‘Final Fantasy XIV’ Mac Release Delayed, Square Enix Offering Refunds
Final Fantasy XIV was supposed to be making its way to the Mac OS just in time for the release of the game’s expansion, Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward, but the company has now delayed the release due to a significant number of users reporting performance issues, among other things.
The problem, apparently, is that Square Enix did not provide the right minimum hardware specifications, leading many Mac users to believe that their system could handle the game. Unfortunately, that was not the case — not by a long shot.
It may offer little relief to Mac fans chomping at the bit to play the game, but Square Enix has promised that it will be offering refunds to anyone who purchased the game around the time of the game’s original scheduled release. Here’s what the company had to say, via IGN.
“Although our development and QA teams tested the client on Mac hardware, because of our last minute efforts to improve performance and the possibility that system requirements might change, we decided to prepare several versions of these requirements, with the one to be released depending on the final result. However, in the chaos leading up to the multi-platform launch of our expansion, we released incorrect requirements, which were not updated prior to the Mac version official release.
Because of this situation, many of you purchased a product which your Mac hardware could not run at even the minimum system requirements, resulting in insufficient performance, for which many of you have expressed your dissatisfaction. Had we provided accurate information beforehand, I know many of you would not have purchased the Mac version, which is why we decided to offer full refunds.”
Naoki Yoshida went on to say that part of the reason the Mac version performed so slowly is that the final version was released with graphical specifications that were too much for the Mac to handle — a patch was intended to resolve this, but ultimately, there was no resolution. Thus, Square Enix pulled the game from stores until the performance issues are resolved.
“In order to address several issues prior to the Mac version release, we planned to conduct maintenance which would conclude on June 23rd at 6:00 PM (JST),” Yoshida writes in a post on the Square Enix forums.
“However, due to our miscommunication with retailers, the Mac version was made available earlier than intended. As a result, some customers were able to download and play a pre-release build which suffered from performance problems.”
[Photo by Square Enix]
