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Comment by tareqak | Hacker News Reader

Blizzard pretty good recent track record with supporting OS X. World of Warcraft, StarCraft 2, Hearthstone, and Heroes of the Storm all run under OS X.

Unfortunately, Blizzard's latest game, Overwatch, will not be coming to OS X. That question happened to be the first one asked by a member of the audience in the first Overwatch panel on Friday, November 6 at the BlizzCon 2015.

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I wonder why not - they've always been pretty aggressive about Mac support, as you observed.

Maybe the overhead required for developing a new FPS engine (which, AFAIK, Blizzard's never done in-house before, even SC:Ghost was another developer) was too much for them to have OS X support in the initial timetable.

Honestly? They've been posting a lot more Mac developer jobs lately and their Mac client's quality for WOW has been degrading consistently over the last few major versions.

I'd say their devs familiar in that space are getting poached/spread to other teams and its not feasible to support OS X on team 4 at the moment.

I remember watching a video of some SC2 panel at Blizcon from 5-ish years ago, where they were talking about how flexible the engine and editor was. They showed some third person shooter level built in the stock SC2 editor, and it looked interesting enough. I bet that Overwatch's code is closely related to their other games, rather than something from scratch.

You might be correct, but the SC2 engine (which also powers Heroes of the Storm) seems to run significantly worse than Overwatch engine on my computer.

The content of each game is so radically different that the comparison might not be appropriate.

That's generally par for the course. There's a lot of CPU simulation that happens in RTS engines, like visibility/range testing and simulating hundreds of moving/(semi)autonomous entities, not to mention pathfinding for them. Some RTSes simulate individual projectiles with startling quality. Most of an FPS is GPU work, environments are mostly static (less CPU), and there's some hitbox detection and maybe insane physics thrown in.

The reason that I heard was something about OpenGL. I was very disappointed about this, mostly from what implications it has on the future of their other games.

Hearthstone runs but is not optimised for retina, nor does full screen mode work as it should (i've heard it's a trivial fix from other unity devs).

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