I can create my own hotwheels tracks without buying.Overwatch wasn’t what you’d call a “surprise” hit — everyone knew it was going to wipe the floor with its immediate competition. But unlike a lot of games, it still costs money. If you’ve been meaning to give it a shot but don’t feel like shelling out the $40, this weekend the game is free to play on all platforms (PC, PS4, Xbone) with no restrictions.
![]() ![]() Is Overwatch Going To Come Out Free To PlayMost developers seem to have stopped caring, and it’s hard to blame them. If you haven’t heard, Mac gaming has been in a particularly sorry spot as of late. For that matter, you don’t have to sacrifice a huge chunk of the often small MacBook hard drives so you can partition them for Boot Camp.Nor is there any reason to pour around $1,000 into an external GPU and graphics card just so you can play something as graphically uncomplicated as World of Warcraft on your MacBook with the settings at maximum.And it’s about time. Provided your internet connection is strong enough, there’s no question you can run it with GeForce Now. An embarrassing number of the games on my list of the best Mac games still haven’t been upgraded to support the transition from 32-bit to 64-bit in macOS Catalina, even in the case of simple games like Undertale.And Macs always struggle to run games anyway, despite Apple’s efforts to woo developers into using its Metal API. With a player count that low, it’s no wonder that Psyonix is offering refunds for players on those systems.Here at Macworld, I stopped writing our monthly roundup of the top Mac games because finding good games every month became as hard as finding a Steve Jobs wallpaper on a Google Pixel. As Ars Technica reported, non-Windows players make up a measly 0.3 percent of players. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has been ported so much that it’s a game industry joke, but it still hasn’t made its way to Mac.You can get an idea of why developer might not care from last week’s report that developer Psyonix was dropping Mac and Linux support for its popular Rocket League. Autocad 2014 for macNew problemsGeForce Now doesn’t eliminate all of the problems of Mac gaming. Nobody buys a Mac expecting it to be a monster gaming rig, but this state of affairs is ridiculous. (Performance did get better when Nelson dropped in an AMD 5700XT.) Even my own 13-inch MacBook Pro struggles to run some Apple Arcade games. And you can do this for $4.99 a month!You can win a Shot Caller commendation in Overwatch and then Command-Tab over to try to find some AirPods Pro in stock in Safari. You can now play graphically demanding PC games you already own on your old glowy-logo MacBook without having to partition your drive or do something ridiculous like buying an eGPU. Leif Johnson/IDGBut let’s repeat some things worth repeating. (Fortunately, GeForce Now has a “Data Saver” mode that will only eat through 4GB of data per hour rather than the 10GB you can expect with the “Balanced” setting.) And I’m not entirely convinced GeForce Now will stay stable once the floodgates open today. You might finally be able to run The Witcher 3, but you’re still in danger of eating your data plan. Right now, one of the big drawbacks of relying on GeForce Now as your main gaming service on the Mac is that you’ll probably have to wait a while for games to become available. Who’s going to crank out a mountain of cash just so they can play Rise of the Tomb Raider the way Feral Interactive intended us to? I doubt it’ll be affordable, and I doubt it’ll be worth the wait.Speaking of waiting, I’d get used to it. The fact remains that the Mac gaming library is pitifully small, especially for blockbuster games. Games like Overwatch never came, and we came to expect that it wouldn’t, as we did with so many other titles. It took years for Rise of the Tomb Raider to come to Mac.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorMarshall ArchivesCategories |