SWTOR Is Coming To Mac Computers!

Over the course of patch 7.5, Broadsword has been working hard at continuing improvements and modernizations to the game, whether it’s in the starting planet art, or in the way the game is able to integrate into more modern community tools such as Twitch Drops – but clearly the plans to improve don’t stop there. In the most recent Q3 2024 Executive Producer Letter, Keith Kenneg had exciting news to share specifically for that niche group of SWTOR players that may be playing on Apple-made Operating Systems – Mac support is confirmed to be a work in progress and on the way!

The article mostly covers what’s been going on throughout the past quarter with patch 7.5, but towards the end Keith made sure to keep us in the loop with the near future of SWTOR. Here we learned the official name for the upcoming content update (7.6 will be called “Galactic Threads”), as well as the following: “…to close out this quarterly letter I have something really exciting to announce on the tech front. We are working on a native Mac launcher for SWTOR! We have been doing extensive internal testing for some time now on late model Mac computers and we are getting close to being ready to roll out that testing externally soon.” Within the next few weeks, the forums should get information on how this external testing for Mac OS users will go, and what sort of technical requirements “Late Model Mac Computers” will entail.

This news likely comes as great relief to many people who have already been playing SWTOR through a Mac-OS computer, which for the record has already been made possible through different wrapper programs and scripts or programs like Wine, Crossover, or Bootcamp depending on what version you are working with to partition an installation of windows that will enable SWTOR. The clear issue with this method is that it is not officially supported and one method may suddenly stop working for certain models of Mac from update-to-update – and even so come with it’s own suite of performance struggles or bugs, a series of problems and hoops so frustrating to jump through as to keep away a decent portion of would-be players, especially those who had no idea this method was even possible.

Keith continues in the article, saying that these improvements “stays directly in line with one of the key goals I have talked about when we added Steam as a platform and when we came back to the APAC region, that we are going to keep pushing SWTOR onto new platforms and to new audiences wherever and whenever possible. And the cool thing about the Mac Client is it is the same game, on the same servers as the live game is now, so all of your existing data will be available!”

The goal of getting swtor to new platforms plural and new audiences is definitely exciting, as (although this is speculation on our part) it may also lead to more opportunities for Fresh Start Servers like Shae Vizsla recently had – if a new region of players could be opened up, we may see Mac and Windows players alike joining in on a fresh community, economy, and leveling experience in the distant future.

In addition to this wonderful Mac support news, the third quarter letter reminds us we will have a video showcase of the new content coming in 7.6 around mid-October; along with the new Lair Boss that will be coming with it. Just a few weeks after that in early November, look out for another full livestream detailing 7.6 even closer!