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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?
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')
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.
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
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.