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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."
This was originally meant to be Mac, Linux, and Windows versions all on one disc with concurrent development cycles (more or less). My guess is that they had too many platform-specific engine issues, and it would have delayed their windows release to work on those. Once the product's finished, the original team members are probably going to be reassigned to various other projects according to their studio schedule. Thus, rather than tying up the team members on bug fixes, they probably decided to farm it out to MacPlay.
The reason they decided to finish Windows first rather than the mac has nothing to do with ease of development. The reason would be because they will have more sales on the windows platform than the Mac or Linux combined, so that's what they chose to finish.
I have no insider knowledge about Bioware or this particular situation. I do know quite a bit about game development, and I have released a product on Windows and Mac on a single hybrid disc, so I have made some pretty good guesses.
=Brian
There is nothing so good that someone, somewhere, will not hate it.
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.