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

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?

[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.