[clocknova]

If you haven't already, you should check out some of the reviews for Dragon Age: Origins. It's starting to look like we may finally have the true spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate. Does anyone think there is a chance we might see this on OS X?

[WarpMooN]

clocknova, on November 3rd 2009, 01:56 PM, said:

It's starting to look like we may finally have the true spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate. Does anyone think there is a chance we might see this on OS X?

January 2011 is my estimate.

Not waiting for the Mac version. :/

[Hansi]

It's not coming.

[clocknova]

Hansi, on November 3rd 2009, 08:56 AM, said:

It's not coming.

Why not? We have a good record of getting Bioware games.

[Tetsuya]

clocknova, on November 3rd 2009, 07:05 AM, said:

Why not? We have a good record of getting Bioware games.

Had.

KoToR was the last one we got. That was ages ago.

[clocknova]

Tetsuya, on November 3rd 2009, 09:17 AM, said:

Had.

KoToR was the last one we got. That was ages ago.

What about NWN2?

[teflon]

NWN2 wasn't Bioware, it was Obsidian, Bioware's little offshoot developer (by which I mean, a bunch of guys left and formed Obsidian who then did a few sequels to Bioware games).

But the last Bioware game we got was actually Jade Empire, which we got through Cider.

The main problem here is that Bioware is now published by EA, who have this thing for Cider, which isn't exactly ideal when you're working with newer engines. Of course, since that's the case, Aspyr, who previously worked with EA quite a bit, could feasibly approach EA and to a traditional port with, hopefully, better performance. The real question is then what performance drop we're going to see. NWN2 used a Bioware engine (albeit an old one souped up to try and handle it) and was very very buggy and sluggish on PC which translated across to the Mac port...

So who knows? Its a possibility, but until something's announced we won't know for sure. It's almost pointless to speculate since we might get a game soon, or it might take years to get picked up...

[Sargiel]

I was about to chime in about Jade Empire - but teflon got there first Although it's cider it ran flawlessly on my iMac so no complaints here.

Would love to see Dragon Age on the mac though ...

[Janichsan]

Well, to be fair: the only Bioware game between Jade Empire and Dragon Age is Mass Effect – and that could not have been ported to Macs due to a severe lack of a working Mac version of the Unreal Engine 3.

But I don't really expect a Mac port of Dragon Age. As Teflon mentions, Cider has no really good track record with modern engines. Additionally, I don't really see that EA has much interest in the moment in porting other games than some few selected cash cows, like The Sims, its wannabe successor Spore or Command & Conquer (I mean, they don't even port their sports games anymore).

[Ichigo27]

If Bioware wants to port it or let another company do so then they will. If there will be a OSX port, I can imagine the performance on the game, unless they do a great job on it. As much as I want to see it, developers these days rely more on making the code more DirectX friendly then OpenGL friendly, crysis, and LFD anyone?

[Mister Mumbles]

Will be picking up this one for my PS3. My Maccer certainly would have problems with it anyway even if it miraculously made its way to OS X.

[Sneaky Snake]

I would definitely buy it if it came out for mac, but I'm definitely buying it in the next few days for PC

[Tacohead]

This game might actually force me to buy a copy of Windows and create a Bootcamp partition when I get my next Mac. It's not just that the game looks astonishingly good and is the spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate but much like NWN 1 & 2 user-created content and expansions should make this game last for quite a long time.

Of coarse I'd much rather have a Mac version...

-PN

P.S. Who would like a personal man-servant for a year in exchange for doing a Mac port?

[devSin]

teflon, on November 3rd 2009, 07:42 AM, said:

The main problem here is that Bioware is now published by EA, who have this thing for Cider, which isn't exactly ideal when you're working with newer engines. Of course, since that's the case, Aspyr, who previously worked with EA quite a bit, could feasibly approach EA and to a traditional port with, hopefully, better performance. The real question is then what performance drop we're going to see. NWN2 used a Bioware engine (albeit an old one souped up to try and handle it) and was very very buggy and sluggish on PC which translated across to the Mac port...

Just to clarify, BioWare now *is* EA (bought-and-paid-for division). So if they were planning a Cider "port," it probably definitely would have already been announced long before shipping. EA would almost certainly have to self-publish a port due to the post-release downloadable content and social community support (the game is pre-allotted a two-year lifeline for active development and enhancement); I don't think Aspyr would even try to touch it (look how well NWN2 post-release support and user content worked out for them).

NWN2 started with the Aurora engine, sure, but the graphics layer was entirely new (NWN was an OpenGL game; Obsidian threw out most of the graphics code and wrote their own, switching to DirectX in the process, from what I understand). Of course, BioWare also switched to DirectX for Dragon Age, but there's no guarantee that they're all that similar to what was done for NWN2.

As suggested, pick it up for Windows or your console of choice. Note, however, that the console versions are slightly different (no toolset, and you have a more restrictive camera with regards to zoom levels, and the combat mechanics are slightly different to cope with the limited resources available on consoles).

[Sargiel]

Issues we have with NWN2 are down to Aspyr not keeping up with the patches. The version we have at the moment is 17 months old and so we can't play online with PC users ... and no sign of the expansion packs either. All in all a bit of a disaster as far as I'm concerned and I'm more inclined to blame Aspyr for that as they're the ones responsible for maintaining & updating their port.

I know a patch is being worked on but it's sketchy at best and I'm concerned the QA won't be there... We'll see how it turns out but I've not much patience left.

If Dragon Age does come to the Mac I hope it's someone other than Aspyr that does the porting.

[ltcommander.data]

Ichigo27, on November 3rd 2009, 06:18 PM, said:

As much as I want to see it, developers these days rely more on making the code more DirectX friendly then OpenGL friendly, crysis, and LFD anyone?

Well to help balance things out, OpenGL has been moving toward being more Direct3D friendly. I believe Brad Oliver mentioned new half float formats for vertex array and pixel formats and new texture format extensions which were added in Snow Leopard and are part of OpenGL 3.0 and are used in Direct3D and common in console games, which seeing how things are going, being console friendly is important. OpenGL 3.2 also added several more extensions with the explicit focus of being more compatible with Direct3D, which I believe some OpenGL purists were objecting to. I think the specific ones had to do with bringing over Direct3D's BGRA vertex color ordering whereas OpenGL was traditionally RGBA, allowing the fragment co-ordinate origin to be in the upper-left as in Direct3D compared to OpenGL's traditional lower-left, and something about the provoking vertex being the first vertex in a primitive as in Direct3D compared to the last vertex in OpenGL. Seeing all these opposites between DirectX and OpenGL, I wonder if Microsoft deliberately made it this way to be difficult. These new compatibility extensions were reportedly pushed for by the Mac game porting companies Transgaming, Aspyr, Codeweavers, Blizzard, and interestingly Destineer/Macsoft (so they are still alive over there). Now that the porting companies have pushed through these extensions to help game porting, it'd be great if Apple adopted OpenGL 3.2 as soon as possible, but so far Snow Leopard doesn't even have a complete OpenGL 3.0 implementation. Maybe in 10.6.2?

[DaveyJJ]

Just a reminder ... almost all reviewers are agreeing the PC version is much better (runs better, looks better, etc) than the console versions. Plus it has the editor as well.

[bobbob]

Sargiel, on November 5th 2009, 01:46 AM, said:

Issues we have with NWN2 are down to Aspyr not keeping up with the patches. The version we have at the moment is 17 months old and so we can't play online with PC users ... and no sign of the expansion packs either. All in all a bit of a disaster as far as I'm concerned and I'm more inclined to blame Aspyr for that as they're the ones responsible for maintaining & updating their port.

The MacSoft port of NWN1 ran into the same hurdle, but they eventually shipped some expansions.

[DaveyJJ]

bobbob, on November 5th 2009, 06:42 PM, said:

The MacSoft port of NWN1 ran into the same hurdle, but they eventually shipped some expansions.

<cough>Aurora Toolset<cough>

[ltcommander.data]

DaveyJJ, on November 5th 2009, 05:25 PM, said:

Just a reminder ... almost all reviewers are agreeing the PC version is much better (runs better, looks better, etc) than the console versions. Plus it has the editor as well.

I actually found it interesting the reports that the PS3 version is superior to the XBox 360 version with better textures and animation. Generally, it's usually the PS3 version that falls behind. Maybe developers are finally understanding the Cell architecture and the PS3 is coming into it's own. Or it might be less technical than financial, since the lower prices and increasing user-base may now be justifying additional developer effort in optimization. It may well be that the XBox 360 has a lot of power that is easily accessible, but if both consoles are squeezed and optimized to their limits, it wouldn't surprise me if the PS3 pulls ahead.