Turbine has announced that the beta client for Mac users has been released for Lord of the Rings Online: Riders of Rohan. Players in the EU and in NA can download the new Mac client directly from the LOTRO site.

“We are really excited to open up the world of Middle-earth to Mac,” said Kate Paiz, Executive Producer of The Lord of the Rings Online.  “We’ve just launched our biggest expansion yet and we’re happy to welcome gamers to play the game natively on Mac OS X for the first time ever.”

Download the Mac client from the Lord of the Rings site.

Originally posted by Reizla
Looks like Mac OSx is starting to become popular under game developers. Early last month GW2 announced for OSx, now LotRo... Enjoy the expansion of MMO's fruit-company users ;-)

Hmmm odd. This is VERY VERY odd. For years now game devs didn't even flinch to tell people hell no when they requested a mac version of their game even tho porting is like sneezing it's so easy to develope a mac client.

It's so funny because being an avid mac fan, and seeing the monopoly direct X has held on the gaming industry for so long, I have tried to remind people that when they talk about how successful Blizzard has been, one of the biggest success stories has been the unquestionable instantly available mac version on every game they've ever made.

The KEY reason that helped them become a success story is the very thing that most developers have ignored. 

Now after GW2 has released it's mac client, it's very interesting to see other companies doing this. I guess other companies have finally learned their lesson. (waits to see who else does this next)

Just so you guys know, the Mac client for GW2 isn't a native client, its basically a cider wrapper.

I'm not sure about the one for LOTRO since I pretty much have no interest in playing it curretly. Though I do think its good they are supporting the Mac platform, regardless if its a true native client or if they use a wrapper for their client, much like GW2 is currently supporting.

I can confirm its a native version.

Also atleast one major reason for game devs to start doing mac versions is that apple only included proper opengl support recently... i think it was in Lion. Prior to that they only supported OpenGL <=2.1 i think, not to mention that the "weak" GFX that plagued Imacs/MacBooks only in the last couple generations got strong enough to handle most games. 

However the client itself is rather... beta at the moment. It defaults to your desktop resolution, no AA, forced AF and rather poor performance unless you got one of the topend imacs from last year, and even then performance is notably weaker than on windows. Also has some annoying obvious little bugs.

The cider wrapper for GW2 on the other hand is pretty much the best use of cider i have ever seen, easily on par with a welldone native client which is something i never would have believed possible for a wrapper technology. Performance is a bit weaker than on windows, and i had to turn on v-sync to get rid of tearing which i never had to do before(on windows). Though im pretty sure those are driver issues, dunno if its something that can be fixed on Arena.nets end.

Edit: Also Valve is pushing things recently, they are not happy with Windows 8 and microsofts inclusion of a store into the OS, so they are pushing for cross game compatibility. They have alot of influence with AMD/Nvidia because of their close relationship, who inturn urge Apple to provide the ground for gaming compatibility, which Apple glady does because of the cut they get on every game sold in their own store ...

So yeah, Valve wants cross game compatibility so that they can get the heck out of dodge if microsoft closes windows down(whose gonna stop them the way things are right now?), Amd/Nvidia wants Apple to include more powerful GPUs into their systems because they have a higher margin on those, and Apple wants more games on Mac OSX because they hope atleast part of them will go through their own store.

Its a self accelerating cycle imho, a unique alliance of game producers/publisher, hardware manufacturers and OS developer all wanting the same things for Macs. Blizzard was always a oddball, but with Valve pushing aswell, and not just their own titles but those they publish ... It only will take one of the big publishing houses like EA now for things to snowball imho.

Originally posted by mnwild1998
Well last week it was LOTRO was doomed because of the layoff at Turbine (not specifically LOTRO). This news just proves that LOTRO is still very much alive and a very active game. On a side note I have known a lot of players the last 5 yrs being able to play LOTRO on their macs. I myself have a big bad desktop so not entirely up to speed on macs, but i think they partition their hard drives.

Macs can dual boot into Windows, or even linux if you care. Or in other words Windows runs natively on "Macs", which is really a misnomer these days as they are normal intel machines, just the casing is a bit more polished. The rest is just a different OS and maybe a little bit more care given into things like noise level and making sure the various "innards" harmonize which each other.

Oh and apple are wizards at making thinks fit into as little space as possible. Its one thing to look at the specs of an Imac and say "meh i could built that", its entirely another thing to make it all fit into something the size of an imac which really isn't that much bigger than just an LCD.