Civilization: Beyond Earth's Mac version has been confirmed to support mods via the Steam Workshop as development continues on the Mac and Linux versions of the game, set to release later this year.
The First Major Patch For Beyond Earth Is Coming
Aspyr, the Mac developer behind the Mac and Linux versions of Beyond Earth has been keeping a dev diary going on its blog to keep fans updated on how the development process is going on both versions. Among the successes Aspyr has reported are the fact that the game now supports 60 fps on Nvidia graphics cards and the fact that the Mac version will be able to support mods for the game via the Steam Workshop. This is a big improvement over the Civ V Mac port, where the Steam Workshop was not supported and players were forced to root around in the game's files to install mods.
The Linux version of Beyond Earth still is without Steam Workshop support, but Aspyr has high hopes that mods will be a feature of both upcoming ports of the game.
See What Beyond Earth Looks Like Running On A VR Display 5K Pixels Wide
According to the blog posts, the biggest problem that Aspyr is still working through on the ports is an issue that the PC version actually still experiences: multiplayer sync failure. For Aspyr, the big issue is that syncing between systems during multiplayer matches is more likely to fail for cross-platform matches. These sync issues mean that players can actually lose multiplayer progress if it happens to their game. The same syncing issues have also appeared during PC-to-PC multiplayer matches in the current release of the game, but the rate at which they occur is much higher, Aspyr has found, when playing across platforms.
Another issue the Mac and Linux versions face involves the leader screens and the animations that occur when another leader in the game comes to speak with you. When the game is run using OS X or Linux, these leader animations take a considerable chunk of time to load, which could noticeably slow a game down for a player that needs to interact with other factions dozens of times throughout the course of a game.
Despite these issues, both the Mac and Linux versions of Beyond Earth seem to still be on track for a release this holiday season.
Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth is now available for PC.
