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Despite the recent news that the veteran MMO EverQuest will be going free-to-play for the first time in 13 years, news hit that the game’s Mac fanbase would no longer be able to access their server.
Writing on the official forums, SOE president John Smedley stated he was upset to have to put an end to the EQMac server. However, he explained it had to be done due in part to the very low population and programming issues.
“It uses a very old codebase that only one of our programmers knows. The simple truth is that’s not something we can allow. We can’t have a single point of failure and in this case we have one,” he says, adding that the game is not built for Macs.
“The mac port is not particularly something we’re proud of. The stuff we’ve done on Free Realms with Transgaming is far superior. Everquest was never designed to be a Mac game, and years ago we tried this and it never took off. Back when we did the port, Mac wasn’t the hotness that it is now.”
While it’s possible to fix the code, Smedley says the population “is very small and it makes justifying adding additional coding resources hard.”
Finally, he shuts down hope of the source code being made to players as an alternative:
“Simply put – it’s got too many proprietary things to make that feasible. We just can’t do it.”
While it seems unlikely the studio will decide otherwise any time soon, Smedley promises to offer users a poll in order to gauge how many Mac users are likely to play the current version of the MMO. The game available on Macs as of now is a version that has been left relatively unchanged since 2003.
EverQuest will lose its Mac server March 16, the same date it will be going free-to-play
