Mike Wuerthele
A rumor was floating around that mammoth Dungeons and Dragons adventure game "Baldur's Gate 3" was coming to the iPad — but that has since been squashed by the publisher.
Apple is doing what it can in hardware to attract AAA game developers to Mac, iPad, and iPhone. It has gone so far to develop a game porting kit, which has been co-opted by enterprising users to port just about anything that runs on Windows to Apple Silicon, albeit unofficially.
Larian has a native port of Baldur's Gate 3 for Mac. It has had its ups and downs performance-wise, but the latest patch fixes most of the issues that made it unplayable later in the game.
And, rumors developed a few days ago that it was coming to iPad in early 2025. That rumor appears to have not passed its saving throw versus death, however, with the killing blow made by Larian Studios' head of publishing himself.
Michael Douse commented on an early post on X about the matter. He shot the rumor down, saying "Ur source is silly."
Ur source is silly
— Very AFK (@Cromwelp) May 7, 2024
He did praise Apple hardware though, in a follow-up tweet.
"I am consistently impressed with Apple tech. It's wild," he said in the post. "But I'm not up to date with it. Their engineers however are clearly best in class. M1 was space-age shit. Continues to impress."
Baldur's Gate 3 arrived on Mac in September 2023 via Steam for $59.99. It won several awards for gameplay and being story rich.
System requirements are relatively modest, requiring only a M1 with 8GB to play — but a M1 Pro or better is recommended. Storage requirements are less modest, with the drive footprint hitting 150GB — and it must be SSD storage.
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2 Comments
Most of the games I've bought on Steam no longer work. That's a mix of Apple updating the OS and the game developers not updating the games, but it left a sour taste in my mouth.
Sounds silly, but Peggle, Peggle Nights, Portal, Portal 2, and Bioshock infinite were super fun games that I can't play on the Mac anymore. So I won't be buying Balders gate on Steam.