FFXIV’s Mac Version Be Suspended Sales Since Performance Issues
Square Enix, The Final Fantasy publisher, suspend sales online-roleplay Mac version in the holiday weekend， since Waves of vitriolic gamers forced the company with serious performance issues from Arkham Knight.
The long-awaited Mac version of Final Fantasy XIV arrived on June 23, but elicited jeers from sites like Kotaku (“Final Fantasy XIV’s New Mac Client Is A Joke”) and Destructoid (“Final Fantasy XIV’s Mac port isn’t great”), because the game apparently runs like a drunken donkey whether you meet the required specs or not.
The game’s producer/director Naoki Yoshida outlined the issue in a 2,000-word mea culpa on Square Enix’s forums. In summary: the Mac version was released too soon, the system requirements were set too low, and boy is Square Enix ever sorry. The word “apologize” occurs seven times on the page.
The Mac version of Final Fantasy XIV uses middleware developed by TransGaming to get Windows’ DirectX visual systems working in the Mac’s OpenGL environment. That, in portability parlance, is what’s known as a wrapper, and since wrappers have to translate crazy-complex rendering logic in realtime, they always induce a performance penalty. Studios use wrappers to port games much faster, lowering their development costs. But what’s interesting in Yoshida’s disclosure is his claim that a native OpenGL version would still have been significantly inferior to the DirectX version.
Well, you can choose Boot Camp if you want to play Final Fantasy XIV at maximal speeds on a Mac. Of course, If you want a refund, Square Enix has you covered here. Yoshida says the company will re-release the game for sale, once the update of game’s system and the improvement of game’s performance be done.