Along with the release of Final Fantasy XIV’s expansion, there were many plans for improvement of the base game such as graphical support on DirectX 11 and a long awaited Mac version of both the original A Realm Reborn and Heavensward. The Mac client was released at the end of June along with the expansion and worked for a while, but as time went on, users reported a number of bugs too great to call the Mac version a working, quality game. These issues we’re not easy fixes and in many cases not even Square Enix knew what was wrong with players’ games forcing them to remove all Mac versions of Final Fantasy XIV from stores and online distributors as well as offer a full refund for a realm reborn on the Mac.
Square Enix has admitted that many of the issues in the Mac version comes from a misjudging of the system requirements of the game as translated over to Mac builds. Many players fell victim to the false information and bought games which their computers simply couldn’t handle along with a number of other performance issues.
The Mac client was simply rushed to meet the deadline of June 23rd which was the day of Heavensward’s release. The Client was said to have been tested repeatedly and pushed on multiple different computer builds to save time and optimize the client’s overall performance rather than the specific, resulting in unorganized and simply miscommunicated results that were pushed out as the false minimum system requirements.
There is currently no ETA on when Square Enix will have the Mac clients fixed, but they will be put up for sale again when these issues have been resolved and completely accurate system requirements have been decided on. For more information on the specifics of the issues and words from Naoki Yoshida, producer and director of all things Final Fantasy XIV, check out their official forum post.