KotOR: a Case Study
tl;dr alert:
People often ask why nobody plays video games on the Mac. This is a post for those people.
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic has been out for a very long time (Sidenote: The sequel to KotOR is still not out on the Mac and probably never will be). But I did not start playing it until very recently because the game was originally released before the advent of Intel Macs and it was completely unplayable on my Macbook. Also, the Universal Binary, though available, is still not out of beta. Apple announced Intel in 2005, right? Just checking. This situation really isn’t Aspyr’s fault, since they don’t control what Apple does with its new hardware, but this isn’t a post about why Aspyr sucks. It’s a post about why playing KotOR on the Mac sucks.
This next point is also Apple’s fault: even with Universal Binary, I have to run the game with lowest settings to avoid slowdown. The Macbook, though a very expensive laptop, has an integrated graphics chip rather than a graphics card. Apparently, in Apple’s mind, professionals are the only people who ever play video games on their computers, and therefore the privilege of a graphics card is only available if you get a Macbook Pro for an additional $1,500 dollars or so. That’s right, a grand and a half over an already high-end laptop just to play games with decent settings.
Next, a general video game problem that’s exacerbated by the obscurity of Macs: no-cd cracks. Seriously, people. This is 2007. I shouldn’t have to carry a DVD around with me because some big company feels that it somehow prevents piracy. Imagine if Photoshop required you to insert its CD every time you used it. KotOR actually required me to copy every file on the DVD onto my hard drive in order to play. It’s as if they’re mocking me, saying “we’re making it obvious that you don’t actually need files from the DVD to play, but we’re still forcing you to put it in.” Fortunately for Windows users, cracks to disable the check for discs on the game’s launch are widely available. But since Mac games are much rarer, it’s almost impossible to find no-cd cracks. So you just have to carry around the discs like an idiot.
Now we get to the crashes. And before I get emails about how the beta status of the Universal KotOR makes crashes a-ok, rest assured that all of these issues were also present when I tested them on the latest PPC version, which is not in beta. These issues are based on personal experience only.
Area loading crash: On Taris, about one of every three loading screens would crash on me when moving from area to area. I was literally saving the game before going through every single door, reloading after the inevitable crashes to roll the dice again. There is no excuse for this, and there is no fix available. Some areas would crash on every try unless I went to another area, came back, and tried the same door again. Sometimes they continued to crash every time. A misplaced quicksave inside a building with only one exit and a consistent crash on leaving resulted in an unplayable game. In rare cases, some areas outside of Taris would never load, such as the Tatooine swoop track.
Freezing: Dantooine has many flaws, one of which Aspyr fully admits to. Whenever I tried to move on the grassland areas, my character would freeze in place, and sometimes zoom into the distance as if I were holding onto the forward movement key. Other times the character would simply move in the wrong direction and then get stuck in place. Aspyr advises via their bug-tacking system to try editing an ini file or using a tip from the Inside Mac Games fourms that involves launching the game from OpenGL Profiler, one of the Mac OS X Developer Tools. Neither helped as far as I could tell.
Crash on Save: This set of crashes was separate from the area loading crashes and occurred mostly on Tatooine. They were particularly bad, as I could not load my savegames at all without crashing the entire application. I tried removing PARTYTABLE.res from my save folder (the file that seemed to be causing the problem). This let me load my game, but I was missing everything in that file, including quests and party members. But I could move a few feet, save, put the file back in, and everything would load up fine. But then the crashing started again, and this solution stopped working. After a lot of mucking around, I found that moving some of the files from the savegame’s folder to a different savegame would let me open my save from that game. I would have to redo this after every crash.
Ridiculous Artifacts: This one isn’t really a crash, but on every world but Taris so far, there have been huge and ridiculous visual artifacts that slow down gameplay. Sometimes they’re a web of random lines. Sometimes a plane of light blocks the player’s view completely. Sometimes there just aren’t textures where there should be.
Well, there you have it. Mac users don’t play games often because the games on the Mac suck hard. People often look at this issue from the wrong angle (“Why don’t publishers make games for the Mac?”), but the truth is that there would be a better market for Mac games if Mac users had any incentive to play them.