Mac welcomes Dragon Age next week

By Robert Purchese Published 15 December, 2009

TransGaming port has SecuROM DRM.

We overlooked this yesterday, but EA's putting a Mac version of Dragon Age: Origins out to digital distributors on Monday.

The official Dragon Age website points to the various online shops taking pre-orders.

Note that this is a port handled by TransGaming, not BioWare, and that the game will use SecuROM DRM.

We hope it shapes up - check out our PC review of Dragon Age: Origins the nearest comparison.

Picture of Robert.

About Robert Purchese

Bertie is Eurogamer's Senior Staff Writer. When he's not hunting down news stories he's often found playing with his kids or gabbling about fantasy games and strange online worlds.

Read more articles from Robert by visiting the Robert Purchese archive page.

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Comments (13) Latest comment 2 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • DoctorZoidberg #1 2 years ago

    SecuROM isn't as shitty on mac as it is on PC, so I wouldn't worry about it too much.

  • AOFanboi #2 2 years ago

    StupidROM amirite?

    The biggest problem is that as far as I remember, TransGaming uses Windows emulation and thus there will be a perceptible slowdown compared to running natively in Mac OS X. I guess Mac owners who want to play games have Windows on dual-boot too...

  • Sharzam #3 2 years ago

    Dumb question as i dont know alot about Macs, but when they port a game to the Mac does it need to be rebuilt from scartch like say if wanted to port to a PS3. Or do they simply emulate like for example running Wine on Linux based systems (yes i know that mac is based on unix).

    If its the second then surely it makes sense for gamers on macs to dual boot windows.

  • XBoxDragon #4 2 years ago

    Sharzam: The latter, most commonly nowadays. Proper ports are done natively, but most nowadays just use transgamings cider to run them, which is effectively a gaming version of Wine.

  • paulf #5 2 years ago

    @sharzam as AoFanboi said transgaming uses windows emulation (I think this was used on spore and sims 3 too) so yes it is slower and yes you are better to dual boot (although most mac users I know are tetchy about putting windows on their machines)

  • dominalien #6 2 years ago

    Dual-booting is always a pain, no matter how you look at it.

    I have Transgaming's Jade Empire for Mac and yeah, there's Windows executables in the package. It runs, though.

    Anything by Transgaming is going to be emulated Windows software. That's why they're able to come out with a Mac version so fast. It's still good, in my opinion.

    Bioshock for Mac, made by Feral, is almost certainly native OS X software, though.

    Also, isn't securom supposed to protect disc-based games? DA on Mac from Transgaming is download-only, both the standard and the deluxe versions. What would securom's role be then?

    At $50, it's not prohibitively expensive, either... VAT will probably be added on purchase, though.

    EDIT: Transgaming's Cider technology is based on Wine. There has been... controversy about Transgaming's behaviour towards the Wine community. Meaning they take, they sell, they give nothing back. On these grounds I'd point people towards Crossover, which exists both on Mac and Linux.
    Edited by 1 at 15/12/09 @ 19:04

  • AOFanboi #7 2 years ago

    Seems almost only Blizzard has the guts to go native on the Mac... a pity, but it does illustrate the dominance of DirectX as a framework among non-console developers.

  • Skurmedel #8 2 years ago

    Don't forget EVE, it's been native for ages on Mac. And Unreal Tournament... I think?

  • Ced_Flanders #9 2 years ago

    It's not really emulation, (it's based on wine, which is short for "Wine Is Not an Emulator";) it's a compatibility layer that adds support for some windows API's such as directX and direct3D.
    From my experience games that run under wine/crossover/transgaming play at about 80% of the speed of the windows version, so if you're computer exeeds the reccomended specs you won't really notice any difference.
    Games based on openGL rather than direct3D don't need any of this, (most blizzard games, and some shooters like the quake series and Unreal 2k4) which is why they are easily ported to OSX and don't suffer from a performance hit.

    edit: EVE runs through wine as well, as do nearly all of the recent EA games on mac, unreal 2k4 runs natively however
    Edited by 1 at 15/12/09 @ 19:45

  • Skurmedel #10 2 years ago

    Ok, always thought EVE was native, maybe they just worked hard on Wine compatibility.

  • RedPanda #11 2 years ago

    Post deleted at 14:31:59 28-01-2012

  • Xerx3s #12 2 years ago

    "hey! dual-booting isn't a pain! not all us mac users are smug gits!"

    Ah, so that's why it is so cold today! ;)

  • the_mtfr #13 2 years ago

    Why the fucking hell all the companies are so willing to strike deals with such a two-faced company as TransGaming? Why the hell are the corporation suits so willing to always go with their assholes counterparts? It's not that difficult to spend a few hours looking in the history and community feelings of both TransGaming and CodeWeavers, and make a fucking straight decision that CodeWeavers are a million times better technically AND very nice guys (I'm no fanboy here, this is how it is). These people in suits almost always take just the most ridiculous, illogical and just wrong decisions...