Hands on with the City of Heroes Mac Client
by Seraphina Brennan 
Jan 8th 2009 at 5:00PM
Filed under: Betas, Super-hero, City of Heroes, City of Villains, Hands-on
While the client doesn't deliver anything new to the City of Heroes gameplay table, it is a really well done port over to OS X. The client still connects to the main City of Heroes servers, allowing Mac users to play seamlessly with their PC friends. Nothing like EverQuest for Mac, more like the EVE Online port for OS X.
What really surprised me about this port is just how well it runs on the Mac compared to other games. Especially when the Mac in question is a laptop that sports an Intel integrated graphics chip instead of a powerhouse nVidia or ATI video card.
The Macbook in question for this test is one of the newer models, but not exactly the top of the line. In fact, it's the cheapest Mac that you can currently buy in the store! What I'm using is a 13 inch Macbook, outfitted with 1 GB of RAM and an Intel GMA X3100 graphics chip. On it I got CoH up to smooth, lagless frame rates at the standard recommended settings at 1024x768 resolution. I even got it to bump up to the highest settings, and things weren't too bad. There was stuttering during running and some lag during combat, but it wasn't unbearable.
Getting the resolution cranked up to my native settings of 1280x800 was a bit of a different story but still not a bad story. Graphics ran on recommended settings (and looked quite good) after playing for a bit, but the initial conversion was pretty much full of stutters. It took a few fights before things were moving smoothly, but I was just really impressed with how well the game was handling without a dedicated video card.
The only rough spot of the whole experience was people en masse and the sound of my fan. Getting a group of people together using their powers ran the game through the mud, but then again the game seems to do that no matter what type of system you're playing on. City of Heroes loves to throw many, many enemies at you, and that's half the fun of the game. As for my fan, it sounds like a jet is taking off inside my laptop every time I even think about booting City of Heroes.
Lastly, and this point isn't Mac specific, CoH is a good MMO to run on your laptop. As long as you can get close to enemies and push one of your attacks, the game will automatically target for you and turn your character to face them. When you get in combat, you don't have to absolutely rely on the mouse to constantly target and retarget enemies. The number keys for combat moves are easily accessible right above the WASD keys, and the experience is very enjoyable.
In comparison to another MMO, I had EVE Online running on my laptop for a time. The performance, compared to City of Heroes, was full of glitches and stutters. Heck, even flash based games seem to give this laptop a hard time. So it really was a breath of fresh air to see City of Heroes run so well on a laptop that is not equipped for gaming.
If you're a Mac owner and a gamer, this port is a good and solid port that needs to go on your shopping list. City of Heroes Macintosh Edition has just hit the NCsoft game store, available as a digital download. If you have some holiday spending cash left over, do yourself a favor and check it out.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
PeterD said on 5:38PM 1-08-2009
Out of curiosity, if you already own City of Heroes can you download the Mac client for free, or do you have to re-purchase it? I would hope the former, because making a player purchase the game twice when the bulk of your revenue is from subscriptions anyway would be foolish.
Although, admittedly, CoH players seem happy to throw money at NCSoft for the game. I'm no exception, somehow I've ended up buying every extra for CoH over the years except the wedding pack.
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Nick said on 9:33PM 1-08-2009
You only need to have an active account. The Mac updater is located on their FTP server
Stark1 said on 9:23PM 1-08-2009
If it runs so well on a Mac with integrated graphics that makes me question why it runs so crappily on my PC. Athlon X2 4400, 2Gb DDR400, 512Mb 7950GTX, 640Gb Western Digital and Vista 32bit. I can get around 50-60fps but it is not consistent at all. It can easily dive as low as 14fps. This was even after a fresh install of OS and game. You would think a game as old as this would run 100fps with my hardware and never see the bottom end of 30. (e.g. this game started off running on a Geforce2 and the graphics upgrade from CoV launch was not THAT intensive.)
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Colin Brennan said on 9:36PM 1-08-2009
You know, I have the same problem, and a friend who has an older computer that really couldn't handle the client after the City of Villains graphics update came out.
My PC is a powerhouse quad-core machine, and still I can get some iffy performance out of CoH every once in a while. Another reason why I was pretty impressed with this hands on... I thought it was going to crash and die the second I loaded it up.
Jin said on 12:28AM 1-09-2009
That's really surprising. It would be interesting if you took your character into one of the really laggy areas and see if you got similar performance for the Mac. Make a villain and run him over to Grandville right under Recluse's statue. I've seen some really high end machines bottom out there. Or better yet, do the Roman Taskforce (forget what it's called atm) and have your 8 person team walk that really laggy road to the big robot.
The CoH development team doesn't seem to do that great in optimizing certain areas within their game world or in large missions where lots of effects are running. I suspect that the Mac client would be just as susceptible to those laggy areas as PCs.
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Lateris said on 8:51AM 1-09-2009
Some will argue this but I swear my mac outperforms my PC. When I was playing AoC in windows mode it outperformed my PC. I am really happy to see this game have a mac client. So how many units sold is gold?
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Tom said on 8:23AM 1-09-2009
This development, more than anything, may get me to finally check out CoH. Playability on a Mac has always been one of the very best things about WoW.
I still balk at paying a $15/month subscription, however.
I really do wish MMO makers would wise up and offered tiered subscription plans or alternative payment methods (e.g., MTs) for people who do not *live* in their MMOs.
I would probably return to WoW, for example, if they offered something like:
$5 = X hours of play
$10 = X + Y hours of play
$15/month = unlimited play
I may give the 14-day free trial a try, however. I presume it applies to Mac client users as well now, right?
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TheNetAvenger said on 9:47AM 1-09-2009
Ok, 1024x768 on Intel 3100 Integrated graphics is not hard to do for CoX.
I am shocked that people are 'happy', surprised, amazed that it runs this well on OS X.
Ok, a bit of contrast, when CoX was released, I use to run it on a 1.6ghz 2001 Toshiba Laptop with a Geforce4 440 Go Video card, and it ran ok, even though some of the 'shader' features were not available to the video card. And yes at 1024x768.
In contrast if you have a laptop with a Geforce 5600 Go (which is technically still slower than the Intel 3100), you can run the game at 20-30fps at 1440x900 easily with most settings on High - especially if you are using Vista that gives the game more Video RAM to use for textures.
I don't doubt the port is well done and I don't doubt OS X if treated properly can run games pretty well.
However, all this talk of how it runs better on OS X than under Windows is a bit of a myth, and anyone with an active account and bootcamp with Vista or XP can confirm, it still runs faster on the Windows side. (Usually not enough that you will need to reboot into bootcamp and Windows to play it, but there is about a 10-20% fps difference.)
The CoV update and subsuquent updates added higher resolution textures and 'shiny' bump mapping if you turn it on. If you leave it off, it will still perform as well as it did when the game was released.
So if you are truly bothered by the FPS you are getting, turn the shader settings down in the game to what the game was when it launch with limited bump maps, and you will get the old pre CoV and pre Graphics update performance.
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The reason I am taking time to write this, is I had a friend in our supergroup go out and buy a Mac because they listened to reviews like this and assumed the game was faster under OS X.
Sadly, he is booting into Vista to get the performance out of the game he is use to, and running Vista 99% of the time on his expensive Mac hardware sadly.
(Yes even Vista on a Mac Notebook will run the game faster than OS X will - there are both port and OS technical reasons for this, and this is not the place to detail the Apple Darwin kernel driver model and the inherent performance penalty the video model has compared to NT's XPDM or WDDM in Vista.)
CoX is great in that if you lower the settings, it will run on anything with a PS unit it, even Intel 950 graphics will run it ok, let alone dedicated NVidia or ATI solutions.
If you run OS X and play the game, get the Mac Client and play without doing bootcamp, it is great and works really well.
But don't screw over people ensuring them that it is faster under OS X, or mislead them to think the Windows version of the game has something wrong with it.
If the Windows users want the FPS of the Intel 3100, turn down the settings like the reviewer of this article did.
Also realize many of the features you are enjoying on your low end NVidia or ATI video card under Windows are features that can't even be enabled on the Intel 3100 on OS X or Windows due to a lack of features in the GPU. And if you prefer FPS over looks, turn them off.
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PS...
Windows Gamer Fans, when you can, get the Public Windows7 beta. (Don't grab the torrent version, it is not 'exactly' the same, trust me on this.)
CoX under Windows7 is significantly faster than it ever ran under XP or Vista, no matter what video hardware or RAM you have in your system.
(Some systems are showing 2x the FPS over XP and Vista.)
CoX is one of our test games in our lab.
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Thunderkor said on 12:54PM 1-09-2009
It's not free for existing customers, but it's only $20 and includes a free month, making it only $5 more than a month's subscription.
On top of that, you get an item bonus pack with some extra costume bits and an extra bonus power. That will probably be $10 by itself when it's available for all users, but right now it's exclusive with the mac client. So if you planned on getting the bonus pack, you'll actually save yourself $5 by picking up the mac client.
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SGD said on 1:53PM 1-09-2009
@Thunderkor
Not completely accurate. If you're an existing customer, you can download the Mac client for FREE from NCSoft.
For new OR existing customers, paying for the $20 download will get you 30 days of play, the Valkyrie costume set, and the Mission Teleporter power.
For existing PC players not interested in the Mac client, they'll be able to get the costume and power in a Booster pack in 60 days or so.
Chadly said on 2:16PM 1-09-2009
Ah I suppose I didn't look closely enough. I missed the part about just getting the client for free without the bonus pack.
Looks like it's still a better bang for your buck if you are interested in the Bonus Pack at all.
I'm kind of on the fence, because I tend to want all the goodies but I'm prone to phases of burnout with this game and I often leave for months at a time.
Thanks for the clarification.