City of Heroes to get Mac Special Edition

by James Egan Oct 30th 2008 at 1:00PM

Filed under: Super-hero, City of Heroes, City of Villains, Expansions, MMO industry, News items, Mac

NCsoft just announced that City of Heroes will soon have a Mac client, joining the likes of World of Warcraft and EVE Online as MMOs that can played on OS X. It'll be made possible through partnership with Transgaming, the creators of the Cider portability engine, which acts as a 'wrapper' for the standard PC client, allowing it to run within OS X on an Intel Mac.

While Blizzard's Mac client for World of Warcraft was written from the ground up, NCsoft's newest City of Heroes 'Good vs. Evil edition' client will be playable through Transgaming's Cider, and thus will be the same client gamers are accustomed to on the PC. This method of bringing the PC client to Mac without porting or rewriting is the same avenue CCP Games took with their EVE Online client for OS X. The City of Heroes Mac Special Edition includes two exclusive items:

Mission Teleporter Power - Players can save time and get right into the action by teleporting directly to their active mission.

Exclusive Valkyrie Costume set - Costume pieces include two varieties of wings, a cape, a skirt/kilt, pants, boots, shoulders, chest, gloves, belts, and helmet with multiple details. (Available to both Heroes and Villains.)

The Mac client for City of Heroes will go into public beta testing with the game's next Fall expansion, Issue 13: Power and Responsibility. NCsoft also states that the Mac version is slated to officially launch shortly after the expansion release, 'via a special digital-only edition'. It's possible to pre-order the Mac version of City of Heroes at Gametree Online but for those who can't wait, NCsoft is currently accepting open beta testers for the Mac Special Edition.

Tags: apple, breaking, cider, city-of-heroes, city-of-villains, client, coh, cov, expansions, mac, mac-client, macintosh, ncsoft, os-x, osx, transgaming, virtualization

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Celestial Lord said on 2:29PM 10-30-2008

Yay! NCSoft will now be able to nab all ten Macintosh gamers!

Badaxe said on 12:56AM 10-31-2008

WOW was, and probably still is playable on my Mac Pro, EVE, and i've been playing EVE for 4 years now, isn't playable on a Mac. You can log in, you just can't really play. Transgaming's wrapper isn't good enough to run EVE properly... i will, however, reactivate my CoX account to see if they did a better job this time around.

James Egan said on 1:39AM 10-31-2008

The EVE client on Mac is better now than when it arrived. For me, it was utterly unplayable in the beginning, with like 12fps and major graphics issues. It's since improved though.

It's never my first choice, but to be able to log in quick for a convo, check my evemail, switch skills, it's great to not have to boot into XP every time. If I'm really going to play, I'll play with the PC client.

Obviously the Mac client doesn't support Premium/Trinity graphics, and that dev blog on this is now some months overdue, but I'm still glad they offered it. Were I to rely on this for my actual play time in EVE, I'd be a bit disappointed. But for what I use it for, can't complain really.

Lemmo said on 11:56AM 10-31-2008

This is like an omen. I was just preaching the word of CoH to a friend the other day, and sold him on it, until I realized he doesn't have a PC.

He's now signed up for the beta. Here's to having one more friend in the game.