The Elder Scrolls Online goes native on Apple silicon in summer 2027, and Shogun 2 Complete Edition comes to Mac tooThe Elder Scrolls Online goes native on Apple silicon in summer 2027, and Shogun 2 Complete Edition comes to Mac too

ZeniMax Online Studios says The Elder Scrolls Online will get a native client for Apple silicon Macs in summer 2027.

Game director Nick Giacomini announced it in a letter to players posted on Steam on 7 October. The game's Mac version is built only for Intel processors, so on an Apple silicon Mac it runs through Rosetta, Apple's translation layer. Giacomini tied the change directly to Apple's plan to stop supporting Intel binaries, and said the studio wants Mac players to keep playing on macOS 28 and later.

What ZeniMax has promised

When the native client arrives, Macs with Apple's own chips become an officially supported platform for the game, which they are not today. ZeniMax says it will add as many performance optimisations as it can, without naming any. The Mac system requirements will be updated closer to launch. The newest Intel Macs remain supported for now; the studio will review whether some older Intel models drop off the list, and says Intel Macs will eventually be phased out entirely.

MMOHuts points out that this reverses ZeniMax's position in 2020, when the studio said it had no plans for an ARM version and players would have to rely on unsupported emulation.

Shogun 2 Complete Edition on Mac

Separately, Feral Interactive said on 8 October that Total War: Shogun 2 - Complete Edition will come to macOS in the first quarter of 2027. The Windows version from Creative Assembly and SEGA launches on 13 October at 34.99 pounds, 39.99 euros or 39.99 dollars. It bundles the original game and all its downloadable content, including the Rise of the Samurai and Fall of the Samurai campaigns, and adds updated lighting and textures, more than 50 newly playable minor factions, mod.io support and a 64-bit upgrade, according to GamingOnLinux and Feral.

Owners of the original game on Steam can buy the Complete Edition at 75 per cent off between 13 October and 12 November. Feral says that applies to existing Mac owners too, who can buy in that window and play when the Mac version ships.

Will Intel-only Mac games stop working after macOS 27?

Not all of them. Apple's developer documentation says Rosetta will be available through macOS 27 as a general-purpose tool for Intel apps. Beyond that, Apple says it will keep a subset of Rosetta aimed at older, unmaintained games that rely on Intel-based frameworks. Apple has not published which games or frameworks that subset covers.

That distinction explains ZeniMax's decision. The Elder Scrolls Online is a live online game that is still being updated, which is the opposite of unmaintained, so the studio had no reason to expect Apple's exception to cover it.

Our take

Apple's Rosetta deadline is doing what nearly six years of Apple silicon Macs did not: getting publishers to commit. For a player, the risk was never that a game would stop working on the day macOS 28 shipped. It was that a studio would quietly decide a Mac port was not worth rebuilding. ZeniMax has answered that, with a release planned before macOS 28 is due. The gap to watch is summer 2027 against the autumn release of macOS 28. If the native client slips by a few months, players who update straight away could be left without a working game for a while.

The other half of the story is the Intel Mac owner. ZeniMax is the latest company to set an end date on Intel support, following Apple dropping Intel Macs from the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad compatibility lists and macOS Tahoe being the last macOS release older Intel Macs can run, short of OpenCore Legacy Patcher. APPDOOK's advice to anyone buying a Mac partly to play games is to treat Intel models as finished. Shogun 2 is a smaller case: Feral has ported Total War games to the Mac for years, and a Complete Edition is a new build anyway. The useful detail there is the discount window, which closes on 12 November, months before Mac players can actually play it.