Yesterday Riot Games Associate Producer Steve “Udyr” Mieczkowski stopped by the forums to drop off the little tidbit that there is now officially a League of Legends Mac Client being tested on the PBE. It looks like the dev team really have been hard at work addressing the issues that were being had with the previous Mac client. In September 2011 Riot shut down the Mac client project after 13 months of development. The team cited too many complications when it came to updating the client, and said that the quality that would be necessary to maintain an official Mac client just wan’t there. And eventual solution was promised, and the world moved on. The official Mac client popped up into conversation here and there, but for the most part I think the majority of the community believed it to be a dead project. In February 2012 a small team assembled an unofficial Mac client that has been the go-to for Apple lovers since, and although there were issues with the software, it kept the LoL Mac community on life support.
So now we have an official League of Legends Mac client on the way, and it sounds like the development team are happy with its performance thus far.
Here is Steve “Udyr” Mieczkowski with the official word:
“Greetings Summoners,
I’m pleased to report that the long-awaited (fabled? mythical?) League of Legends Mac client is almost ready, and it’s heading into open beta soon™.
And by soon™, I mean that it’s available right now on the Public Beta Environment. Open beta, which will allow anyone to access the live servers on Macs, will follow after we’re confident in the results from the PBE test.
To make this happen, we’ve been hard at work: Riot engineers re-wrote a lot of the underlying game engine so that both PC and Mac platforms share the same code base and assets. This means Mac players will receive all future features, bug fixes, and new content at the same time as PC users.
While we aren’t quite ready for a full open beta launch, we wanted to share the Mac client with PBE players to help us find bugs and give feedback.
Download the Mac PBE client here, patch up, and log in to help us make the Mac League of Legends experience as awesome as possible!
Thanks to the Mac community for your extraordinary patience – and a very special thanks to a particularly astounding group of folks who helped many of you play League via an unofficial client over the past months.
Best,
Steve “Udyr” Mieczkowski”
In case you missed it, you can click here to download and help test the new League of Legends Mac client.
