Jan 2, 2012

Posted by in News | 5 Comments

Mac Version Of The Old Republic: Coming Soon? Massively Reports

Over the course of three years following the game and running Ask A Jedi, in all of the interviews I’ve conducted with BioWare, LucasArts and Electronic Arts I’ve always asked about a Mac version of the game. I was never given a “no” answer, but rather some variation of “just Windows at this time” or “we can’t take about that yet.” In fact, our first-ever interview was with James Ohlen back at E3 in 2010, and he had this to say when asked about a Mac version of TOR (click for audio):

Ask A Jedi: What are your plans to support TOR on the Mac?

James Ohlen: Um, currently I can’t talk about Mac… can’t talk about that. The only thing I can say is we’re coming out on the PC.

We even did  Blue Milk & Cereal not too long ago that showed over 34% of the respondents would play TOR on a Mac if it was an option to them. That’s more than 1/3 of the players, and similar to a poll of World of Warcraft players.

I’m a pretty staunch supporter of the Mac. Heck, I wouldn’t even own Windows if it wasn’t for Star Wars: The Old Republic. There was just no need for it in my daily professional and personal life. So imagine my excitement when I read Ben Gilbert’s post on Massively today, summarizing a discussion he had with BioWare co-founders Dr. Ray Muzyka and Dr. Greg Zeschuk about the importance of the Mac market:

“I’d say ‘not yet,'” Zeschuk assured me when I told him that, as a BioWare fan, I’m unable to play The Old Republic on my less than two-year-old MacBook. Though Muzyka was quick to remind me that I cantechnically play the game on a Windows partition, he also admitted that it wasn’t an ideal situation. “We’ve done a lot of Mac ports before of our games. We haven’t announced any details yet for The Old Republic, but we know that’s an important and large audience.”

While the statement is far from an official announcement, seeing the Doctor’s speak of it, I have great confidence that given BioWare’s past track record, and seeing how well Blizzard has done with the Mac version of World of Warcraft, it’s only a matter of time before we see a Mac version of TOR.

Now, let’s hope it’s a truly native version and not a Cider port or some other virtualization layer. If it is all that I will hope it will be, I’ll be placing my recently built Windows rig on eBay faster than you can say iPad 3.

Hop on over to Massively for the full read.


  1. One thing a lot of people forget is that Hero engine itself is still working on a Mac client. As per wiki on the official website of the hero engine. I guess once they got that, I’m sure we’ll see a mac version of SWTOR.

  2. Kryssprollz says:

    I recently asked a question on HE forums (I think it was about BW guys looking how the HE Mac client would run before taking action to support it themselves) and the admin gave a answer that was bad news for us Mac folks: while Idea Fabrik had been actively exploring an OpenGL-compatible HeroEngine and a Mac client for it, they were in fact essentially targeting iOS compatibility for future MMOs on iDevices. Due to technical hurdles they are now questioning this objective and more and more thinking about a HTML5+javascript solution to provide iOS devices with a MMO engine – I suppose – derived from HeroEngine.
    Q1 2012 was announced for the release of a Mac client for HeroEngine but the more we approach this release Window the more HE guys are mute on the subject…

    On the other side, TOR runs surprisingly well on a VM like Parallels Desktop 7 (not smooth enough for collective content but good enough for questing) and I expect a Cider port to be pretty easy and, maybe, efficient…

    One third of my guild is already playing TOR on their Mac after months of a collective effort to support everyone wishing to set up a Windows partition with Bootcamp. So far, so good.

    But if a Mac client was available, we would switch to it in an heartbeat and many friends would join us then…

  3. A lot of my friends who love star wars, aren’t playing TOR simply because they use macs, and selling there macs would not only make what work they do on them more difficult, but also the hassle itself of selling the mac and then buying a new computer just for a game (even if it is the greatest of all time) would be ridiculous. Everyone I know at least who uses a mac, would easily buy TOR in a flash if they came out with a mac copy of the game…

  4. personally i am a huge star wars nerd, cant get enough of it, i recently got jedi academy for the mac because its one of the few good games out made for the mac, this game looks awesome, i was following it for at least 5 years, and then i get faced with the decision of gettin a few years older pc laptop or a brand new 2011 15inch macbook pro, biggest worry was tht the old republic wudnt wrk with my mac, however i remebered wow was compatiable with my mac so i figured a massive online game liek this wud no doubt be made for mac as well because of all the ppl tht own macs tht wud love to play this game, n now i cant n it is such a piss off, this game looks amazing ive wanted to play this game for years! n now i cant all because of the retarted reason that the mac never got picked up asa gaming system ;P which makes no sense cuz games work perfectly on this machine, sumtimes better then pcs, its trendy to have mac and yet the gaming community is horribly and dissapointly lacking in the mac department when it shudnt be, game shud be made regularly for this device, just like all other computers

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