FFXIV Mac Early Access (confusing wording on site)

[Joeni]

Forgive me if this is something that has been posted about already, but as a player who currently plays on a Mac (in Bootcamp) and is looking forward to playing natively in Mac, I'm keen to know the answer before I make my pre-order choices.

Firstly, does the Mac specific bundle need to be purchased or will the Mac client be made available to existing FFXIV owners. As somebody who has an ARR collectors edition licence already, I feel victimised having to buy a bundle that already contains ARR in order to get access to Heavensward. This isn't the way any other MMO goes about their PC/Mac client licencing and so I'd find it odd if this was the case.

Secondly, presuming that I DO have to purcahse the Mac specific bundle (and therefore am unable to buy the Heavensward collectors edition that I sorely desire), is there any reason why I can't get early access with a pre-order of the Mac bundle?

Wording on the FFXIV website says this:

* In order to enjoy the benefits of early access to Heavensward content, you need to be playing FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn and have made sufficient progress in the main scenario. As such, early access will not be available to new players who pre-order the FINAL FANTASY XIV Online all-in-one bundle and have yet to begin their adventures.

As somebody who has completed the main scenario in it's entirety, this statement makes it sound as if I'd be able to enjoy the benefit of early access with the Mac edition, since I've already made sufficient progress, yet all other information available online states that the Mac edition gets no early access, can this be clarified?

Much apprecaited

[Naylia]

The treatment is likely the same a PS3/4 players. You have to buy a client per platform that it was developed for...Windows, OS X, PS3, or PS4. I have multiple copies of many SE games and find them internally consistent on this front regardless of what the rest of the world does.

For the two FFXIV + Heavensward bundles, they seem to be assuming that you must be new, and hence they may not be planning to provision early access privileges for those two bundles. If you notice on the store, select the PC or Mac Bundle and go to the preorder tab....there is no mention of early access.

If early access is established by download of the new client, you may not be able to download it in advance.

I will be buying a preorder PC digital CE client for my desktop and I'll buy the Mac client for my laptop as soon as it's actually available since it confers no additional benefit to buy it early. It won't surprise me to not see the Mac client download available until 6/23.

[DracotheDragon]

to play on mac you need to buy a mac version,
if you own it on PC ps4 or ps3 you still need to re buy it,

own it on steam ... you may have to re buy it

also mac users will not be able to get into the early access PC PS3 and PS4 only, the mac version technitcly launches just after 3.0

[Mara-Eve]

own it on steam ... you may have to re buy it

If they don't have a Mac Steam version then will that mean that I can never play on the Mac as the "normal" SE expansion won't work for Steam?

[DracotheDragon]

If they don't have a Mac Steam version then will that mean that I can never play on the Mac as the "normal" SE expansion won't work for Steam?

the issue with steam (and why SE hasn't said much about it) its a 3rd party platform, so if steam allows the game to be both mac and pc for a 1 time buy or separate it, is truly down to Valve and not SE :c

it is more a question you should direct towards steam and about there policies about games on PC that gain a port

[Joeni]

The treatment is likely the same a PS3/4 players. You have to buy a client per platform that it was developed for...Windows, OS X, PS3, or PS4. I have multiple copies of many SE games and find them internally consistent on this front regardless of what the rest of the world does.

My problem with this logic is that, for Mac users, we're not on a separate platform (in a physical sense) since it's all the same machine and the development was just porting via a WINE wrapper, which is nowhere near as much work as making a new game. The point is moot, if SE wants to view it differently, of course, but it doesn't feel like a very fair way to handle it, especially as other companies view PC/Mac as a ubiquitous environment in terms of licensing traditionally.

Either way, I guess I'll have to buy the PC CE and hope that the Mac client is released later, because paying £49 just to play on a different OS on the same machine is a wretch.

[BreathlessTao]

The machine, physically, is the same, yes, but the system is not. If you've been playing on a Mac via Bootcamp, it means you've been playing on Windows - using the Windows (or Steam) version. Even if bringing the game to OSX is "just porting" (doubtful, as that wouldn't have taken so much time), it's still development of a big chunk of software for a different system - so yes, you have to pay for it. For ARR too, since that doesn't yet exist for OSX.

The reason why the early access is a no-go on Mac, I assume, is because of just that: ARR doesn't yet exist on OSX. So, Mac buyers are treated as "completely new" - which, in a sense, they are. Of course, exactly because of the multi-platform nature of the game, this is kinda odd, since it leaves multi-platform players somewhere in no-man's-land, as they obviously could (and probably most of them did) get to the required point in game where they can theoretically start Heavensward right off the bat. For now, I'd say SE has to revisit that logic, which may still happen, especially a dev gets in here and sees the issue. Be patient about that a bit, I'd say.


(Post victimised for being 93 chars over character limit.