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That's not an error, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition is now out for SteamOS/Linux and I am downloading it as I type this. This is truly a knock-out year for Linux gamers and it's only May!
Warning: Radeon graphics cards are not supported, Intel integrated graphics chipsets are also not supported. This commenter points out why. Interesting to see AMD fix their drivers so quickly, I hope more bigger games come out forcing all graphics vendors to improve.
One thing I mentioned before is the coming of "SteamOS" rather than Linux, it is becoming more frequent quickly and I am actually okay with that. Linux has been a scary word for developers for too long, but no more!
There have been hints at this happening for months and I am extremely pleased to see it turn out well for us.
Be warned it's a hefty 15.8GB download, so prepare for a wee bit of a wait. Grab a beer a relax while watching that download bar, or just play something else...
About
The player is Geralt of Rivia, a professional monster slayer, a witcher. Entangled in the political turmoil that engulfed Temeria, Geralt helped quell the rebellion of the Order of the Flaming Rose. Soon after, he saved King Foltest’s life when the monarch was attacked by a witcher-like assassin. He continues to protect the king, serving as his bodyguard as Foltest strives to bring peace to his kingdom. The Order’s last bastions have yielded to the royal army, yet one more task remains - the Baroness La Valette announced her secession from the realm, and her fortress must be taken. A month after the attempted assassination, Foltest’s armies stand at the gates of La Valette Castle, preparing for a final assault. Still at Foltest’s side, Geralt is among them, unable to begin his personal quest to discover the mysterious assassin’s origin and identity…
Thanks to the new, ultra-modern REDengine, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings features both beautiful graphics and sophisticated in-game mechanics, drawing players into the most lively and believable world ever created in a video game.
Defining new standards for realistic, non-linear game narration, The Witcher 2 spins a mature, thought-provoking tale to produce one of the most complex and unique RPGs ever released on consoles. In addition to its epic story, the game features a complex combat system that uniquely combines dynamic action and tactical depth.
The great thing is that it's also 80% off to celebrate! Get it on Steam now, seriously go get it right now.
Check out the trailer if you haven't seen it before:
Direct Link
For those who own a boxed copy of it, with GOG.com supporting Linux this year I suggest you go here and reedem your backup copy on GOG. While you won't get a Linux copy yet I imagine in future you would.
You can also thank the developers directly on their official forums post on it.
UPDATE
It's no wonder people are experiencing poor performance issues, it looks like it uses a wrapper called "eON" from Virtual Programming who did the Mac port. This porting technology is new to Linux, so perfect performance isn't going to happen right away.
Personally I am displeased by this as the performance on the lowest setting for me isn't great and my rig is pretty damned powerful. I am actually glad I didn't pay full price as it's unplayable. I don't mean to be too harsh about it (I don't like to sugar coat things either), but when there's so many people claiming the same thing then something is up, but this "eON" tech is new to Linux, so there's always room for improvement.
If you scan around the files, you will note these:
eONprecompiledShaders32.dat
witcher2.vpfs
VPFS_registry.vpfsdb
Pretty obvious it uses their eON tech. It wouldn't be so bad if it didn't run so terribly, I've said before that I am glad our purchases count for Linux rather than Windows, but for newer games it just doesn't feel right somehow.
What do you think to this information?
UPDATE 2
A developer from the porting house who worked on this has done a few posts in the Steam forum topic on it. You can see one such post here, there's also a funny one here where the developer is sadly making rather uninformed statments:
jaycee1980Remember the binary Nvidia and AMD Catalyst drivers only tend to support newer hardware.
I wish developers would research a little more before saying such things, as it doesn't do their reputation any-good.
Both teams need to do some damage control I think and get down to fixing issues ASAP. Two things to check is if Vertical Sync and UberSamping are both off as both are known to cause problems, but sadly for me I still cannot play on the lowest possible settings.
Not the best of launches.
Quoting: ShmerlYes, it was expected that the port will be done by the Virtual Programming. It was a low hanging fruit for CD Projekt Red. I'm not familiar with eON framework however. Does it have a bad reputation in general? Is Wine's D3D -> OpenGL translation better performing?
On the bright side, I doubt eON can support D3D11, so if CDPR will get to porting Witcher 3, they'll have to make a proper OpenGL 4.x port of their engine first.
If I remember right it ran better on wine for me :/
By the way, are there any tools to measure framerate of games in Wine? And native ones too for that matter. Some games report framerate internally, but not all.
Quoting: Shmerl@killx_den: It sure runs very well for me in Wine (with CSMT enabled). I can't compare to the Steam release since I'm waiting for the DRM-free version. So let's wait for someone to run such comparison.
By the way, are there any tools to measure framerate of games in Wine? And native ones too for that matter. Some games report framerate internally, but not all.
Well I have it both installed, I can play the wine version on ultra. If I try that on the "nativ" version I get like 7fps
Quoting: killxdenQuoting: feketenapThe keyboard settings are empty by default. If I 'restore to defaults' it sets the keys, but they don't work in-game. My character doesn't move but the menus work well with my keyboard. Anybody else have this problem?Hope this helps :)
http://steamcommunity.com/app/20920/discussions/0/522728086937828976/#c522728086953857443
Oh thanks man! This solved the problem.
tuxisagamer May 22, 2014
Quoting: tuxisagamerIts running fine on Ultra settings for me.Ah, I thought I'm going mad:)
I hear everywhere complains about the very low perf, yet the game just works beautiful for me.
Thanks :)
But the point is, the game 3 years old and shouldnt need todays high end hardware to run smooth.
with a gtx780 16gb ram and a 8 core cpu nearly every game should run smooth.
OS: Windows XP/Vista/7
Processor: Intel or AMD Quad-Core
Memory: 3 GB (Win XP), 4GB (Win Vista/Win 7)
Graphics: GeForce 260 (1 GB) or Radeon HD 4850 (1 GB)
DirectX®:
Hard Drive: 25GB
Linux:
Recommended:
OS: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, Steam OS
Processor: Quad Core Intel
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: GeForce GT 640 1GB (1440x900, medium)
Hard Drive: 25 GB HD space
Do the math
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