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Feral Interactive have released an absolute whopper—Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor is now actually available for Linux. This is a seriously good game! Initial port report now included.

Warning: AMD and Intel cards are NOT supported. If you wish to play the game using an AMD graphics card, you should update your graphics driver to version Catalyst 15.7 or higher. You should be able to run the game without experiencing stability issues or graphical glitches, but you may still experience poor performance.

As a big fan of the Tolkien universe this pleases me beyond words, and I can’t tell you how excited I am to have a game of this calibre on Linux.

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Shadow of Mordor is an open world, action RPG with some excellent graphics. It has easy to manage combat with several fun abilities, parkour climbing (think Assassin's Creed) and a very interesting boss system.

The “Nemesis” system is the real killer in this game, as you have Uruk captains that command a bunch of soldiers, and defeating them can give you special upgrades. However, if they defeat you, they will get a lot stronger. This makes dying more interesting to the point of making you be careful about who you go after.

You can also have random events that happen between captains, as there’s a lot of in-fighting in the Uruk camps. You can chose to take part in these events, and favour one captain over another. There’s lots of fun little quests like that, and it’s part of what makes me love the game.

We will be giving it the full review, and no doubt the GOL Cast treatment on this one as it’s such a big (and extremely satisfying) title. Just give us some time to pump some hours into it to get a real feel for how it is.

We are downloading it now, please wait for the port report to be done. Feral kindly gave me a key, so we just need my internet to go into overdrive.

The early port report

Intel i5 4670k, Nvidia 970, 16GB RAM, 1080p resolution
Performance on Ultra was quite smooth, ranging from 40-70FPS, but sadly after a while it did crash to the desktop. Booting it up again gave me an error message that suggested I revert to lower settings. This is expected, as Ultra needs a lot of VRAM, and more than the Nvidia 970 has. I guess I need to invest in something even better...

Trying it on one notch below at Very High was fine performance wise, but I still encountered a crash bug. I was killed by a captain, and afterwards it refused to show me the captain screen where they move about and level up, so I had to force quit it. I have not since been able to reproduce it.

FPS wise on Very High settings it gave me a minimum of 46FPS and I saw it top off at 100FPS when not being able to see much going on, but the average is around 50-60FPS. It’s very much playable for the 970 on Very High, and that has me rather happy, as it looks fantastic.

What I do find very interesting, is that the game will seamlessly switch the on-screen prompts between gamepad and keyboard depending on what you last pressed. I’ve never seen that before, and it’s really quite a nifty little feature.

The game isn’t kidding about full controller support either, as my Logitech F310 has been utterly flawless. It’s incredibly responsive, and I couldn’t imagine playing it with the mouse.

For a brand new AAA game on Linux, to have only one real crash bug in two hours of testing is pretty incredible. The wait was worth it for sure!

Intel i5 4670k, Nvidia 560ti, 16GB RAM, 1080p resolution - For lower end users.
On very high settings the game was giving me an average of 20FPS, so it wasn’t playable at all.

On High settings it was between 27-36FPS, even with it dropping below 30FPS it was still surprisingly playable, not perfect, but still reasonable for such a demanding game. I know people will argue with me on it, but if the FPS counter was off, I wouldn’t be able to tell personally. It did crash once while alt+tabbed to the desktop, so that could be a window manager or driver issue.

On Medium settings there wasn’t much difference at all to high settings. It stayed around 30FPS a bit longer than on high settings, but it never went lower or higher than it did on High.

I would say it’s perfectly playable on Medium/High on a 560ti, so that should give the lower end guys something to go by performance wise. It’s worth noting that Mordor is only supported on Nvidia 6xx and up, so this lower card I tested is below their minimum requirements.

On Low settings the game went between 41-60FPS, with it mainly being around 50FPS. I honestly think the game still looks visually pleasing on Low settings, and it's a perfectly playable FPS for a rather old card now.

About the game (From Steam)
Fight through Mordor and uncover the truth of the spirit that compels you, discover the origins of the Rings of Power, build your legend and ultimately confront the evil of Sauron in this new chronicle of Middle-earth.

System Requirements
OS: Ubuntu 14.04.2 64-bit / SteamOS
Processor: 2.6 GHz
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: 1GB NVIDIA 640 or better with driver version 352.21 or later
Network: Broadband Internet connection
Hard Drive: 47 GB available space

RECOMMENDED:
OS: Ubuntu 14.04.2 64-bit / SteamOS
Processor: 3.4 GHz Intel
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: 4GB NVIDIA 9xx series card or better with driver version 352.21 or later
Network: Broadband Internet connection
Hard Drive: 47 GB available space

Check out Shadow of Mordor on Steam now.


You can also get it directly from the Feral Interactive store, and support their porting directly.

If you pick it up, be sure to come back and tell us how it runs for you and include your system specifications so we can get a rough idea.

You have my sword Feral, and my axe. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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196 comments
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mannerman Jul 30, 2015
If I buy this game through feral, will I get a code to enter in Steam or what's the deal? I don't want to install yet another game-client-installer-downloader/whatever but I do want to support feral directly :)
edddeduck_feral Jul 30, 2015
Performance of you meet the specs should be smooth and similar to what you would expect on console or windows.

We've tested on min spec Nvidia 640 cards so we know that if you have the right hardware you should have a great experience.

Settings depend on your hardware. Better hardware means higher resettings are possible. Any issues you can always contact support with details.
dubigrasu Jul 30, 2015
Quoting: mannermanIf I buy this game through feral, will I get a code to enter in Steam or what's the deal? I don't want to install yet another game-client-installer-downloader/whatever but I do want to support feral directly :)

Yeah, you get a key to activate the game on Steam and download/play it there.


Last edited by dubigrasu on 30 July 2015 at 8:00 pm UTC
edddeduck_feral Jul 30, 2015
Quoting: mannermanIf I buy this game through feral, will I get a code to enter in Steam or what's the deal? I don't want to install yet another game-client-installer-downloader/whatever but I do want to support feral directly :)

Steam key.
mannerman Jul 30, 2015
Quoting: dubigrasu
Quoting: mannermanIf I buy this game through feral, will I get a code to enter in Steam or what's the deal? I don't want to install yet another game-client-installer-downloader/whatever but I do want to support feral directly :)

Yeah, you get a key to activate the game on Steam and play it there.

Perfect, thanks!
edddeduck_feral Jul 30, 2015
Quoting: MaelraneAny chance being able to play this with the amd open source drivers? (Radeonsi mesa-git or even R600?)

The game uses OpenGL 4.3+ as a minimum to render correctly. This rules out open source drivers for any card until support is completed.

If you use the latest closed source AMD drivers released just a few weeks ago you should be able to play but not at a standard where we felt official support was possible.

As we said on Twitter we're working with AMD in regards to AMD card support.
silverphil Jul 30, 2015
Is it mandatory to install nvidia-352 or can i get away with nvidia-331 (preferably) or nvidia-346 without issues or performance problems?
I have a GT 650M.
Cimeryd Jul 30, 2015
Aw hell no! Looks awesome, gameplay looks fun, has an Assassin's Creed feel to it. I have it on PS4, I've ragequit a few times, long before it got fun. This is just too hard for me. As soon as I get into the world and get an objective, I came across two named orcs. They patrol the same area, though not together. I tried to rush in and just kill everything, no dice. I tried sneaking around them, they found me. I tried to single one out and kill him, beat him down to almost no health and he just won't die or be controlled. Then the other guy came along as that was that.

Either I'm missing something vital, or the game is just too hard for me. No way I'm shelling out again to get equally frustrated on a new platform.
mao_dze_dun Jul 30, 2015
Good news indeed. Sadly with AMD not supported and Crossfire being a chimera in Linux, I'm basically forced to play it in Windows. Then again that goes almost all games... Hope it runs good on Nbidia hardware, none-the-less.
WorMzy Jul 30, 2015
Quoting: edddeduckferalwe're working with AMD in regards to AMD card support.

I'm not an AMD user, but this is excellent! :D

Thanks for the port, and for being so responsive, Edddeduck/Feral. <3

Downloading now.
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