My experience has been you should always do BootCamp for Windows gaming due to performance losses. But for something like DII Re I guess it could be good enough.
Notably, every major game before this point that had a native macOS version, also supported an OpenGL renderer on the Windows version. Specifically in my case, my experience with Wine back then wasn't ideal, and I believed that if SC2 had just had the OpenGL renderer, I could have gotten along fine with it.
I don't expect D2:R to be using Vulkan on any OS, or else that would have made x86 macOS support relatively easy. With my limited macOS usage in Mojave and Catalina, two MMORPGs (Guild Wars 2 and FFXIV) used Wine wrappers. Can't quite remember what GW2 did, but if I recall FFXIV, it used D3D11 -> Vulkan -> MoltenVK. Surprisingly worked well, but I don't know if that was something any random user could have done with any other game easily (not sure if there were pre-compiled solutions around).
Bootcamp should be fine, at least on x86 Macs. I've heard some initial work being done with M1 Macs, but I doubt anything ideal will exist by the time D2:R releases.
- It doesn't work on Linux
- It doesn't work on Mac
Mac has 10% - 20% Market with 100M+ Active user, and judging from the M1 sales it should finally cross the 110M by late 2021.
Asking for Mac support isn't ridiculous question like it was in the 90s.
Linux support in games usually means support for Ubuntu/Steam runtime. No Linux user is asking for 100% QA coverage for Alpine and Kali.
> and has less than 1% of market.
If you mean Steam stats, it is comparable to macos market share.
> Mac has 10% - 20% Market
Nope, not even in US.
> judging from the M1 sales it should finally cross the 110M by late 2021.
Did you know that in 2020 ChromeOS machines sold better? I was also surprised.
> Asking for Mac support isn't ridiculous question like it was in the 90s.
Actually, it is.
MacOS is the platform that breaks ABI the fastest, even faster than Linux distributions. Apple expects the developers to keep up with maintenance of their software for each annual MacOS release -- which is exactly what game developers won't do. They expect to release their game, and after the wave of their sales ends, the game will end up basically unmaintained.
Hence, all the 32-bit games I have for MacOS won't ever run on M1. Or even any other Intel Mac that was upgraded to Catalina or newer. But their Linux counterparts will run on Linux for years to come.
Which turned out to be a problem, once the Classic environment was no longer shipped with OSX and you wanted to reinstall the game.