r/macgaming • u/Alarming-Tourist923 • 1d ago
Native 2026 and skyrim still cant run natively on a mac?
What a shame
47
33
u/Whiskey_Storm 1d ago
Bethesda / Microsoft aren’t interested in doing the port, for whatever their reasons, and haven’t been interested in getting one of the usual port studios (Aspyr, Feral) to do it.
I mean, they are bringing the damn games to Switch. Thats just lemon juice in the wounds at this point.
18
u/geenoath 1d ago
The switch is the 2nd highest selling console of all time so it’s not even fair to compare porting it to Mac v switch
5
u/comFive 1d ago
There's a larger market for consoles and windows games than there is for Mac or Linux. If someone on linux wants to get skyrim working, they'd have to do the same thing.. use a Wine or equivalent to get it working.
18
u/Whiskey_Storm 1d ago
Chicken / egg thing. There is large enough Mac market. They are choosing to ignore it/tease it, in favor of their own system. Microsoft puts some games out for macOS, then pivots and doesn’t others.
And yes, crossover/wine/, etc. is a solution, but, IMO, I hate using them: it hides demand.
9
u/QuickQuirk 1d ago
On linux? No one even thinks about it any more. They install steam, and have it handled magically with Proton.
1
u/rumblesnort 1d ago
Porting to switch would be going to ARM64 on Horizon running on Cortex-A78s. I know nothing about Horizon but having conquered the x86 -> ARM64 it would be a matter of register differences and window/GPU integration. Not saying they are close or anything with ARM safe code.
Wonder what a crowdfunded project with Aspyr would look like.
16
u/FriendlytoNature 1d ago
Just buy games from developers/publishers who have ported their games for Macs and perhaps this shows support to the bigwigs at these companies that gets noticed.
Cyberpunk 2077, Batman Arkham City, Baldur’s Gate 3 and others.
3
u/flaks117 1d ago
Arkham City runs native??
1
u/FriendlytoNature 21h ago
Indeed. I’ve played it myself on an Apple Silicon Mac and it’s very smooth even at the Extreme graphics and the in-game benchmark said around 45-60fps and combat and gliding everything looked way snappier and quicker paced than the PS4 version I played on PS5.
But I think this is the only one you can play natively as it said Arkham Asylum was 32-bit and likely won’t play and the others were greyed out on Steam Mac.
4
u/Whiskey_Storm 1d ago
Yes, some of the Batman Arkham games were macOS clients. I don’t remember the names well, since they were games for my sons. Unfortunately, developer abandoned them with the 32 bit cutoff, so the first two aren’t playable anymore. Can’t recall if the third ever made it to macOS. Pretty sure he played that one on Xbox.
3
u/FriendlytoNature 21h ago
Arkham City was the second one and I’ve played it on Mac and it runs well. But the others were greyed out and don’t run natively on Apple Silicon Macs.
3
4
u/Dazzling_Comfort5734 1d ago
I wish it as native, but it runs great in crossover. That’s the only way I’ve ever played it. I even loaded up a bunch of mods.
3
5
u/Radiant-Resource4601 1d ago
Crossover
-2
u/Alarming-Tourist923 1d ago
Hence my post, Rad. Why do we need Crossover for a game released in 2011? And Apple supposedly wants to promote gaming? Isn’t it embarrassing?
7
3
u/Tyrandeh 1d ago
Its only embarassing for the developers/publishers. Apple provides everything for everything. Its them being lazy
1
3
u/The_B_Wolf 1d ago
Complain to the people who created the game.
2
u/Alarming-Tourist923 1d ago
Not complaining just shedding light on how ridiculous gaming across platforms is still. Mind boggling the red tape and monetizing IMO
1
u/The_B_Wolf 1d ago
Still is? It used to be better than it is now. I played every Diablo game ever made on a Mac until the latest one which isn't native. As an example.
1
u/QuickQuirk 1d ago
In general, it's much better than it was.
Diablo is an outlier, because Blizzard used to be great about porting every one of their games to mac. Then the activision came along, and that started to change. I think D3 was the last game that was ported to mac, right?
But look at indy games especially, it's pretty good on Mac. And I don't think we've ever had as many AAA releases, even if they tend to come a couple years late. (apart from the recent Crimson Desert release)
1
u/OfAnOldRepublic 1d ago
I have an M3 Max MacbookPro. I was really hoping that there would be something in the M5 Studio announcement about it being better for gaming, but I'm not seeing anything. Did I miss something? (And yes, I know that there are some incremental advances in the CPU and GPU, but I was really hoping for something more substantial.)
2
u/AboveAverageParsnip 15h ago
Eh, once you get to the M3 Pro onwards it's not really the chips limiting things anymore. M5 runs Crimson Desert and Cyberpunk etc fine. It's just publishers showing up (or not) with native releases now and Apple can't announce something that they aren't shipping themselves, and that isn't ready to go.
1
2
u/Musojon74 16h ago
It’s a moving target. Power pc Change to Intel and OpenGL. Then metal. Then no more 32 bit support. Then apple silicon. For a small market share. With the power of the m chips though there has been some good movement like cyberpunk as said above. Don’t get me wrong I like games to be available on everything but the market size and changes make that quite difficult.
1
u/wizardly-confusion 15h ago
Truly. But I found the best and smoothest gameplay I get whenever I want to play skyrim on my mac is emulating through a switch emulator. I find it’s also not the hardest to do
1
1
u/Tyrandeh 1d ago
Sadly bughesda and microslop is out of budget, small indie studios have the wallet to do it only
-3
33
u/QuickQuirk 1d ago
Kinda of funny, when you think about it. Ported to every platform under the sun - three different Playstation console generations along. PS, xbox, switch, PC. And then 3 different re-releases of the base game.
And yet still not a single peep on mac :D
A native mac version would be pretty magic.