The macOS Gaming Thread

Cromulent · 20 Mar 2022 at 20:03

My Mac Studio is due before the 31st of March, and I've been looking into gaming on the Mac in advance. I see that World of Warcraft supports Apple Silicon which is cool, but I'm also looking for other games. According to Steam, I see that Crusader Kings 3 works on Mac, but it only mentions Intel Macs, so I'm not sure if it will work properly on Apple Silicon.

Because of this, I thought I'd ask Mac people what games they play? I like strategy and RPGs mainly.

HACO · 20 Mar 2022 at 20:19

See here:
https://www.macgamerhq.com/apple-m1/native-mac-m1-games/

Some games are now native (WoW being the biggest).

random_matt · 21 Mar 2022 at 07:18

A lot of games will have to go through rosetta. POE 1/2, Divinity 1/2 and whatnot all run well though, BG 3 is even native.

Cromulent · 21 Mar 2022 at 08:29

HACO said:
See here:
https://www.macgamerhq.com/apple-m1/native-mac-m1-games/

Some games are now native (WoW being the biggest).

Thanks. I think I'll try out Elder Scrolls Online even though it is through Rossetta. I used to love that game.

muttclugg · 25 Mar 2022 at 15:54

Crusader kings 3 works on my M1 MBA as does HOI3

HACO · 25 Mar 2022 at 16:02

There's also Crossover, which uses Wine in the background to run Windows games on macOS using the open source VulkanVK. This is similar to how they run Windows games on Linux these days, with one layer of emulation on top (x86->ARM), but since it's on macOS (rather than virtualising ARM Windows), it runs through Rosetta.

https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover

Search through YouTube to see which games play well, some are really good and some are awful.

Feek · 25 Mar 2022 at 16:04

Eve Online works well on macOS.

Zeebedy · 25 Mar 2022 at 18:54

Feek said:
Eve Online works well on macOS.

Used to love eve online!

would it be good enough On a M1?

Feek · 25 Mar 2022 at 19:07

Zeebedy said:
would it be good enough On a M1?

There's a real, proper macOS client now, oh yes.

uvarvu · 25 Mar 2022 at 22:23

I just connected from my iPad to my Mac Mini (it’s headless) via nomachine and installed the client. Fired up my old account and it’s very smooth when spinning in the hangar. May risk an undock tomorrow!

Minstadave · 25 Mar 2022 at 23:09

@jigger isn't this your area of expertise?

HACO · 28 Mar 2022 at 18:07

Minstadave said:
@jigger isn't this your area of expertise?

pingwing · 28 Mar 2022 at 22:48

Civ 5 and 6 work really well on Monterey/M1 (better than on my intel 16'), humankind you can force to run on rosetta on the m1 which also works pretty well. Two point hospital and most the total war series have been ported as well but they've been played less (civ6 is a tad addictive)

Feek · 29 Mar 2022 at 08:43

@pingwing Interesting, is that Sid Meier's Civilization® V? I bought it years ago and really couldn't get into it but thought it was one of the many games on Steam that became unplayable when macOS shifted to purely 64 bit. Does it actually work on current Macs?

HACO · 29 Mar 2022 at 09:05

Feek said:
@pingwing Interesting, is that Sid Meier's Civilization® V? I bought it years ago and really couldn't get into it but thought it was one of the many games on Steam that became unplayable when macOS shifted to purely 64 bit. Does it actually work on current Macs?

Yeah they sorted those issues out and they now work quite well (on both Intel and AS).

pingwing · 29 Mar 2022 at 09:12

@Feek yeah that's the one, Aspyre have gone to town implementing the patches and updates for the game which cleared out the bugs over the years.

Most of the performance problems came from Open gL when I first got the game, it really couldn't render the world in the late game, which eventually got smoothed out. There was then a big problem with Metal implementation which went through the same growing pains and has been resolved.

NickK · 2 Apr 2022 at 09:26

I wish there was a good mech online Mac game. Mech Warrior online or something.

I used to play WoT which worked nicely, but stopped given the obvious Russian tank bias make the game unplayable without playing a Russian tank. The ex-belarusian developer/owner lives in Cyprus..

Cromulent · 3 Apr 2022 at 16:23

I got a three month trial of Apple Arcade and there are some small fun games in it. I tend to game more on my iPhone at the moment but there are also macOS games included. I'll only keep it if I end up getting Apple One premium account though.

kissenger · 7 Oct 2022 at 20:21

Can anyone recommend some good FPS games that will run well on a 2020 M1 MBA?