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GW2 Mac Client Available NOW!
Roxtarr
Member CommonPosts: 1,122
Just Announced!
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/announcing-guild-wars-2-for-mac-beta/
Today we’re happy to announce another major milestone in the development of Guild Wars 2: going forward, ArenaNet will also be supporting the game on Apple’s Mac OS X. The Mac Beta client is available immediately for all Guild Wars 2 players. It shares the same features and connects to the same live game servers as the PC client. Anyone who purchases Guild Wars 2 can now play it on both PC and Mac.
Bringing Guild Wars 2 to the Mac is huge for us, because it introduces the game to an entire group of players who are often ignored by game developers. The ability to play together with your friends is one of the underlying principles of Guild Wars 2, and providing a Mac client means that friends and guildmates can play together regardless of what operating system they favor.
On top of it all, ArenaNet staffers are big fans of Macs. We offer them as part of our employee laptop subsidy program, and our president Mike O’Brien is rarely seen without his Mac laptop. We’re as excited as anyone to play Guild Wars 2 on OS X.
The Mac Beta is available to anyone who has purchased or purchases Guild Wars 2. All you need is an active Guild Wars 2 account to download the Mac Beta client. Just log in toaccount.guildwars2.com and click Download Client to get started. If you have any questions, check out our Mac FAQ.
Keep in mind as you play the Mac Beta that it is a beta product. Performance and system requirements aren’t finalized. Review the beta hardware specification, and understand that your overall experience will be better when we release the final version. Even though it’s a beta, the Mac client does connect to the same live environment that the PC client connects to.
To bring Guild Wars 2 to the Mac, ArenaNet worked with our partners at TransGaming, whose Cider technology allows us to mirror the game experience as closely as possible between the PC and Mac. This means that future updates to Guild Wars 2 will be available for both platforms simultaneously.
So whether you’re a PC or a Mac, or both, we’ll see you in-game!
If in 1982 we played with the current mentality, we would have burned down all the pac man games since the red ghost was clearly OP. Instead we just got better at the game.
Comments
Respect, walk
Are you talkin' to me? Are you talkin' to me?
- PANTERA at HELLFEST 2023
Wasn't much of a reason to do so for 2 main reasons:
1) They made the intel based Macs specifically so users could have access to all of the Windows programs and games. That made making a Mac client redundant.
2) Most gamers use PCs making it the,by far, major market share.
If you have the money and time I suppose why not, but it really is never necessary because of reason #1.
With MAC OS X being superior to Windows in every possible way, its just plain stupid to have to run a duall boot on a macbook pro.
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
To avoid the inevitable, maybe denote in the subject that it is beta at this point.
Otherwise this is pretty awesome!
We both know that's a complete lie. Just be happy they're bringing the game to MAC like everyone is instead of preaching like a fanboy. Ugh. Getting back to point I'm glad this is happening! Not only will my friends be able to play now, the player base is going to expand by quite a bit! Yay Anet!! Although fix the issues in the windows version first u.u
Mac fan opinion doesn't make a truth
I'm forced to use Windows, OSX and Linux for my job - yet I will take Windows 7 on a good PC any time of the day over the two other OSes. Windows 7 is just so much better and also so much more OPEN than OS X that it's not even funny. The same reason why I will never have an iPhone.
Respect, walk
Are you talkin' to me? Are you talkin' to me?
- PANTERA at HELLFEST 2023
For the love of all that is good and holy in the world, DO NOT start another stupid OSX v. Windows "debate" in this thread. This isn't the place for it. No one gives a shit which one you think is better or why.
Back on topic, this is great news for the Mac community. LotRO is also introducing a Mac client, although theirs will be a native client. Two big MMOs releasing Mac clients within a couple months of each other is always a great thing!
Current: None
Played: WoW, CoX, SWG, LotRO, EVE, AoC, VG, CO, Ryzom, DF, WAR
Tried: Lineage2, Dofus, EQ2, CoS, FE, UO, Wurm, Wakfu
Future: The Repopulation, ArcheAge, Black Desert, EQN
You did that on purpose, didn't you? Really not helping ...
You overlook that Windows has broad hardware support, and Mac OS X doesn't.
And if you care about gaming in particular, the situation for Mac OS X is even worse. You need a graphics API to do 3D graphics. Windows has the access to the latest versions of DirectX and OpenGL. Linux at least has the latest version of OpenGL. Mac OS X has neither, and can only do very old versions of OpenGL.
I disagree. I find the Mac OS to be over complicated about certain things and also very limiting. It's good for a home computer, but your claim that it's superior in every possible way is false. It also makes you sound like an apple fanboi, fyi.
there is a mac gw2 forum -- beyond that, no idea
https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/support/mac
EQ2 fan sites
This is interesting news. Especially considering Windows 8 is on the horizon, and it's not receiving the most positive responses from developers, critics and consumers alike.
I wonder if we'll start seeing a shift toward UNIX-based systems?
If the Mac version using OpenGL to emulate DirectX, then of course it's going to perform worse. Doing the reverse would also give a performance hit for the same reasons, as translating from one to the other is costly.
So long as games are mostly made using DirectX, they're going to mostly be Windows-only.
Hmm this is interesting. To get to the point people can't seem to ignore ... Mac OSX certainly runs better than Windows on Macs. I have a Imac with bootcamp and windows 7 and there are certain things where you plainly notice its not as smooth. For example brighness controls on keyboard do not work, system temperature rises faster(and thus fans run faster and louder) and current drivers can be a pain to aquire(im talking about ATI drivers and stuff).
Nothing major, but the system definitely runs better on OSX which is really not much of a suprise ...
That being said i see more and more publishers getting OSX versions of their games ready, in the past it has pretty much been only blizzard, but nowadays we saw CCP and Turbine also enter the fray. Reason is imho simple, the Mac market is growing far faster than the PC market. We have year over year groth rates of 20% on Mac, and apple is actually the biggest PC manufacturer in the US now. Not to mention that you have not alot of competition on that market, so its a win-win situation really.
Though im very disappointed by the way arena.net chose, Transgaming is known for their easy and fast "conversions", but they really just add a translation layer for directx, performance aswell as quality has always suffered in the past. There is a reason Blizzard is not working with them but rather making native versions, just as Turbine has chosen.
I might be more in favour of that approach if i ever had actually seen it working properly on anything actually using directx9+. It also means arena.net is outsourcing things and will depend on transgaming to fix any issues on "their" side...
Well, this could be good news if ported nicely.
I'm playing it on Windows 7 via Boot Camp now and it runs perfectly, but it'd save me a lot of restarts if they got a nice OS X client.
The keyboard brightness is almost certainly a driver issue. If Apple wrote drivers for both Mac OS X and Windows, is it really any surprise that they put more effort into the former? And if Apple didn't write Windows drivers at all but left Microsoft to do it or use a generic keyboard driver, it again shouldn't be surprising that the drivers aren't as good. The blame is almost certainly on Apple.
I'm not sure if this is the issue affecting you, but there was some Apple hardware recently that used some modified version of SATA rather than the standard version that the entire rest of the world uses. They measured hard drive temperature to determine the need for fans, but made sure that if you bought your own hard drive or SSD elsewhere rather than paying Apple's exorbitant prices, it wouldn't work right because it was the normal SATA. It's a vendor-lockout issue. Windows might not have the right drivers for it, in which case, the problem is that Apple's hardware design was basically defective. Industry standards exist for a reason--to prevent this sort of thing from happening.
I'm surprised that you'd have trouble getting video drivers for Windows. If you go to AMD's web site and tell it what card you have, does it not take you to the right drivers?
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If a game is originally written in DirectX and you want it to run natively on Mac OS X, then you have to redo all of the DirectX stuff in OpenGL. You'll also have to redo all of the HLSL shaders in GLSL. For many commands, there will be an OpenGL or GLSL equivalent for the DirectX or HLSL that you used the first time. But when there isn't, it can get complicated.
Or worse, there could be an equivalent that is available in OpenGL on both Windows and Linux, but not for Mac OS X because Apple hasn't bothered to write drivers for recent versions. The latest version of OpenGL and GLSL is 4.3, but Apple drivers don't support anything after OpenGL 3.2 and GLSL 1.5. That means that a game might have done something in DirectX or HLSL for which there is an easy OpenGL or GLSL equivalent--but the OpenGL or GLSL won't work on Mac OS X because Apple hasn't bothered to provide working drivers. For a purely DirectX 9.0c game, the OpenGL and GLSL equivalents will probably be available, but anything more modern may require stripping features out of the Mac OS X version to get it to run at all.
Above, you talk about trouble getting video driver updates for Windows. You know what's worse than the hassle of updating your video drivers? Needing updated drivers that don't exist. You can't blame game developers for that.
The brightness and sound volume and all other such keyboard keys can be set in Windows 7 Boot Camp control panel to either to their OS X function or behave like windows 7 control keys.
Personally, I turned off their OS X functions as many games require the use of F keys so switching to desktop when trying to quicksave is not the best solution.
Oh and also, I had the same issue with faster and louder fans on my iMac, but that was just because they were caked in dirt.
Clean them up and the loud buzz will be gone.
Its not a driver issue, since you can't write a driver that globally intercepts keystrokes afaik. For example the F1 key has a different meaning on desktop than within an application. I guess you COULD hack it in some way, but then your driver wouldn't get certified by microsoft. AFAIK its not possible in windows to assign a keypress to globally control brightness. If there is i would be delighted to know how, since im currently using a desktop shortcut that opens the energy options, which is a major pain.
Thats quite correct, though not my issue since i don't have one of those SSDs. I have a regular boring spinning harddrive. The issue simply is that my CPU more often goes into full throttle on windows. I.e. if i open a folder i see a CPU frequency spike on windows before it goes down again, that spike is not there on OSX. I guess you could say OSX is more sluggish, and less happy to leave the CPUs energy savings mode. I guess thats due to the fact that apple put alot of effort into making their laptops run as long as possible. And yeah i already tried playing with the settings on windows ...
No it doesn't. The drivers it takes me too are over a year old, i.e. older than the drivers that come with bootcamp. You see the Imacs use a beefed up mobile version of the chips, something you usually only see in highend laptops. And AMD thinks laptops are not their problem. What i have to use is basicly a hacked version of their normal current drivers that doesn't do the hardware check upon installation and works like a charm ... still this is basicly a third party modified driver and im not totally happy with the situation.
I guess thats Apples fault too in a way, but one of the reasons i bought the imac was because i wanted a energy efficent and silent system ... so i can hardly blame them for choosing hardware which does just that. Besides shoveling the blame around between apple and amd doesn't help me as a enduser.
Thats what Turbine did, for exactly the reasons you specified. And im ok with that, the game still looks very good(i admit im one of those you have to point graphical features out for to notice them), and it has the benefit of actually running faster on OSX than it does on bootcamp, loading screens are much faster too and the microlag that bothered me for years is gone.
Though i fully lay that at the feet of OpenGL vs DirectX, i don't think OSX vs windows has anything to do with it. Though who knows, if they had to rewrite parts of the engine anyway maybe they corrected some designflaws or something. God knows i usually tried to improve code if i had to rewrite it anyway.
Well no windows drivers is a big problem if the software only runs on windows ... Tbh i didn't expect that issue, i mean the Imac nowadays is basicly a fancy looking but normal PC isn't it? Fully expected AMD to provide normal driver support for it, especially because the normal driver works fine on it once the installer got hacked ...
Brigthness keys don't work for me on windows no matter the setting in bootcamp. And my fans are not covered in dirt, unless they shake it off by booting into OSX and then sneakily reapplying it on booting in windows. That would be going a bit far even for apple ...
Still, thanks for trying to help. The thing the brightness keys once worked with the original apple bluetooth keyboard and then stopped ... only they though, sound and the player controls work like a charm.
1) If the keyboard were to somehow communicate directly with the monitor without the OS being able to see it, it wouldn't matter if you were using Windows or Mac OS X, or for that matter, had just turned on the power and hadn't yet loaded an OS. If the OS can see it, it's hard to imagine what it could be other than a driver issue.
2) I don't think you understood what I said. The problem isn't some particular SSD. The problem is that the hard drives Apple shipped at some point aren't the standard SATA that the rest of the world uses. Apple added some extra stuff to detect the hard drive temperature, and then based fan speed on the hard drive temperature.
If you replace it by your own hard drive, it will work for data, but won't be able to detect the hard drive temperature, so it will have the fans going full blast whether you're in Windows or Mac OS X. If the fan speed being based on hard drive temperature is based on something in the BIOS, then it wouldn't matter if it's Windows or Mac OS X. But if it's something in drivers, then it won't work properly in Windows unless it has whatever special stuff the Mac OS X version has to control the fan speed.
3) What happens if you go to the Catalyst 12.8 page while you're running Windows, download it, and try to install it?
http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/Pages/radeonaiw_vista64.aspx
Macs aren't on the list of unsupported hardware (certain vendors ask AMD to artificially disable driver updates), so I'd think it should work.
4) Recoding a lot of stuff in OpenGL and GLSL is a lot of work. It also means two separate code bases to maintain and debug. For really popular games, doing so to make a Mac version might well get you enough additional sales to be worth the trouble. Guild Wars 2 might do it eventually, as it seems to be a very popular game. But for most games, the tiny fraction of added sales doesn't justify the cost.
5) I wasn't talking about Windows drivers. I'd be surprised if you can't get Windows drivers that run DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4.2 (assuming you have recent hardware) for your Mac. The problem is that you can't get Mac OS X drivers that run anything more recent than OpenGL 3.2, which is several years old and roughly the OpenGL equivalent of DirectX 10. Apple writes their own drivers for Mac OS X rather than letting AMD or Nvidia do it. I'm not sure why, as AMD and Nvidia write their own Linux drivers, and that has far smaller market share (in desktops and laptops, but not counting servers) than Mac OS X.
1. Its a logitech keyboard. Are you telling me logitech isn't properly building windows drivers for their stuff? And how come i have never seen a normal(windows keyboard) with brightness controls? You only ever see it on laptops.
2. So they put a temperature sensor on the harddrive and only turned on the fan that cooles it when needed? Thats spiffy but not the problem i think, my system is not constantly louder under windows. If im not doing anything intensive its just as near silent in windows as it is on OSX.
3. It does not work, the driver says on installation that my video hardware is unsupported. They have their own category for imacs in bootcamp, there we may download the drivers from january 2011 ... see here http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/Pages/bootcamp-win7.aspx
4. I admit im suprised myself Turbine chose that way for LotRO, by no means a title as big as GW2 or WoW, yet they did and im thankful. And i call shame on arena.net, if Turbine can do it what is their excuse for not doing it? People using non windows systems are very sensitive wether you dedicate yourself to the platform and produce a native client(and we know its not easy) or wether you use a, sorry, halfassed emulation/translation software.
5. If i wasn't techsavy enough to install unsupported drivers from a thirdparty site and confident enough to not worry about compromising my system with them ... yeah it would be a tad bit problematic. Graphic drivers that approach their 2nd year are considered old, correct?
As for why apple doesn't let them write their own drivers ... maybe its the state of the linux drivers thats putting them off? Last i used them they where beyond horrible, outdated and prone to produce kernel panics. Honestly, they most likely simply do not meet apples quality standards. Not that i blame them, they focus their driver developement on Windows ... im pretty sure there are big differences between writing drivers for OSX and Windows, it doesn't sound so farfetched that neither amd nor nvidia have the kind of expertise on OSX in their team that apple has ...
Atleast thats my explanation. There does exist a amd driver as i linked above, the fact that they ceased developement on it ... take that how you will.
Obviously 10/10 :S
I'm so broke. I can't even pay attention.
"You have the right not to be killed"