At this year’s PAX East, a Mac version of Final Fantasy XIV was announced alongside the release date of the game’s first expansion, Heavensward. When the Mac version of the game was finally released last month, gamers were disappointed to find that the port wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
The main problem was that the Mac version of Final Fantasy XIV isn’t a port at all: instead, the Mac client is simply a wrapper around the Windows version of the game that allows it to run on a Mac. These types of wrappers work well enough if you’re looking to run Windows-only software, but they aren’t known for their performance. Even worse, the system requirements that Square Enix posted before the launch of the Mac client were inaccurate.
“We decided to prepare several versions of these requirements, with the one to be released depending on the final result,” Final Fantasy XIV producer and director Naoki Yoshida wrote in a post on the game’s forums. “However, in the chaos leading up to the multi-platform launch of our expansion, we released incorrect requirements, which were not updated prior to the Mac version’s official release.”
“Because of this situation, many of you purchased a product which your Mac hardware could not run at even the minimum system requirements, resulting in insufficient performance,” Yoshida continues. “Had we provided accurate information beforehand, I know many of you would not have purchased the Mac version, which is why we decided to offer full refunds.”
In addition to offering to give purchasers their money back, Square Enix has pulled the Mac version of Final Fantasy XIV from sale. Yoshida promises that the team will continue to work on the Mac version of the game to improve performance, but there is no word on when the game will return.
For a deeper look into the problems with the Mac version of Final Fantasy XIV, see Yoshida’s full forum post.
