Diablo II Gets Native Mac OS X Installer

Sutekh-Acolyte writes "Blizzard Entertainment just released a native Mac OS X v10.2+ Diablo II installer, so Mac users no longer have to use the Classic environment to install the game and its expansion set. At 25 megabytes, it's not a small download, because it includes patch files and installs as version 1.10b. PlanetDiablo has a set of screenshots of the installer in action. Download it from FilePlanet (login required) or directly from Blizzard."

Comments

Sure its an installer...

[Dylbert]

Rather than download it to find out, I'll just be lazy and ask whether this is just the installer, or whether the whole game has been ported to run on OSEX.II

If its just the installer, I'll still have to load up Classic to play it.

Re:Sure its an installer...

[Anonymous Coward]

If its just the installer, I'll still have to load up Classic to play it.

Diablo II has had an OS X native version for a few years now. IIRC, Blizzard ported both Starcraft and DII to OS X within about 3-4 months of the first release of 10.0. This is finally a native installer for the game...

Re:Sure its an installer...

[Anonymous Coward]

If its just the installer, I'll still have to load up Classic to play it.

This post reeks of trollness...But here goes...Blizzard released OS X versions of both Starcraft and Diablo II within a few months of the release of 10.0 (yes, that's several years!). This is just the native installer that's been missing.

Is there a market for this?

[dbm1175]

When did Diablo II come out? Three or four years ago? Is there still a market for this game such that they need to be spending a lot of time and development effort on developing an installer for another OS? I'm all for being able to play games on multiple platforms, but this seems like too little too late. There are much better games on the market now!

Re:Is there a market for this?

[gamgee5273]

Yes, there is a market for this. In fact, Blizzard has said that an OS X installer of StarCraft is on its way pretty soon, too.

Blizzard looks out for its old games, especially if they are the most recent in the series, hence the reason there is no OS X installer for WarCraft II (WarCraft III is already OS X ready), but Diablo II and StarCraft get ones.

Frankly, this is what I consider strong customer service - Blizzard could have killed these games years ago, but they choose not to and they choose not to charge their users to keep the games updated (think of the various updates of Myst we've seen). I like that.

Re:Is there a market for this?

[Rappy]

Could you go into how there are better Dungeon Crawl type games that are out there that are better than D2? I've played Dungeon Seige, Beyond Divinity, and Sacred, but none of them are as fun to play as D2...but I wouldn't be surprised if I missed a hidden gem out there somewhere.

Re:Is there a market for this?

[valkenar]

I assume you've already played Nethack, Moria, and Angband. Have you tried Zangband or T.o.M.E?

For those that don't know, these games are the same basic style of diablo, but are text-based (or graphical text-based if you consider ascii maps graphics). Short on graphics, long on depth of play. Most versions don't have an action-element however, and that's something you'll miss from Diablo. Though there are multi-player Angband variants that aren't as turn-based as the rest.

Has Blizzard ever mentioned these old games? It seems that the basic item system is very much like certain angband varients.

Re:Is there a market for this?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a reason they don't kill their games like that:

The last three non-expansion pack games they released are

Warcraft III (2002)
Diablo II (2000)
StarCraft (1998)

They MUST support these games with patches and expansion packs or they'll have no source of revenue! Cut off StarCraft and Diablo II and all you've got is Warcraft III! Also, their games typically stay at full retail much longer than games from other developers. That's just their business strategy.

Re:Is there a market for this?

[Guspaz]

Look out for their old games? You mean like how it took them months (Years?) to make StarCraft compatible with the Windows NT TCP/IP stack (Win2K and WinXP affected)? Many patches went by without a fix for this huge problem, that as I recall, made 95% of games unreachable in the game browser.

Yes, they fixed it... eventually. But that doesn't exactly show the best support for their old games.

Now, find a critical bug like that in WarCraft III: The Frozen Throne, and I'll bet you it'll get fixed damned fast.

Re:Is there a market for this?

[Dizzle]

The fact that there is a small market for this game due to it being old and this installer is for a small portion of users is irrelevant. It creates a good image of the company and also gives them an idea of how to do it in the future. It shows they care about the customers which creates satisfaction (much like Google does), even if it isn't used by everyone.

Re:Is there a market for this?

[MyDixieWrecked]

I can't wait for the starcraft installer.

I havne't run OS9 at all (even classic mode) since 10.0 came out and havne't had my starcraft fix in years. This is seriously good news.

I've even reduced myself to sending support emails asking about this on several occasions in the past couple years. =)

Re:Is there a market for this?

[cheide]

Shortly before the 1.10 patch came out, GFrazier mentioned on the BNet forums that D2 was actually still a fairly strong seller for Blizzard, and that it still occasionally popped up on the monthly top 10 sales charts. Heck, the battle chest version still sells for $40-$50 CDN in most stores; it's nowhere near the bargain bin.

It may have waned a bit since then now that the patch has been out a while, but it's apparently still popular enough for them to think it's worth supporting.

Re:Is there a market for this?

[gamgee5273]

Well, let's keep in mind: Win 2K was not meant for home use. If you wanted to play games on it, you had to suffer the consequences that came with it or should have picked up Windows Me (not a grand solution, but that is what MS would have told you at the time). Win 2K is not a major installed base for Blizzard users. So, no, it isn't pressing. Sorry. Same reason for the OS X installer. OS X has been around for three years at this point.

XP, obviously, is different. Now, not being a Windows user, I have no idea when the patch you mentioned came out in conjunction with XP's release. But, keep in mind, that most of the SC and Diablo players are probably still running 98SE or Me. I'm not defending their decisions to do so... but, as someone who runs a help desk, I can tell you that the Win 98/Me installs at home dwarf 2K and exceed XP.

Re:Is there a market for this?

[drinkypoo]

A DirectX game which runs on Windows 98 which does not run on Windows 2000 is by definition poorly programmed. If you want to optimize everything, write console games. If you're going to produce PC games, you have to accept that the PC is a moving target, and you have to target the API and not the PC.

In general I have been very happy with Blizzard but if they had games which don't work on 2k then clearly they did something wrong. (The only Blizzard game I ever played on 2k was the original Diablo.)

Re:Is there a market for this?

[gamgee5273]

Let's step in the way-back machine for a moment, Sherman:

It's the April after Windows 98 has been released and Microsoft, quietly, announces "The Death of DOS." DOS is over. DOS is done. The next consumer release of Windows will be NT-based.

Suddenly, less than nine months later, MS announces Windows Me. Which is DOS-based (granted, it doesn't look like it, but that's another story).

Why?

Because the game manufacturers screamed bloody murder as they were not ready for that large of a move. Thus, because the manufacturers dug their heels in and told Microsoft not to release only an NT-based OS. Thus, they didn't.

I don't disagree that it is sloppy on the manuafacturer's part. But, if your buyers are going to be overwhelmingly 98/Me installs, are you going to put compatibility with 2K (an OS that MS was actively saying was for business, not home) on the front burner? No, you aren't.

As a Mac user and an avid gamer, I can say that I wait, and choose to wait, for games because of the same principle: the manufacturer is looking at who their largest possible customer base is first. I'm comfortable with that... it's a fact of life, and the reason I also have a Windows 98SE machine. :)

Re:Is there a market for this?

[drinkypoo]

It's not an issue of NT compatibility. It's an issue of DirectX compatibility. My very point is that they optimized for Windows 98 or it would be working. Many other games managed to be released for windows 98 and work just fine on Windows 2000.

Re:Is there a market for this?

[gamgee5273]

No, it isn't a question of DirectX compatibility. Something works with DirectX just fine in 98 but not in 2K. Where is the variable there? It isn't DirectX.

Re:Is there a market for this?

[Alcimedes]

there is an OSX native installer for starcraft. i was just installed it last week.

Re:Is there a market for this?

[cheide]

A program that works in one environment can still suffer from flaws that will prevent it from working in another.

For example, an application might access some memory that is technically out-of-bounds, but the program might still continue working because something else caused that nearby memory to be allocated already and it wasn't being used at the time so there was no corruption. But, the next version of the OS might change the allocation strategy, so now that memory isn't allocated, the program overruns the end of its space, and crashes. Or it's being used for something else that now gets corrupted. The program *is* at fault, but the fault isn't revealed until later on.

The real question though, is did they promise it would work on NT2K in the first place? (I don't remember if they did.) If they never even claimed it would work, then you can't really blame them if it actually doesn't, no matter how much one thinks it *should* work.

Re:Is there a market for this?

[MyDixieWrecked]

Where, may I ask, did you find it? I still can't find it anywhere.

I can find the updaters, but they just update SC if you already have it installed. I can't even install it because I don't have classic or anything pre-X running on any machines.

Re:Is there a market for this?

[spir0]

people are still playing nethack.

draw your own conclusions.

Re:Is there a market for this?

[Alcimedes]

halfway down this page:

http://www.blizzard.com/support/?id=msc0411p

that works. then you have to copy the files from the broodwars cd irrc., and it should work. i know it was easier than i thought. i installed in on my dual G5 (massive overkill) and i know i didn't have to boot into classic at any point to do it, since i don't have it on there. if you can't get it, let me know and i'll try and redo the process from the beginning, see if i can figure out what i did exactly.

Re:Is there a market for this?

[Anonymous Coward]

That downloadable Starcraft installer is in fact still a Classic app. It was released because the 1.0 installer on the StarcraftCD does not function correctly under Classic (though the Diablo II installer on CD does). Just a short term solution to allow installation on OSX without taking the installer fully native.

Blizzard's goal with the new installers is to eliminate the need for Classic to be installed, in order to install either Starcraft or Diablo II on OS X. The native installer foir Diablo II is out, the Starcraft one is not quite yet.

PC/Mac LAN Gaming

[Puggs]

Can you play Diablo II multiplayer over a lan with a pc?

If it doesnt I dont care.

Im fed up of games that are ported to the mac, but not compatible with the same game on a PC played over a direct LAN connection. Im not a programmer (I know, I know...), but it seems to me that it shouldnt be that difficult, im presumably theyve come from the same codebase so they should be reasonably compatible.

Re:PC/Mac LAN Gaming

[jahndm]

Yes. I use a PowerBook and play with my two PC friends over the Internet (using TCP/IP, not the Blizzard servers). We use LOD 1.10.

Re:PC/Mac LAN Gaming

[NaugaHunter]

The number one reason ported games do not have compatible networking is the original maker used MS's proprietary networking code instead of open standards or their own code. MS has not ported these to the Mac. While a development team could probably reverse engineer it, you can bet MS would lay the smackdown on them.

Re:PC/Mac LAN Gaming

[Anonymous Coward]

All of Blizzard's games have had cross-platform multiplayer. Even Warcraft II could use the same maps on both platforms.

If you're fed up... I wonder what games you've been playing because they obviously aren't any of Blizzard's. Assuming you're a Mac person and you've never gotten any of Blizzard's games which have always been available cross platform, I question whether you're a gamer at all.

Re:PC/Mac LAN Gaming

[spir0]

I only own 2 games for my mac... Quake 3 and Warcraft 3. Both of those are networkable with PCs. So if I had a twisted view of the world, I could say that 100% of mac games are lannable with PC games.

But I won't make that statement with having played every networkable mac game.

can you give some examples so that others can avoid them?

Re:PC/Mac LAN Gaming

[maharito]

MS wouldn't necessarily lay the smack down, nor might they have grounds to do so. If, by some stroke of the imagination, a gaming company chose to steal MS's code, or take the proprietary libraries and reverse engineer those, MS would be within their rights to throw the compulsory hissy fit. However, a game maker is going to know two very important things when it comes to the data being sent over the wire: 1) The input data is being generated by their own software (i.e. the game) and 2) They can pick the resulting data (as sent out from MS proprietary networking code) off the wire and see how it was changed. Knowing these two things, they could simply implement their own library functions to do the necessary data transformations to ensure multiplatform interoperability. IANAL, but I'm relatively positive that clean-room reimplementation of proprietary code based on publically available input and output data is perfectly legal. That is, unless you're in the EU and operating under their software patents. AFAIK, the clean-room reimplementation of DirectX and Win32 API's is essentially the goal of WINE (and Transgaming WineX), so that games implemented in DirectX/Win32 are playable without missing any features under Linux (and other unices).

Diablo 1 update please? :-)

[DamienMcKenna]

I wish they'd do an update for Diablo 1, in many ways it was more fun than D2.

Damien

Re:Diablo 1 update please? :-)

[chromaphobic]

The original Diablo had one (IMHO) critical thing going for it that Diablo II was sadly lacking, the ability to save any where, any time.

Diablo II was the last game I ever bought that had restricted saving. Too many times I got tired of playing after spending an hour tearing through some dungeon and still only being half way in, then having to decide between playing for another hour when I don't really want to or have to (more or less) start that dungeon over the next time I play.

Thus I will never again buy a game that won't let me save and quit playing whenever I want.

Re:Diablo 1 update please? :-)

[cheide]

I don't really mind having to run it in Classic mode, but what bugs me is that I haven't managed to get it to work with a disk image yet (D2 works fine with one though).

Argh, it's my laptop, I don't want to have to haul CDs around with it...

Re:Diablo 1 update please? :-)

[drinkypoo]

Unless Diablo 2 is a real 3D game unlike Diablo, you could probably run it in a virtual machine (ala vmware) and you can suspend that whenever you want as long as you use Win98. (Suspending Win2k/WinXP machines in vmware usually works, but not always.)

I've seen desperate game news before

[hambonewilkins]

But really, PlanetDiablo has a set of screenshots of the installer in action.

Though I welcome the news of Blizzard working to port games to OSX, this is such a sad little bit... screenshots of an installer?

I want to see screenshots of Doom III's desktop icon! Or Half-Life 2's ISBN number!

Re:I've seen desperate game news before

[DavidLeblond]

Though I welcome the news of Blizzard working to port games to OSX, this is such a sad little bit... screenshots of an installer?

They ported the actual game to OSX a long time ago. They posted screenshots of the installer because thats what they released.

Re:I've seen desperate game news before

[chromaphobic]

Keep on waiting for that Half-Life 2 ISBN number, it's probably never going to be released for the Mac. :(

Re:I've seen desperate game news before

[DLWormwood]

this is such a sad little bit... screenshots of an installer?

Since the game was ported first, most OS X users already did the old jury-rigged install process. So they may be curious as to what artwork Blizzard used for installer screens, since they are unlikely to see them. Blizzard tends to make even their installers a little high on the "eye candy" scale compared with most companies.

Linux compataibility

[SonicTooth]

will the installer work in linux? it can't be too far from OS X to linux in terms of compatability.

Re:Linux compataibility

[AHumbleOpinion]

will the installer work in linux? it can't be too far from OS X to linux in terms of compatability.

No, the typical Mac OS X game is as far from Linux as ever. Don't let Mac OS X's Unix underpinnings fool you. Mac programs are not written to some generic Unix API, they are typically written to the Carbon or Cocoa APIs and these are Mac OS X specific.

Re:Linux compataibility

[IntergalacticWalrus]

Wrong, it couldn't possibly be more far than that, for starters by Linux I assume you mean "Linux on a x86", so already you have a different arch.

Re:Why own a mac

[DLWormwood]

When I read this article, I thought this was originally a joke, but it's not.

When I first heard about this a couple days ago, I thought the same thing. And I'm a Mac user!

Seriously, though, this is just a convenience utility. The game itself was already Carbonized, but it required launching into Classic to use the installer. With current Mac OS X installs not even having the OS 9 files needed to use Classic, I'm guessing that Blizzard realized that the tech support phone calls for the clumsy Classic based procedure could be potentially expensive in the long.

Brood War

[Twon]

Hopefully they'll do this for Brood War soon, so I can do a proper install on my iBook (which is Classic-free), rather than ditto-ing my desktop install and being stuck with that CD-Key. They have an OS X installer for SC itself, but you can't patch to BW without Classic.

Re:Why own a mac

[Sutekh-Acolyte]

Um... Diablo II was released on June 28, 2000. Got a time machine?

Re:Why own a mac

[maharito]

Coincidentally, your argument for Doom III is reasonably terrible. id Software has released Quake III for Win32, Linux, and Macintosh, and all of them play very nicely with each other. On top of which, each of the versions was released during the peak of its popularity. Aside from the obvious issue of marketshare, it's quite a shame that more game developers are not writing for the Mac OS and Linux platforms. Both of these platforms, in my experience, have insane performance benefits over the Win32 environment. That being said, I do most of my gaming in Windows simply because that's the release target for most of the games out there.

It's a bloody game!

[droleary]

Why the hell does it need an installer at all? Just give the user a folder to drag and drop, or go the extra mile and hire a developer with a clue to make a proper application package. OK, I get that Diablo might have a lot of data, but even I can think of a few ways to locate and load resources without writing a separate installer application. Certainly I can't be the only one concerned with all the opaque installers that ask for the Administrator password first thing after being launched, too.

Diablo II is several years old, still a top seller

[AHumbleOpinion]

Unlike other older games people still play Diablo II and Starcraft. Go on to Battle.net and you will find hundreds of thousands of people playing these games. Even though it was several years old at the time Diablo II was the #5 best seller last Summer.

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2003/07/02/news_60708 78.html

All Blizzard games let Windows and Mac play ...

[AHumbleOpinion]

Im fed up of games that are ported to the mac, but not compatible with the same game on a PC played over a direct LAN connection

Obviously you don't play Blizzard's games on a Mac. All of Blizzard's PC based games let Windows and Mac users play against eachother. Their save game files are compatible and can be moved from one platform to the other. Their Mac products are not missing companion programs like map editors and such.

Im not a programmer (I know, I know...), but it seems to me that it shouldnt be that difficult, im presumably theyve come from the same codebase so they should be reasonably compatible.

Actually no. It takes some care in both the design and the coding. It is difficult in some ways.

Mac?

[Mc_Anthony]

Whats a Mac OS X?

Re:Mac?

[kryptKnight]

Is this a question or a joke? If it's a joke it isn't very good and if it's a question you could have found out very quickly. I'll just assume it's troll.

Re:Mac?

[Mc_Anthony]

Are you haveing a bad day, or are you a Mac user?

Very nice.

[SphericalCrusher]

I'm a very visual person.. and this new look is awesome! Not preferring it over the PC look (or PC over the Mac), I just think that it is very beautiful. More games that are ran on the Mac should have their own Apple Aqua Look and Feel.