New or upcoming Mac games

[Homy]

Last summer Apple announced RE Village, No Man's Sky and Grid Legends coming to Apple Silicon. RE Village and Winters' Expansion with Shadows of Rose have been released exclusively on Mac App Store. https://www.residentevil.com/village/us/mac/

NMS for Mac and Grid Legends for Mac are coming this year.

This year Apple has kicked off its gaming event early and had a press show with some upcoming games for Mac, iPhone, iPad and Apple TV. Here are the games shown at the event: https://9to5mac.com/2023/02/17/apple-event-gaming-iphone-mac/

- Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile
- Honkai: Star Rail
- Lego Starwars castaways
- Run Legends
- The Medium

The Medium coming to Mac has "very positive" reviews on Steam and uses UE4. Bloober Team has previously released Brawl, Layers of Fear and Observer on Mac but their last Mac game was Observer from 2017. They now make a comeback for "Apple Silicon Mac Lineup" after 6 years.

They plan a release this summer according to their tweet: https://twitter.com/TheMediumGame/status/1626237105042239490

Here is the trailer for Apple Silicon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YV2eat2tUis

Apple's new strategy seems to be sponsoring game devs financially? in exchange for exclusive titles on MAS, a similar path to Valve's solution to the lack of games on SteamOS. By helping developers like Capcom and Hello games financially? Apple helps to port new game engines to Mac which will be useful and cheaper for porting future titles. I think that’s a good solution and start, helping devs to port their engines and their first Mac game for exclusive titles on MAS.

It remains to see if such exclusive titles will come to Steam in the future.

In other news Crossover's new update 22.1 offers great news for me personally and others. Many old 32-bit games now work great. My favorite Bioshock Infinite which I barely could play on my iMac 2011 is one so now I can finish it on my M1 Max. Other 32-bit games now working great are Borderlands 1 and Calll of Duty 2.


https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/jschmid/2023/02/14/presenting-crossover-221-the-hallmark-of-this-holiday

[Homy]

Unlike CoD Warzone mobile Warframe is coming to Mac in Feb 2024. The mobile version will be playable on M1/M2 and beta testers have already installed it.
https://apps.apple.com/app/id1520001008

[Homy]

The Medium is out on Steam and App Store for Apple Silicon and macOS Ventura.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1293160/The_Medium/

[Homy]

This is a pleasant surprise. Lies of P is coming to Mac and App Store Sep 19. I think we can call it AAA. Reminds me of Bioshock Infinite and looks great. Either Apple is involved as usual or the Korean dev Neowiz has been inspired by Capcom. We didn't get Elden Ring so it's fun to get a new soulslike game.

“We’re thrilled Lies of P is coming to the Mac,” said Jason Park, Head of Round8 Studio. “Gamers from around the world have fallen in love with our unique take on the Pinocchio lore and now they will be able to experience our Souls-like on their preferred platform at launch.”

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1627720/Lies_of_P/

https://youtu.be/dzAnzMvGsk4?si=wLftzdADtFT_jfe_

[Homy]

Isonzo will be released for Mac tomorrow on Steam.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1556790/Isonzo/

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1556790/eventcomments/3818543965126257581?snr=1_5_9_

[Homy]

Star Trek Infinite is coming to Mac on Oct 12 and can be pre-ordered now. Not sure if it supports Apple Silicon natively because the Steam depot only says macos64, not macosapplesilicon.

https://www.paradoxinteractive.com/media/press-releases/press-release/boldly-go-as-star-trek-infinite-beams-onto-pc-and-mac-on-october-12-2023

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1622900/Star_Trek_Infinite/

https://youtu.be/3gS_nMkKl84?si=1EOFwbcsbHfnu7E1

[Homy]

Steam suggests that Len's Island is like Valheim and it does indeed remind me of Valheim but this one has a Mac port. It's an early access game with very positive reviews.


https://store.steampowered.com/app/1335830/Lens_Island/

[Homy]

With IPhone 15 Pro today we got very promising news for M3 Macs. The GPU in A17 Pro has a new feature for Mesh Shading. It also combines the power of the GPU and Neural engines for MetalFX. We have now HW RT too.


Some highlighted games were Ubisoft's The Division Resurgence and Assassin's Creed Mirage, HoYoverse's Honkai: Star Rail and Genshin Impact and Capcom's Resident Evil 4 and Village.


I wonder if The Division Resurgence, Assassin's Creed Mirage and Resident Evil 4 will come to Mac and be showcased with M3 Macs next year. It wouldn't take much effort once the games are on iPhone.

[Homy]

Holy cow! Resident Evil 4 Remake is coming to Mac. Amazing!

It's coming already this winter, perhaps in November like Village. So, what's coming next? Street Fighter? I hope we'll get the whole RE series some day. :)

https://www.capcom-games.com/apple/en-us/

[Homy]

The first beta for CrossOver 23.5 is out with VERY exciting news folks! 😃😎

"This release offers an alternate way to run DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 games through CrossOver, using components from the Apple game porting toolkit. It can be enabled by toggling on “D3DMetal” in the right bottle sidebar."

"We are happy to report that this new D3DMetal option improves quality, compatibility, and performance for many games on Macs with the M1 chip or later, including Elden Ring, Hogwarts Legacy, Cyberpunk 2077, Deep Rock Galactic, Satisfactory, Monster Hunter Rise, God of War, Hitman 3 and Batman Arkham Knight. Note that Elden Ring defaults to launching with Easy Anti-Cheat disabled."

"The excitement does not stop there! We are also happy to report that Baldur’s Gate 3 is working out of the box, and we recommend enabling D3DMetal or DXVK for the best experience. Denuvo games are now playable, and this release also includes support for GStreamer for multimedia decoding."

"CrossOver 23.5 is the first CrossOver release with support for macOS Sonoma with optimizations from thorough compatibility testing."

"CrossOver 23.5 also boasts better compatibility for a variety of distros, including Debian 13, openSUSE 15.1 and the upcoming Ubuntu 23.10 release."

"Lastly CrossOver 23.5 includes a handful of fixes, including special characters not rendering in certain apps and components not loading with MetaTrader 4."

"macOS Sonoma is required for D3DMetal option and Denuvo games."

[Homy]

Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader is coming to Mac.

https://youtu.be/t6DfyGpQlMk?si=J63uN0mdPKjA623M

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2186680/Warhammer_40000_Rogue_Trader/

[Homy]

FM 2024 will come to Mac on Nov 6 according to Steam.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2252570/Football_Manager_2024

[Homy]

Lies of P is out on MAS. Performance seems to be good according to Reddit and Steam reviews are very positive. Works on Monterey and M1.

"I have tried on M1 Pro easily got 50-60 fps on high settings. I am impressed by the performance even on base m1 MacBook Air 30-40fps which is super impressive.Worth it totally ."

"on m2max maximum settings constant 60fps. really beautiful graphics. But the game is not my favorite. Good to see games coming to Mac now."

"On my m1 macbook air i got 30-40 fps easily with metalfx performance medium settings."

"I have tried on M1 Pro easily got 50-60 fps on high settings. I am impressed by the performance even on base m1 MacBook Air 30-40fps which is super impressive.Worth it totally."

"Fromsoft quality, feels great, plays great, looks great. The level of polish this released with really puts most AAA publishers to shame."


https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/16lzrwn/lies_of_p_now_available_on_mac_appstore/

[Homy]

Apple explains Game Mode: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213658

Game Mode optimizes your gaming experience by giving your game the highest priority access to your CPU and GPU, lowering usage for background tasks. And it doubles the Bluetooth sampling rate, which reduces input latency and audio latency for wireless accessories like game controllers and AirPods.

- Move your pointer over the green button in the upper-left corner of the game window.
- Choose Enter Full Screen from the menu that appears.

When you enter full screen in this way, a Game Mode menu appears in the menu bar. You can use this menu to confirm that Game Mode is turned on for your game.

Also Crossover 23.5 is released:

"This release offers an alternate way to run DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 games through CrossOver, using components from the Apple game porting toolkit. It can be enabled by toggling on “D3DMetal” in the right bottle sidebar. We are happy to report that this new D3DMetal option improves quality, compatibility, and performance for many games on Macs with the M1 chip or later, including Elden Ring, Hogwarts Legacy, Cyberpunk 2077, Armored Core VI Fires of Rubicon, Mortal Kombat 1, Deep Rock Galactic, Satisfactory, Monster Hunter Rise, God of War and Batman Arkham Knight. Note that Elden Ring and Armored Core VI Fires of Rubicon default to launching with Easy Anti-Cheat disabled."

"The excitement does not stop there! We are also happy to report that Baldur’s Gate 3 is working out of the box, and we recommend enabling D3DMetal or DXVK for the best experience. Denuvo games are now playable, and this release also includes support for GStreamer for multimedia decoding. CrossOver 23.5 is the first CrossOver release with support for macOS Sonoma with optimizations from thorough compatibility testing. CrossOver 23.5 also boasts better compatibility for a variety of distros, including Debian 13, openSUSE Leap 15.1 and the upcoming Ubuntu 23.10 release. Lastly CrossOver 23.5 includes a handful of fixes, including special characters not rendering in certain apps and components not loading with MetaTrader 4."

"macOS Sonoma is required for D3DMetal option and Denuvo games."

[Homy]

Everspace 2 is now released for Mac. They say "The EVERSPACE 2 store page on Steam has been updated accordingly with minimum and recommended macOS specs. If you are unsure about how the game will perform on your machine, the free demo is a good way to test." but there's no demo for Mac??? The reommended system sounds too high too. M2 Max?? Not even M1 Max? At the same time they recommend i7-4770 from 2013? Sounds very strange.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1128920/EVERSPACE_2/

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1128920/eventcomments/3877093659890638560?snr=1_5_9_

[Homy]

Got an answer from the dev Rockfish Games:

"Unfortunately, the performance of games made in UE4 running on Apple silicon is not great due to the Rosetta instruction layer needed to run legacy x86 applications on the new Apple architecture, and there's not much we can do about it. With this update, the demo has been updated to the latest version and supports macOS, though. /Michael"

I know UE 4 is slower on Mac but never seen such high requirements for a game even under Rosetta. So they're saying the game doesn't support Apple Silicon natively? That's sad to hear. Lies of P does also use UE 4 but it's a native port for AS.