Guild Wars 2 Beta For Mac Announced Today, Less Than A Month After PC Release

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Guild Wars 2 On Mac Beta

Holy high-fantasy MMORPG gameplay, Batman, but the strangest thing happened today. NCSoft, developer of Guild Wars, announced that the Mac beta for Guild Wars 2, still a hot Windows gaming title, has been released. They created it along with TransGaming, using the Cider Portability Engine, which may explain why it happened so fast.

Typically, Mac gamers have to wait months, even years, to have their favorite Windows-based games ported over to their favorite Mac-based operating system. Guild Wars 2 came out at the end of August, just a couple of weeks ago. To have it on the Mac, even in beta form, is something of a big deal.

“The Mac Beta client is available immediately for all Guild Wars 2 players,” said NCSoft in a press release today. “It shares the same features and connects to the same live game servers as the PC client. Anyone who purchases Guild Wars 2 can now play it on both PC and Mac.”

This is huge! Not only are Mac gamers being treated as well as their PC brethren around a highly-anticipated and well-received game release like Guild Wars 2, but the fact that all gamers can play together on the same servers is just fantastic. Now friends who want to play together can do just that, regardless of the platform they own.

The Mac beta itself is currently available to anyone who purchases Guild Wars 2, or who has an active Guild Wars 2 account. All you need to do is log in to account.guildwars2.com and click Download Client to get started. Heck, there’s even a Mac FAQ.

Apparently, the folks at ArenaNet, the backend networking system that runs Guild Wars 2, are huge Mac fans, even offering them as part of an employee laptop subsidy program. Let’s hope this is a continuing trend, and that NCSoft sees solid revenue reports from this move.

“To bring Guild Wars 2 to the Mac,” wrote NCSoft, “ArenaNet worked with our partners at TransGaming, whose Cider technology allows us to mirror the game experience as closely as possible between the PC and Mac. This means that future updates to Guild Wars 2 will be available for both platforms simultaneously.”

I say bravo, NCSoft. Bravo. I’m sure MAc gamers everywhere applaud your efforts and speed, as well.

Learn more at the links below. The current specs needed to run Guild Wars 2?

Mac OS®X 10.7.X or later
Intel® Core™ i5 or better
4 GB Ram or better
NVIDIA® GeForce® 320M, ATI Radeon™ HD 6630M, Intel HD 3000 or better
25 GB available HDD space
Broadband Internet cConnection
Keyboard and mMouse/eEquivalent

*The Mac beta version of Guild Wars 2 runs well on the below machines or better. Your results may vary if you’ve upgraded or changed your Mac hardware or are running on lower hardware specifications.

iMac 21.5″, 27″ (Mid-2010)
iMac 21.5″, 27″ (Mid-2011)
MacBook Pro 15″, 17″ (Mid-2010)
MacBook Pro 13″, 15″, 17″ (Early and Late-2011)
MacBook Pro 13″, 15″, 17″ (Mid-2012)
Mac Mini (Mid-2011)

Source: Guild Wars 2
Via: Inside Mac Games

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