Title is pretty clear. When Overwatch launched without Mac support it was mentioned by a Blue that not enough Macs had the graphical power necessary to run Overwatch to make it worth the investment to port it to Mac OS. That’s no longer true today. From their least expensive entry-level Mac Mini/MacBook Air M1 Macs absolutely have the power to run games today. They are all over college campuses and will only continue to take a larger share of the laptop market.
I’m not angry or demanding you support Mac, but I wanted to request it, to express interest. Maybe other people would like it too!
Blizzards hands were tied by Apple when they decided to move to 64bit only. (Catalina+) The original D2 code is the heart of D2:R, which is 32 bit code. Apple made it even more difficult with the switch to their own in-house chips.
Then there’s the whole ratio of Mac gamers to PC gamers… Miniscule in comparison to PC gamers. There’s just simply not enough demand to make it worth the time and money that would need to be spent to port D2:R to Macs.
My best advice: Get a gaming PC. I know the market is terrible for one right now, but you’ll be so much better off when it comes to playing games.
The ARM Cortex chips in the Nintendo Switch are capable of both 32 and 64 bit.
The PS5 uses an AMD Zen 2 based processor, which is also 32/64 bit capable.
The Apple M chips are 64bit only. The ONLY way you can run 32 bit applications on an M1/M1X processor is through emulation, which emulation has its own set of drawbacks.
I guess it’s a reasonable objection, although they were able to port WOW and other games from 32 to 64 bit, I guess it just increases the cost and isn’t worth the effort.
It’s a shame. Maybe enough people can ask for it that we get some attention over there at Blizzard? I really can’t be the only one who wants to play on their MacBook =/
PS. I do own a gaming PC. I get that Windows is the better platform for gaming, but I want to play on the MacBook also =/
Ya, at home. No problem. Would love to play on the go! I’ve got friends with MacBooks who can’t afford two computers and aren’t going to go Windows to play Diablo. Just an ask, not an expectation. The hope was that other people would also happen to enjoy playing this game on their Macs. I guess it’s the wrong forum to post this request on… you can’t post here if you don’t own the game, so the number of “get a Windows” replies are going to be astronomically high since anyone who has a Mac only can’t even post here.
I have mac and PC and yet I LOL at this suggestion.
Sure it would be nice, but it is a dumpster fire on PC right now.
I can’t imagine what it would do to a mac.
The CPUs are 32-bit capable, it’s an exclusion from the kernel that prevents anything with a 32-bit userspace from running. D2R is a 64-bit client FWIW. You’ll notice this in how much RAM it uses. The game client was in fact modernized.
The primary issue is Apple’s treatment of developers. Working with Apple is…problematic. Shame too, because on the CPU side their ARM variants absolutely wreck either Intel or AMD’s best, and that includes the Xeon and EPYC CPUs when you factor in how well ARM as an architecture itself scales. It’s the GPU side of the equation where Apple lags behind still. That also happens to be the very area of betrayal by Apple toward their game devs as well.
Overwatch didn’t get a Mac client because Apple kept Metal to itself for too long and by the time they finally decided to be forthcoming with Blizzard it was too late. Management told Apple to sit and spin and hasn’t released a new Mac game since. Adding to that was the fact that Apple flat out blocked nVidia from making drivers at all, even for existing hardware. That’s why folks like me with a 1080 Ti are stuck on 10.13.6 instead of on Big Sur or Monterey. And with Apple’s transitiion to ARM64 about 75% complete, the days of AMD GPUs are also numbered.
Apple’s best CPU, the M1 Max, is “comparable” to a 3080. No, not the desktop version, the mobile version, and apparently only in very, very carefully cherry picked scenarios. Games? You’re still going to have to dial down either resolution and/or settings. Those M1 IGPs can’t drive native resolution on Apple’s displays at anywhere near max settings. Not even close. They can’t even do that in World of Warcraft.
Apple made its bed. Now they get to lie in it. It’s sad really, especially since having AAA games on that platform would mean a one stop shop for those that like to game and also use iDevices. I’m not among the iDevice users, but it would have been nice to have the more fluidly functional OS for at least my WoW needs for the foreseeable future. That’s going to end almost certainly with WoW 10.0 as 10.13.6 will be on the chopping block physically - the version of XCode in use by then to make the macOS game client won’t be able to target that OS anymore like it can now. It’s why emulators now require a minimum of 10.14.6.
There really isn’t much of a reason for Blizzard to keep making new Mac games when Apple just makes it such a PITA to keep up with and/or deal with.
WoW was the first of their clients to go 64-bit. That happened very early on in the changeover to 64-bit exclusively. In fact, it started years before Windows 10 even came out.
People with Macs can post here, just not those that don’t have the game license on their account (admittedly this is going to be those that have Windows installed for the most part). Unfortunately this particular argument is a bit of both a strawman and a red herring all in one due to its self-fullfilling prophecy nature.
Different teams.
It works, just…barely. It works fine for me in 10.13.6, but that was the last OS with reasonable OpenGL performance and/or functional AMD driver performance (for the AMD GPUs supported up until the time of 10.14’s release). D3 performs as badly as it does on modern macOS because it uses OpenGL still, not Metal. And with all of a single Mac specific programmer left to handle all, I repeat all of the Blizzard games that still support macOS in addition to the Windows load he deals with, I doubt it’s ever going to get an update. I also doubt it will maintain macOS support much longer in the end because the only way to do so is to continue using older versions of XCode to compile the client app so as to not destroy the support currently available to the OSes D3 can run in at present. Using the newest XCode to compile the app would systematically eliminate OSes on a 1-2 year timeline (this is a big part of why Mac support just doesn’t happen and so many devs are bailing on macOS on the whole).
Hopefully different budget too. I’ve been in situations before where folks think my team could work on X and Y simultaneously because they’re theoretically handled by different sub-teams, but in practice, post-launch, budget cuts meant that the team working on Y previously is now being funded by another project.
D2R on Windows runs as a pure 64bit application, this can not be the reason.
Even that would not be a problem, there are quite a lot of x64 game on Steam that just run fine with Rosetta.
And Blizzard already ported WOW native on the ARM M1, so it definitely can be done.
I highly doubt that the consoles (Switch maybe but not the others) support 32bit on OS-Level.
It is not just the hardware that must support 32bit, the key factor is the OS. Apple dropped 32bit support in Big Sur also for Intel based Macs although the hardware is known to be able to execute 32bit code.
Apple uses ARMv8, and ARMv8 as an architecture is able to switch between Aarch32 and Aarch64t just as x86/x64 is. But this ultimately does not matter, because Apple scratched 32bit support at OS Level.
The problem is the same as the linux one. The risk and cost is too high for a small benefit.
Create support channel for those OS is costly and doesn’t pays off. If one of them gets sudden changes or newer versions they would left alone in the water with angry customers.
Apple doesn’t help developers to adhere their plataform, while linux tries is really riskier to actually invest in something outside steam.
Until this day, even most popular game engines (unreal and unity) doesn’t entirely work on neither linux or macOS. Not when comparated on windows.
Windows is far from perfect, but at least have a huge amount of users and active support from microsoft. Doesn’t appear to be a huge deal, but when something goes wrong with your software and the OS technnicians can’t provide any insight or help to your cause is pretty much a painful job paired with a ton of angry customers.
If the server issues already made folks angry, even while they could still play offline. Then think about users having issues because apple decided to change something or just drop support of something.
Is really unlikely that macOS would have a client. But doesn’t mean you couldn’t try to make your workarounds around it. I mean, on linux folks does that more often than not, the performance aren’t the same and often aren’t great, but at least in some extent are doable. Same could happen on mac, if they didn’t change much the way that things behave on their ecosystem. Anyways, someone figured out or maybe will figure out how to make things work, but don’t expect great experience if ever works.
Fun fact: This only happened because Blizzard was testing ARM64 Windows builds. Code that runs on ARM64 Windows can be compiled to run on ARM64 macOS so long as the functions are “safe” (i.e. changed so that they don’t try to pass illegal instructions, which will fully halt an ARM CPU whereas x64 platforms will simply ignore the faulty instructions and switch to an alternate instruction branch silently without the user ever knowing). It hasn’t exactly been smooth sailing though. One need only look at the MTS forum to see that.
Actually they dropped 32-bit support in Catalina, a full year before Big Sur. It’s why so many Steam games listed as “Mac compatible” now have a warning that they will not work past 10.14.6 (Mojave).
This is actually untrue. Both work perfectly fine in Linux. But it’s up to the developer to perform the necessary code adjustments when compiling in order to ensure that all dependencies are met. Linux dependencies are the hardest to meet because each distro and kernel are at least slightly different, often running different versions of the same libraries… macOS is relatively easy to port to, but hard to maintain due to Apple’s yearly abandonment of their OS versions and the fact that graphics drivers are tied to each specific OS point release, meaning a bugfix only happens in X.Y.Z version of the OS and not before. And sometimes never, as seen with the Intel IGP bug that still plagues WoW nearly three full years after it was first encountered. With that kind of “help” is it any wonder Blizzard would abandon that platform for newer games and releases?
In my experience the M1 has had no issues whatsoever with World of Warcraft, easily handling level 7 or “high” graphics including in dungeons and outdoor world content at 50-80+ FPS at 1080P scaled (Which is more than enough, lets be real). Even in raids I don’t see dips under 30 FPS.
The M1 Pro and M1 Max already have benchmarks in typical gaming 3D benchmarking software like “T-Rex” and “Manhattan” and such with results measured in FPS, not in compute score. In these tests the M1 Max trades blows with the RTX 3080 Mobile and AMD 6800M which virtually no windows gamers have (they all have RTX 1660ti, RTX 2060 and maybe RTX 3060, lets be real). It has 10.4TF raw compute power, which puts it on par with Desktop RTX 2080 or Mobile RTX 3080 or the PS5. Very few people purchase this spec, I’m sure, but even the base level M1 has significantly more juice than the Xbox One and PS4 (1.8 and 2.1 TF vs 2.6TF M1 chip) So even Apple’s lowest-end chip can run the entire Blizzard Library at 60 FPS if they wanted to take the time and money to make it happen.
The world of Apple-Silicone is not the same as the 2015 days of limping along with a Radeon 370MX or other lackluster chips. Macs from top to bottom have the grunt to game and I’m certain that developers, including Blizzard, will catch on in the next five years. Furthermore, I imagine from a coding perspective it’s gotta be pretty efficient to code for essentially one chip, the M1, across the entire Apple Lineup. Mac Mini, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 13", iMac 2021, iPad Pro 2021 – they all have the exact same M1 chip. Optimize for that setup seems to me like it must be a pretty solid value proposition considering all the machines which have it. It’s console-level of optimization shouldn’t be entirely out of the picture there.
PS. Warcraft 3 Reforged Runs on Mac, that was Apple’s latest release prior to Diablo 2 Resurrected so they haven’t “abandoned Mac.”