@HangryYeti Lot's to unpack here. 🙂
"Graphics driver" is close, though not 100% right. macOS used to rely on technologies called OpenGL and OpenCL to allow programs to access the underlying graphics capabilities of the OS and hardware. Apple began the process of dropping support for these legacy technologies by introducing Metal in El Capitan (and in iOS before that). Beginning with Mojave macOS will no longer even install onto hardware that does not support Metal, though OpenGL/OpenCL applications can be installed onto both Mojave and Catalina. Apple has told developers that support for these older technologies can be dropped with any future macOS release, however, so developers are rushing to update their apps (think of this as similar to the deprecation and eventual drop of 32-bit apps on macOS - you could still install them; you would get a warning the first time you ran them, and then with Catalina they simply won't run at all).
Whether your Mac can support Metal is entirely dependent on the graphics chip (GPU) inside the Mac. I've seen Macs as old as 2012 have GPUs that can support metal, and I've seen Macs as new as 2015 that do not. It depends entirely on what the capabilities of the GPU are and what Apple's product goals for that Mac model were at the time. The best way to tell if a Mac supports Metal is to update it to the most modern release of macOS that will run on it, then go to the System Information report (accessible from About This Mac) and look into the Graphics/Displays section. For every "Video Card" listed look for a line that starts with "Metal: Supported". If that line is there (with some more information on it) then your hardware supports Metal and you're good to go. If that line is absent then your hardware does not support Metal and will be increasingly orphaned as various apps are updated.
I'm not sure I agree with your conclusion at the end. There definitely seems to be an issue that is impacting a number of players on Legacy Edition that seems to involve and incomplete or missing language resource. A workaround that players seem to have found is to switch the game language to another in the Origin client, then switch back to the preferred language. This seems to force the Origin client to reinstall/repair the language information for the game.
