Final Fantasy XIV’s revival since its initial disastrous launch has been remarkable, with very A Realm Reborn being well received as it overhauled the game on PC and made the move to PS3 and PS4. Mac gamers, who generally get the short straw, haven’t been quite so lucky though, and after finally releasing a client that can be run on OSX to coincide with the Heavensward expansion release, Square Enix have pulled the game from sale on Mac and are offering refunds.
Complaints about poor performance and graphical glitches soon arose, and Final Fantasy XIV’s producer Naoki Yoshida took responsibility in a detailed and apologetic letter posted last week. First things first, those that were affected by the issues have been offered a full refund for the game, and it has been pulled from sale until an unknown future date.
However, it’s unlikely that too much will change with the game without a major overhaul of the game for OSX. The main problem in the run up to launch was a lack of communication to potential customers, with system requirements only being posted after the game launched, and then a series of miscommunication with retailers gearing up to sell the game, who did so prior to last minute maintenance. Yoshida wrote:
I believe that the biggest problem with the Mac version release was the significant discrepancy between the performance of the product our development team produced and the expectations our customers had for it, which was due to the lack of information available on our product when sales commenced, as well as other issues. I would like to explain in detail how this happened.
Up until the official release of the Mac version on June 23rd, we were working to improve the client’s performance. Consequently, the system requirements which we should have released were not made available in time, which was a serious problem.
Although our development and QA teams tested the client on Mac hardware, because of our last minute efforts to improve performance and the possibility that system requirements might change, we decided to prepare several versions of these requirements, with the one to be released depending on the final result. However, in the chaos leading up to the multi-platform launch of our expansion, we released incorrect requirements, which were not updated prior to the Mac version’s official release.
However, the Mac version of the game will never perform as well as the PC version on the same hardware. Apple’s GPU drivers generally do not perform as well as AMD and Nvidia’s efforts on Windows, for one thing, but FF XIV’s Mac version isn’t actually a native port of the game, instead using TransGaming middleware in order to translate the game on the fly from DirectX to OpenGL. Such software has existed for a long, long time on both Linux – where it is better known as WINE – and OSX since Apple switched to Intel chips, but cannot hope to produce the same level of performance.
Naturally, this is all very disappointing for those hoping to avoid rebooting into Windows all the time, but in explaining these details and the thought process behind using TransGaming in the first place – a balance between cost and the potential market – as well as a candid and sincere apology for the mistakes made, Yoshida and Square Enix do at least deserve a little credit for their transparency in this matter, when so many game companies seem to fall foul of releasing software before it’s ready for public consumption.
Source: Square Enix via Gameranx
