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MacSoft To Publish Neverwinter Nights In Fall 2002
Oddbod writes "Hot on the heels of yesterday's gold news, Bioware has announced that IG arm MacSoft will publish the Mac version of Neverwinter Nights. They hint at porting the toolset over to Mac, which originally wasn't expected, but no promises so far."
It is a shame they didn't start development on a mac. The graphics and animation tools work together so much more easily.
But what do I know about game development?
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The official NWN sites (the Bioware site, Amazon's page, EB's page) I've been looking at all this time have all implied that the Mac version would be released simultaneously with the Windows and Linux versions, in the same package. Some of them have said things like "Mac requirements forthcoming" even, IIRC. Now I find that it's going to ship in a seperate box? Bleah...
echo Prpv a\'rfg cnf har cvcr | tr Pacfghnrvp Cnpstuaeic
Can this crap just be deleted? Some of it seems to hang around forever. I need to do a little volunteering again. Yes. I know.
From OmniGroup:
blakespot
-- Heisenberg may have slept here.
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What's "off topic" about my comment. The original post is spam. I see no reason why it should be allowed to just hang around. We're not talk troll here. It's plain vanilla spam and it keeps popping up all the time. It is intrusive and should be deleted by the mod. I called attention to the spam and I addressed the issue of what the top was: it was about spamming Slashdot,CmdrTaco, open source, and any number of things I couldn't stomach reading.
Well, for one, OmniGroup is not owned by InfoGrames, the company distributing NWN, and MacSoft is. A port of the toolset may take a while (depending on how portable they made it), but a port of the game itself should take very little time because a Linux port already exists (at least, a port to OS X).
:)
Fall of 2002 isn't too bad... better than Fall of 2003
btw, having a separate box is often a good thing, because numbers aren't counted as PC sales, but I digress.
...but no promises so far.
... expecting promises from a game company. I don't know why I ever got my hopes up about a multi-platform release.
Of course not. The promises made so far haven't panned out. Expecting promises at this point would be like
As an aside, all my PC friends are laughing at me. (Well, a few are; I'm not kidding.) When will Mac martyrdom end?
This now concludes our broadcast day.
The FAQ still says that they're doing a simultaneous release for WIn/Lin/Mac. It looks like the Marketing is not in sync with reality yet.
It became apparent to anyone following the situation that Bioware's recent utter silence regarding the non-Windows clients means they had fallen behind. The company has been in a huge push to get the game out (as well as changing publishers), and so of course the first things to fall off the radar are going to be the Mac and Linux clients when in a crunch.
The NWN Gold press release yesterday mentioned the Linux client would be out *after* the Windows version, confirming the statement above. So there goes any hybrid Mac/PC/Linux idea.
If the Mac client is some indetermined length of time older than the Windows, someone's going to have to go back and get it up-to-date.
Therefore, if the hybrid box idea is shot, it makes *much* more sense for MacSoft (another Inforgrames label) to do the Mac-specific marketing, QA, and even try and port the toolset (a beast in itself) so Mac users don't pay the same price for half the game. This is a *much* better idea than Bioware (who has never published a Mac game themselves) to try and do all this themselves.
And for those wanting Omni to do it, MacSoft has stated to Insidemacgames.com that the porting house has not been decided yet. It could be them, Westlake, or some other programmers they often use for their work.
I would have thought that porting the authoring toolset to the Mac would be a no-brainer. The Mac-using demographic is heavily slanted towards creative types - writers, artists, musicians, and so forth. Who better to write good story lines, create monster illustrations, and so forth?
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I believe it was mentioned the Linux binaries would be downloadable, they better do this for the mac version as well..
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What about all the Mac and Linux users that pre-ordered the title expecting it to be a multi-platform release as promised? Not that we can't likely cancel our orders and get our money back, but it really sucks having to go through all the hassle and disapointment. Now that the Mac version has been pushed off onto another publisher, there is certainly no hope for us now. Just like with Return To Castle Wolfenstein and practically every other game, we'll be the last to see a version for our platform and weeks behind everybody else with updates. This truely saddens me Bioware. You had the opportunity to usher in a whole new era of commercial multi-platform software development and distribution and totally blew it. Yeah, you'll still get my money but you've certainly lost my respect.
This is bad news by any reasonable definition. Note that the official FAQ still says "we are planning a simultaneous PC/Macintosh/Linux release for Neverwinter Nights, with all three versions to be included in a single box."
Also note that Macsoft expects it will take them two months to finish the Mac version, not including the toolset. No clue how long the toolset would take if they decide to port it at all. Third, note that Bioware has never released a single Mac (or Linux) demo appliction, or even a screenshot of a partial prototype.
For comparison, other porting houses like OmniGroup and Westlake can plow through an entire port, starting from raw Windows-only DirectX-based source code, and turn out a complete Mac game in the same amount of time.
The obvious conclusion is that Bioware has spent the past three years working solely on the Windows version, and their claims about parallel simultaneous development were a crock.
By the time it's released for the Mac, the major bugs should be fixed (at least those that would affect both versions). It's always better to wait a little while for these things...
It's not portable at all. The bastards wrote it in MFC and DirectX. Not that I'm bitter. It's only that the most innovative thing to happen to PC RPGs -- being able to DM like in real life -- is the one feature they left out of the Mac/Linux versions. Oh, here. We're giving you every bit of the game on your platforms except the part everyone's excited about. Let's just dangle it under your nose instead.
Now, there's a second middle finger for Mac users by holding off the publishing. I'd honestly rather them have not ported the game at all than to release a late, crippled version. It's just like that time I bought HoMM3 only to find out they didn't port the damned campaign editor.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The real question is "Are they going to release the Mac binaries as a free download for those who bought the Windows version and want to run it on their Mac?"
No, the real question is, "can you bother to read the press release before asking pointless questions?"
It states that MacPlay is doing the port, not Bioware: therefore, the game will be in a separate retail box, since I suspect MacPlay is unlikely to give away their work for free...
Jay (=
Someone posed the question, although it seemed a little more in passing...but seriously, what *about* the people who pre-ordered? I was this close to doing so myself, but I decided not to at the last minute. I know, though, that if I had ordered it, it would be coming in soon, but all of a sudden, I wouldn't be getting the product I had ordered. With Bioware claiming to have a hybrid release, supposedly pre-ordering would get you said hybrid. But then, *later*, you find out that it is not, in fact, a hybrid...well, that just doesn't work. They were taking orders for hybrid copies, not single-platform copies. So, my question is, did any of you pre-order it? And if you did, what is Bioware telling you? Or are they just ignoring you and playing innocent?
-G
Their may be a grammatical error, misspeling, or evn a typo in this post.