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EverQuest Coming to Mac OS X
Anonymous Coward writes "EverQuest is coming to a Mac near you, as reported on GameSpot. Sony is planning to release it on Mac OS X sometime next year. You can also find details on Apple's website. Scott McDaniel, vice president of marketing for Sony Online said 'Combine the power and stability of Mac OS X with Apple's outstanding desktop systems and you've got an incredible gaming environment that'll take full advantage of EverQuest's huge and seamless 3D world.' (sounds good to me =)"
It will no repeat will not connect to the PC version.
How many people call it EverChest vs. EverCrack?
is that the folks who make enough money to buy a Macintosh on which to run EverQuest will soon end up losing their jobs and families because they're obsessed with the game . . . and so they won't be able to afford new Macintoshes and upgrades.
So, Apple and Sony will have to come up with a way to get some 'new blood' into this consumer base, or, within a year or so, it'll become extinct!
If we are to believe the apple switch campaign people who use Macs are smarter than people who use pcs. By that logic anyone who uses a mac is smart enough not to play everquest.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
What happens when you mix RDF and EverCrack? I guess we'll find out.... hehehehehe
Boom Shanka
It's getting launched at pretty much the same time Everquest 2 is ramping up and Star Wars Galaxies is running. So, it looks like the latest attempt to save the EverQuest Brandname is to try to hook Mac OS users just as the game is being replaced.
So far to keep their game alive they have
- Removed information as to how many people are playing after noticing a 20% drop
- Started promoting EQ as a way of drunk women meeting famous people with a really amusing movie file that has basically vanished from the net
- Offering $40/month luxury servers that have what they used to promise the standard servers
- Providing a range of services that they swore they would never ever do (The Rename service netted then $69,200 last month alone)
- Trying to stir up interest in their game with some of the poorest tie-in merchandise in history
- emailing out free accounts
- giving free doses of their game away on magazine covers
(For people who don't play EQ, a lot of people are commenting on how once crowded zones are now going empty, and more and more people are leaving or Ebaying their characters rather then keep playing. When asked about Everquest 2, a common reaction is a shudder and 'Nope, never again')
Only the unproductive citizens of society play Everquest, and none of them own a Macintosh.
But, seriously, the boat has passed. The only imaginable reason anyone would still play Everquest is a) being psyched up for geeky medireview-ishness by the Lord of the Rings or b) trying to relive their childhood, in the same horrible manner that people still care about Ozzy Osbourne because they were children of the 80's.
Of course it is an EverQuest.
As for EQ, I had an account active for quite some time, because of the low-ish system requirements that allowed me to game on an old AMD K-6 333 with a cheap Voodoo3 card. (I prefer to keep my Mac free for doing other things, and the gaming PC sat next to it for when I felt like wasting some time.)
When the Shadows of Luclin expansion came out, they upped the requirements for all users, not just the ones who bought the expansion, so I chose to close my account rather than buy a new gaming PC.
My guess is that the Mac version's system requirements will be so rigid that it would probably demand tieing up my main G4 workstation (even though a well-coded port of that game really should be able to run fine on an old iMac G3-400... we all know that it won't though, eh?)
I'll pass, thanks. Neverwinter Nights for Mac will probably blow it out of the water anyway. If the Mac port of EQ came out two years ago, I would have been all over it... now I just don't care.
There's a lesson here for game design shops, though. Simultanious development efforts == Loyal Mac customer base. Bungie knew it, Blizzard has learned it. Even if your releases are a month or three apart (as with NWN), it will still profit you much more than porting a long-obsolete game and trying to sell it at new-release prices. Macs may be only 5% of the overall computer market, but keep in mind that over half of that other 95% is made up of office PC's that will never, ever be used as gaming stations, so efforts to build a simultanious Mac port actually reaches a proportionally larger unrealized market than you may have considered.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I see your second point, which is a good one, but is the same not also true for the Mac? Aren't a lot of Macs used for K-12 education, aren't a lot used at design firms, and aren't a lot used by, as a recent study discussed here pointed out, by richer people who wouldn't be inclined to game, as they have actual jobs?
I am honesly asking, not being rhetorical, do these uses equally dipose the use of Macs for gaming just as office tasks do for PCs?
What, 4 years or so? Coming soon: Doom for mac.
EverQuest's huge 3D world is divided into around Zones (over 200 I believe), and moving from zone to zone involves basically stopping the game and loading all the data for the next zone, a process that can easily take over a minute. Any monsters chasing you in the previous zone forget about you when you zone, and monsters right on the other side of the zone line that you couldn't see may be hitting you once you step across it. Hardly seamless.
- Steve
so efforts to build a simultanious Mac port actually reaches a proportionally larger unrealized market than you may have considered
A best selling Mac game shifts around 30K units - this isn't even on the radar for a PC title, which would be considered a flop if it sells less than 200K. It's unfortunate, but true - there just aren't as many Mac users who play games (I know these numbers are correct, because I port games to the Mac for a living: see posts by people like Westlake at IMG/MacGamer if you want another source).
Companies which do simultaneous development typically do so because a)of their history, e.g., they started out on the Mac and feel they owe it to their users or b)due to internal politics (e.g., id do it because they want to help support OpenGL).
EQ: Just Say No!
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
Guess what, a lot of us aren't. Surprised as heck that was announced, but not thrilled that it's not only an old game, but not due out until next spring. Some people think that they're porting this old game so that when the sales figures ae low, they can use this as an excuse not to port SW: Galaxies, but I don' think that makes much business sense myself.
"Common Sense Ain't" -Unknown
Yess, but a game that sells 230K is considered much, much more successful than a game that sells 200K. That's what simultaneous development can do for you.
Of course, if you port Mac games for a living, I'm sure you would rather that the game companies did not do it that way.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
How many people still play Tetris, or original Nintendo games?
A lot of people do. Just because a game has been in existence for 3 years doesn't mean anyone, aside from hard-core gamers who go through a new game each night, is necessarily tired of it.
Blah, D3D and DX8 may look nice, and all the new nVidia cards may have all that nice hardware stuff built in, but it would just be SO easy with OGL! :)
I like to kill your couch. HE DIED HARD! MOO.
insidemacgames.com
An interesting blurb in that article:
Uh, am I the only programmer here that thinks that's about the most absurd thing I've ever heard?
The only incompatibilties that could possiblity exist is if they changed the protocol.
Server's just don't say "Icky, I Think this network connection is coming from a non-windows box, I better not work right with it".
It will be interesting to see what happens once some clever people hackersquest.org end up reverse engineering the protocol on the MacOS version and see how much it differs from the Windows version.
Yeah the hardware is a LOT faster on the pc side, but I'd have to disagree with you about DX looking better than OGL. Doom 3 is an OGL title and it's looking pretty damned good.
The hardware is better? I don't know about you, but the stuff on Mac is starting to destroy things on PC. RISC BABY!
I like to kill your couch. HE DIED HARD! MOO.
EQ is coming for OSX. Neverwinter Nights is due out soon.
:lol: By then they should all be 7+ levels...
Assuming that I would want to play an online RPG (which will NEVER be a true RPG in my opinion; it can only be, at best, a war game), why would I want to play a game that's been out for the PC for so long? I see that players are gaming with other players, some good, some evil, some teenagers with nothing better to do than go online and wreck havoc...
I spoke to a buddy on EverQrack who has some rediculously high level character(s). He's not the only one.
These games seem to put a huge emphasis on Power Levels (again, where's the role playing in that?) What would make me, a new player, want to play in a power-hungry world with high level characters already out there? My joke to my friends who are playing NeverWinterNights already (PC version, natch), is that I can join as a 1st lever character and be a burden to the party as soon as the Mac client comes out.
Why do I never get a fortune in my fortune cookies?
Dunno about you, but x86 architechture isn't exactly shining performance.
I like to kill your couch. HE DIED HARD! MOO.