Path of Exile’s “Unofficial” Mac Port
Path of Exile is making quite a bit of noise on the action RPG scene. Arguably more enjoyable than Diablo 3, and with more complexity and more mature tones than (as yet non-Macified) Torchlight 2, the game itself has just entered public beta following a rather lengthy closed beta. Reports are good, and having played some of it myself, I can say that it strikes a good balance between click-kill-loot fun and things to tinker with. The game throws you straight into the deep end, so some familiarity with other games in the genre.
Unlike other ARPGs, Path of Exile follows a free-to-play model, and eschews the traditional approach of having skills gained through levelling up, instead you’ll collect skills through finding special gemstones as you play. There is still a skill tree (for passive skills) that you get to pump experience points into, and a rather intimidating one at that.
Developers Grinding Gear Games have so far failed to embrace the idea of a Mac version, but one of the fans, julus, took it upon himself to create and maintain an unofficial Mac port, which you can download right now. I had a quick chat with julus about the port, which is based on “a combination of Wineskin and Wine”. Apparently the Path of Exile developers haven’t yet acknowledged its existence (although julus says he doesn’t expect them to, and is doing it just for fun), but that they’d be free to turn it into an official version, as it licensed under GNU/GPL.
Downloading the port will give you a standard Mac application, and running this will then trigger the rest of the game to download and install itself. Julus says he will update the port (currently at version 3.6) only if he finds something to improve the game’s performance, which would mean redownloading the full game again or transferring files between the old wrapper and the new one (instructions on how to do this, as well as how to disable gatekeeper to allow it to run are on the forum post).
I’ve verified that the port works well (but be sure to check the requirements), there’s a slight performance hit compared to the Windows version, and I found it necessary to disable (changing graphics settings would occasionally cause the game to crash).
So thanks to julus for that excellent work, and here’s hoping that Grinding Gears will take note of the Mac gamers looking to play their game (you’d think the 30,000 or so views the post has had might help).
(via Reddit)