MacOS Catalina - Launcher Can't Run

[Mistyregions]

Lets back track to the real problem. You dont buy a Apple product to play video games.

[Xiomara]

The problem is that the Mac client uses Wine to power the Windows version of the game, and Catalina gutted everything Wine uses to run it's Windows emulation. So it's not SE's fault, they are waiting on CodeWeavers (the Wine developers) to fix Wine, and they've been working on this for months.

If anything it's SE's fault for offering a non-native Mac client in the first place.

[Saefinn]

With using Wine, yeah that's not an ideal implementation. but Mac development can present its own issues, particularly in porting something that wasn't built to work on Mac in the first place. As I understand it Mac support was something considered at a later date.

So I can understand why getting it to work through Wine was a given solution, especially if they've got it to work and if the alternative was "no mac support" should a proper implementation be too time consuming, but the downside is they are relying on a third party.

True they did but you are assuming people read these messages on a daily basis and noticed it. If they cared it would have been on the launcher weeks before Catalina, not a post here 5 days before. I personally came to research the issue only after I upgraded to Catalina and saw it didn't work. So in order to keep playing I had to create a Mojave partition to boot into just to play FFXIV.

If SE truly wanted to support the Mac they would have been on top of betas and had a working version on day 1. I'm sorry, this is SE's fault, not Apple's.

P.S. It didn't even occur to me FFXIV would be a problem since they did do a 64-bit upgrade a few months ago. I thought that was to have Catalina support.

Even on the assumption people don't read the notices, it isn't sensible to upgrade without checking your software still works, this wouldn't have taken much to do as the information is easily accessible.

As for how soon they release the notice. If they left it to the last minute to test, then yes that doesn't look good for how they see Mac support. I hope this isn't the case, but I accept it is perfectly possible that it was an after thought

There too also exists the possibility they were working on trying to get a fix implemented for Catalina release but hit a wall and figured better to set an alternative deadline and put a notice out of the issue.

[Reih]

For me it just means I can't play FFXIV and won't be paying this month's fee. Going back to Mojave is because work not possible. See ya'all when this gets fixed.

[LalaRu]

Well, if Nintendo's Switch were powerful enough, I don't be surprised to see xiv there. I remember Mr. Yoshida told he will like have the game on every platform possible. "possible".
Maybe Mac platform were on the edge of do it/ do't do it but it was decided to do it.

To Mac users, I hope the "Catalina incident" won't reflect on future decisions if continue to support Mac or not. You know, SE is a business not a charity and if costs/revenue for a given platform passes the red line...

[DumdogsWorld]

I have no experience with Macs, but if Macs use WINE to run Windows games, then I'll speak with my experience with WINE on Linux. WINE always seems to be outdated in its support of DirectX and other Microsoft apis that are updated on a per-OS basis. Even if it runs some DirectX 11 games, others are likely to just flat-out crash.

Have you tried the 32 bit client and launcher? They are still being shipped out to computers, but without technical support.

Also, the launcher, unlike the client, makes heavy use of Internet Explorer apis. Have you tried one of the various third party launchers around the web? I don't think they're against the TOS because they don't really interact with the game at all - they just log you in and launch the client.

[LalaRu]

...Have you tried one of the various third party launchers around the web?...

For which reason they exists in first place?

[Vespar]

Honestly, this whole thing is completely ridiculous. I just purchased Shadowbringers, reactivated my SE account subscription, only to not even be able to run it. No warnings when I was buying the game from the SE store, nada. Now I can sit here and not play for 2 months (hopefully it's out by then) or reward SE for this failure by buying another platforms version? $40 + $15 wasted.

...and no, I'm not interested in wiping my computer and trying to go back to a previous version of MacOS just for 1 game and to cover for this screw up. I just want my money back at this point.

They warned users of this a few weeks back. They did what they can do. It's not their fault Apple rushed Catalina.

[DumdogsWorld]

For which reason they exists in first place?

They're usually just independent programming projects written by hobbyists and what-not. Often for reasons like this.

If you find one that just does the bare minimum to securely encrypt/decrypt the connection request and then passes control to the client, it might have a higher chance of working due to having a simpler executable.

[Xiomara]

Have you tried the 32 bit client and launcher? They are still being shipped out to computers, but without technical support.

That's the problem, Catalina's kernel has had it's 32 bit support gutted. WINE was using the 32 bit windows libraries to get stuff done, but it can't because the Catalina kernel refuses to run 32 bit code, so CodeWeavers are currently working on some sort of wrapper to bypass this restriction as the hardware will always be 32 bit compatible.