Mac gamers can now play 'Baldur's Gate 3' a day later than expected

AppleInsider

Starting Friday, gamers on macOS can play the critically acclaimed role playing game "Baldur's Gate 3."

Baldur's Gate 3

was first released on PC in early August and has quickly gained popularity among reviewers and players, with some even considering it a contender for the best game of 2023. The game is now expanding to other platforms, having been released on PlayStation 5 in early September and set to arrive on Xbox Series X/S before the year's end.

Now Mac gamers can download and play Baldur's Gate 3, which received a patch to make it compatible with macOS on Friday. The game was initially slated to be released to Mac on Thursday, September 21, but the developers stated that the patch would undergo one additional day of testing to ensure quality.

Patch 3 is coming, and it's a big one. To ensure thorough testing, we're releasing Patch 3 this Friday, September 22 instead.

Thanks for your patience, all! https://t.co/Ex8hrMOHNq

-- Larian Studios (@larianstudios)

September 20, 2023

Baldur's Gate 3

is available to purchase via Steam for $59.99.

Read on AppleInsider

mknelson

A day? 3 weeks?

Potaytoh, potahtoh

chasm

mknelson said:

A day? 3 weeks?

Potaytoh, potahtoh

FTA: “ The game was initially slated to be released to Mac on Thursday, September 21, but the developers stated that the patch would undergo one additional day of testing to ensure quality.”

Sorry if this confused you.

22july2013

When Apple says "new episode Fridays" I usually find (for me in my time zone) that it's available Thursday night. That's because there are multiple time zones and multiple dates at any given time around the world. This is also why, when Apple says, "delivery starts on <date>," the first people to get the delivery are in New Zealand, because <date> always occurs first there. (Actually, it occurs first in Kiribati, but only 14% of the people there have a cell phone, and it's probably not a smart phone. And half of the islands in Kiribati don't seem to have any cell phone coverage.)

This could explain why Baldur's Gate was a few hours late: it was actually released Sept 21 somewhere in the world. Maybe even Alaska, which is next to the International Date Line. Parts of Alaska are located in the Eastern Hemisphere of earth.

On a less entertaining note, it is disconcerting that Larian studios believes they can perform "thorough testing" in 24 hours, and that they had performed only non-thorough testing up until the day of release.

emig647

Was really hoping for a long trope about Kiribati

It is amazing that the Mac finally gets a AAA game release in a reasonable time frame.  

Marvin

22july2013 said:

On a less entertaining note, it is disconcerting that Larian studios believes they can perform "thorough testing" in 24 hours, and that they had performed only non-thorough testing up until the day of release.

Usually that means that the thorough testing wouldn't be completed by the 21st, not that they didn't do thorough testing.

Software patches are made against bug reports. Bug reports are selected for a patch and they can estimate the time to fix. The bugs are then fixed all the way until the patch release along with a QA test per bug. If bugs are patched late, they need to be tested and it can push the patch release until later, otherwise they can be pushing other bugs into production.

emig647 said:

It is amazing that the Mac finally gets a AAA game release in a reasonable time frame.  

And not a lazy port either, a fully native Metal renderer. It looks like it's running well - high quality, 50-60FPS, 1440p on M2 Pro:

panathaninf

I bought the game day one of it being released on Steam. I own PCs and Macs and I was so happy I could play a game series I enjoyed since being a child in all my computers and especially some older macs that I keep for use only on my summer and winter houses... Fast forward the game was advertised to be supporting both PC and Mac, NOWHERE was it mentioning that the Mac port would be release at some unknown time in the future... Result? I had to find from forums that Macs where not supported until later AND of course make arrangements so that I can play the game on PC. Now the game has finally being released (with even greater delay than was communicated) but 1] I have finished the game already in PC and have no further interest, 2] It either doesn't run or runs horribly any of my Macs , ok for my old mac mini, not ok to be horrible in the 17.1 M390 AMD discrete gpu 27 Imac (It runs okish in the supposedly worse nvidia 960M junk laptop PC i keep as backup plan) and NOT OK that it sucks in the just two+ year old M1 air 1400 euro... More absurd it that my son's Lenovo's something/whatever legion 799 euro older than my M1 air performs really fine.... Whom on a Mac this game targets???

It is still beyond me that Apple, the biggest company in the world, trillion dollar valuation cannot spend some billions to have video games like starfield, cyberpunk released on Mac AND ffs it lets situations like BG3 with delays and performance issues slip to their customers... 

thethirdshoe

The Beta was running fine on my 2019 iMac 27". Now all it does is crash when you try to launch the game after setting up your profile.

anome

Working fine for me, so far. So much better being able to use a controller and not having to deal with GEForce Now lags and session limits.

Of course, I'm still dealing with GEForce Now for the Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 release (which actually did come out on Thursday - well Friday morning in Australia).

saarek

panathaninf said:

I bought the game day one of it being released on Steam. I own PCs and Macs and I was so happy I could play a game series I enjoyed since being a child in all my computers and especially some older macs that I keep for use only on my summer and winter houses... Fast forward the game was advertised to be supporting both PC and Mac, NOWHERE was it mentioning that the Mac port would be release at some unknown time in the future... Result? I had to find from forums that Macs where not supported until later AND of course make arrangements so that I can play the game on PC. Now the game has finally being released (with even greater delay than was communicated) but 1] I have finished the game already in PC and have no further interest, 2] It either doesn't run or runs horribly any of my Macs , ok for my old mac mini, not ok to be horrible in the 17.1 M390 AMD discrete gpu 27 Imac (It runs okish in the supposedly worse nvidia 960M junk laptop PC i keep as backup plan) and NOT OK that it sucks in the just two+ year old M1 air 1400 euro... More absurd it that my son's Lenovo's something/whatever legion 799 euro older than my M1 air performs really fine.... Whom on a Mac this game targets???

It is still beyond me that Apple, the biggest company in the world, trillion dollar valuation cannot spend some billions to have video games like starfield, cyberpunk released on Mac AND ffs it lets situations like BG3 with delays and performance issues slip to their customers... 

The poor gaming on a Mac is largely due to Apple itself. 

Before the Intel days games required lengthy ports, during the Intel days most Macs had terrible GPU’s and Apple deliberately refused to update support for common universal graphics API’s such as OpenCL to modern versions. On top of all of this Mac OS averaged around 5-6% of the market with Windows at 90%+

But there is finally a reason to feel hopeful. Mac OS is actually climbing steadily and averages around 15% of market share now. The Apple Silicon Mac’s all come with mid range or higher GPU’s and as the old Intel models die and people upgrade game developers can start to drop support for the old Intel Macs all together. Metal is becoming a mature API and Apple is finally showing interest in supporting game developers.

Still, what matters to gaming companies is the balance sheet. The best thing you can do is to buy and play any Apple Silicon native games that you can, BG3 is a great place to start!