stated Cider which is a software conversion tool that fools the game that it's running in a Windows environment. in-real time, on-the-fly converts Direct X into OpenGL so that the graphics can be rendered.[footnote]Yea, while re-reading this it does sound a bit confusing and I might be missing something. Let me sleep.[/footnote]

Are there any drawbacks? Damn straight there is, not only more bugs and lesser graphical quality be generated but it is also a resource hog.

If it uses Cider, the Windows version will be the better version.

 

[Faerillis]

You know, I bet there are a lot of Bioware fans who like Demos too. Now I've heard and read a lot of good things about this game, but if it lacks the confidence to let me try it before I assume a monthly fee, then I'm not interested.

 

[joe-h2o]

Here's the real question. Does Mac even make good gaming gear? My hardcore gamer friend just bought a mouse with the num pad on the side. What say you one button Mac mouse with your fake wheel? And boy won't be a common thing in the game community when hotkeys dont line up and people get confused: "Whats the HK for (whatever). oh its ctrl k............oh you have a Mac. Why don't you have a PC?" lol yea I'm a Mac hater but thats cause i like building my comps with the hardware i want and not spending alot of money on them. And you know.....windows 7 without having to have OS X first

I use a Microsoft mouse with my Mac, of all things. At least for gaming (under normal computing I use the desktop-size Magic Trackpad).

It the past the achilles heel of gaming on the Mac has been the GPU (especially since the bulk of Macs in the wild are laptops), but it's something they have started to address properly in the past couple of years with *much* better GPUs than in previous generations.

It's still not going to be anywhere near building your own monster dual GPU, watercooled gaming box, but the current (and future) generations of Macs are much more suitable for someone who wants to play games without being a min/maxer.

The word that a Mac gamer does not want to hear though has already been mentioned in this thread: Cider.

That wrapper really is unpleasant. If your choice is a Cider-wrapper version of the game or running in in Windows under Bootcamp then the bootcamp option is infinitely superior on the same hardware, even though you have to reboot into windows to play.

 

[CapitalistPig]

Wohoo! That's exactly what TOR needs right?
Even more customers to not listen too. Even more suspensions and bans to hand out because the programmers don't feel like writing an extra line of code to prevent low-leveled characters to access high-level zones and chests. Even more people to show that it's just WoW in space and nothing else.

Now, I play the game and I find it loads of fun. But I have so far been suspended for one week because I gave a friend some credits, so that he could buy the weapon he wanted, and for "camping" mobs.. It's not like I according to the quests HAD to kill 20 of those buggers? Nooooo, not at all! That would be insane! Then perhaps someone else would come along and have to wait for thirty seconds for respawns! THAT'S INSANITY!!!

I'm going to play the time I have paid for, then it's bye-bye TOR.
Sure, it's a new game, but it's not the bugs that make me rage. There are always bugs and I can deal with that without a problem. What I can't deal with is the god-awful community, the worst I've ever experienced. I can't deal with the fact that the GM's assigned to help with bugs and such have no grasp of the english language at all. I refuse to accept the fact that my friend got banned because he dropped the F-bomb in guild-chat ONCE.
I hate the fact that people actually have gotten suspended and banned because they have tried to help their friends by giving them items/credits that according to Bioware are not to be held by their friends because they havn't been of the correct level. Or people getting banned because they try to sell something at the auction house...

/rant

Like it is now the game is going the way of WAR which is really sad. So much potential, and actually a good game in core, it's just that Bioware can't run it for shit.

sounds like the Nazi Republic. On my F2P game called Aika (which i have found to be the most interesting F2P thus far, trust me ive tried alot of them.) They actually allow and encourage premium credit trading. Its very common for people to shout that they are selling premium credits and people bid over the prices of them. I dont see why they are trying to regiment your gaming experience like that. They can't expect healthy feedback from that kind of GMing. Sounds like something to do with money.

 

[stringtheory]

I played in a beta weekend late november/early december. Here's what I have to say about it: it's WoW, but in Star Wars land, and with a good coat of voice acting painted over it. My take on it: gameplay wise, it's just like WoW, but the voice acting makes it a much more immersive experience, because now u have a real reason to do the quests and not just for the xp, money, equipment, etc. and the companion system was really well done

 

[the7ofswords]

What a surprise?

For the sake of Mac users, lets hope that they are not using Cider.

Man, you just know that's what they're going to do. (That's what they did with Dragon Age, after all.)