The Witcher 3 is something Linux users have been practically begging to have, but the problem is that it seems it will likely never come to Linux. An ex-Virtual Programming developer has taken to reddit explaining why this may have happened.
I should stress, for our own record here that this is not the official word from Virtual Programming or CD Projekt RED. This is the personal opinion of an ex-VP developer.
Here's the issue: The Linux version of The Witcher 2 was released in a poor state, it had poor performance and just didn't really work well at all. It was later fixed-up and last time I tried it, the performance was absolutely fine for me. The real problem, is the amount of hate that was sent towards the porters Virtual Programming and directly to CD Projekt RED as well. Even I personally saw some of the hate that was sent their way and it was downright idiotic and absolutely uncalled for.
I will absolutely hold my hands up as well, I made mistakes around it since I simply didn't know enough at the time, and to be honest three years ago I was still learning a lot about everything. I later corrected what I said, as I always aim to.
Writing on reddit, this developer said (source):
It seems we may have also seen a port of The Witcher 1 as well, as the developer also said (source):
There's also this post from another user, who said at the time The Witcher 2 released for Linux, CDProjekt apparently lost a fair amount on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. Apparently due to such a big backlash from the community about the initial release quality. I haven't verified that myself, but if true it would certainly make CDProjekt rather against doing another Linux port with anyone.
This is sad, really sad. I hope this makes a few people reconsider their attitude when talking to developer about the performance of ports. Performance can be worked on and fixed, burnt bridges are harder (and sometimes impossible) to fix.
This reminds me of the time the Blizzard President responded to a small petition asking for Linux ports of their games. The response to the petition was really nice to see from such a big company and truthfully the response I fully expected, but the original statement in reply to it from the petition author (now deleted by the author, but captured in my article) was downright childish and idiotic.
Yes problems are annoying, but throwing insults around helps no one and yes it does make us look bad. I get where people are coming from, to an extent, since some games do end up getting left in a terribly broken state for a long time and sometimes forever. However, in this case VP did good and continued working and now, as stated previously, The Witcher 2 seems fine. Their others ports are generally pretty decent too.
I just hope in future that this developer who got a massive amount of hate and CD Projekt RED can look past it somehow, for all the fans of their franchise on Linux.
Note: I personally spoke to this developer about publishing this with their approval, in the hopes that it might get a few people to re-think their initial attitude towards problems in games. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
I should stress, for our own record here that this is not the official word from Virtual Programming or CD Projekt RED. This is the personal opinion of an ex-VP developer.
Here's the issue: The Linux version of The Witcher 2 was released in a poor state, it had poor performance and just didn't really work well at all. It was later fixed-up and last time I tried it, the performance was absolutely fine for me. The real problem, is the amount of hate that was sent towards the porters Virtual Programming and directly to CD Projekt RED as well. Even I personally saw some of the hate that was sent their way and it was downright idiotic and absolutely uncalled for.
I will absolutely hold my hands up as well, I made mistakes around it since I simply didn't know enough at the time, and to be honest three years ago I was still learning a lot about everything. I later corrected what I said, as I always aim to.
Writing on reddit, this developer said (source):
QuoteI agree, things were not right on release... but the vocality of people went way beyond that. It was an all out hate campaign against VP, against CDPR for "lying about the port being native". I attempted to help people out in my own time and got absolutely roasted and abused for it.
The community needs to realise it simply cannot justify this sort of behaviour if they want to convince devs and publishers to support them. There is no excuse.
It seems we may have also seen a port of The Witcher 1 as well, as the developer also said (source):
QuoteThe vitriol was unbelievable. Yes we messed up the performance on release but we put it right. However a huge hate campaign ensued. Both VP and CDPR got lots of vengeful hate mail sent to them. I cannot help but feel this damaged CDPR's view of the Linux platform irrevocably.
They certainly didnt blame us, because they had us work on a Mac port of Witcher 1 to replace the non-functioning Wineskin version. The same port would have ran on Linux too with very little extra work, but they were not interested in releasing it.
There's also this post from another user, who said at the time The Witcher 2 released for Linux, CDProjekt apparently lost a fair amount on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. Apparently due to such a big backlash from the community about the initial release quality. I haven't verified that myself, but if true it would certainly make CDProjekt rather against doing another Linux port with anyone.
This is sad, really sad. I hope this makes a few people reconsider their attitude when talking to developer about the performance of ports. Performance can be worked on and fixed, burnt bridges are harder (and sometimes impossible) to fix.
This reminds me of the time the Blizzard President responded to a small petition asking for Linux ports of their games. The response to the petition was really nice to see from such a big company and truthfully the response I fully expected, but the original statement in reply to it from the petition author (now deleted by the author, but captured in my article) was downright childish and idiotic.
Yes problems are annoying, but throwing insults around helps no one and yes it does make us look bad. I get where people are coming from, to an extent, since some games do end up getting left in a terribly broken state for a long time and sometimes forever. However, in this case VP did good and continued working and now, as stated previously, The Witcher 2 seems fine. Their others ports are generally pretty decent too.
I just hope in future that this developer who got a massive amount of hate and CD Projekt RED can look past it somehow, for all the fans of their franchise on Linux.
Note: I personally spoke to this developer about publishing this with their approval, in the hopes that it might get a few people to re-think their initial attitude towards problems in games. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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The comments on this article are closed.
Quoting: AresoWell, Witcher 3 was promised AND cancelled long after that VP-storm. So they promised, don't mind to haters, and cancelled, don't mind to haters. In the end, it all comes down to the price. SteamOS and Steam machines are failed (though it was nice try), even Valve don't support VR stuff on their's own platform. But how many VR owners in Steam? 100k? (and I very optimistic there). VR of course much coster, than Alienware Steam machine (alpha counterpart). Not any gamer could use VR because of their health (I, for an example, cannot and not only due to bad vision). Almost any glasses owner couldn't, except the ones, who uses lenses.
...
Now I have about 50% of my library in Steam compatible with Linux. Sadly, most of them are indie (and some of them broken, I don't mind much).
Well witcher 3 was never officially cancelled CD and Valve just stopped talking about it
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Quoting: Whitewolfe80Well witcher 3 was never officially cancelled CD and Valve just stopped talking about it
Valve never talked about it. They just posted two ads, clearly sanctioned by CDPR. And while it was never officially cancelled, it was de-facto cancelled.
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slaapliedje Aug 21, 2017
Quoting: ShmerlQuoting: Whitewolfe80Well witcher 3 was never officially cancelled CD and Valve just stopped talking about it
Valve never talked about it. They just posted two ads, clearly sanctioned by CDPR. And while it was never officially cancelled, it was de-facto cancelled.
You never know... they may release it in 2077 when Cyberpunk is real and it's a Golden Oldie Retro. Might even release on a Micro-Mini-SSD card? :P
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wvstolzing Aug 21, 2017
Quoting: slaapliedjeQuoting: ShmerlQuoting: Whitewolfe80Well witcher 3 was never officially cancelled CD and Valve just stopped talking about it
Valve never talked about it. They just posted two ads, clearly sanctioned by CDPR. And while it was never officially cancelled, it was de-facto cancelled.
You never know... they may release it in 2077 when Cyberpunk is real and it's a Golden Oldie Retro. Might even release on a Micro-Mini-SSD card? :P
By 2077 the game will run inside a browser on a low end smartphone.
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slaapliedje Aug 21, 2017
Pretty sure by 2077 we'll all just be batteries for the AI... unless we already are...
1 Likes, Who?
Going back there was a hole other situation back then.
Graphics driver wasn't up to par and full of bugs.
eON wasn't working as good as we wanted it to.
We had a lot of games ported to only support Nvidia which created some anger from AMD users.
Many ports wasn't especially good.
It was a moment 22 situation where porters needed better drivers with more extensions and the driver developers only wanted to add support for existing games and a top of that adding buggy drivers that didn't behave as expected.
I think much of the problems was that Linux wasn't ready yet.
Fast forward to today and it's a hole different situation with much better drivers, the ports is often better and even eON is better many things comes down to drivers but also porters have learned a lot and perfected their tools.
The Witcher 2 runs fantastic, i usually run it on my AMD APU in an laptop from 2013 with radeon open source driver.
I have no complaints on wither 2.
Last edited by Odin on 22 August 2017 at 12:34 pm UTC
Graphics driver wasn't up to par and full of bugs.
eON wasn't working as good as we wanted it to.
We had a lot of games ported to only support Nvidia which created some anger from AMD users.
Many ports wasn't especially good.
It was a moment 22 situation where porters needed better drivers with more extensions and the driver developers only wanted to add support for existing games and a top of that adding buggy drivers that didn't behave as expected.
I think much of the problems was that Linux wasn't ready yet.
Fast forward to today and it's a hole different situation with much better drivers, the ports is often better and even eON is better many things comes down to drivers but also porters have learned a lot and perfected their tools.
The Witcher 2 runs fantastic, i usually run it on my AMD APU in an laptop from 2013 with radeon open source driver.
I have no complaints on wither 2.
Last edited by Odin on 22 August 2017 at 12:34 pm UTC
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slaapliedje Aug 22, 2017
The thing is while I'd like to yell at developers for not supporting AMD upon release, it's really AMD's fault for having such crap drivers for so long. It's the reason I always buy nVidia. I also always buy Intel now because every time I get an AMD CPU/Chipset motherboard I have weird random issues.
Though I will say lately it's been Intel's latest chipset/cpu that has been having weird issues with it's microcode.
Though I will say lately it's been Intel's latest chipset/cpu that has been having weird issues with it's microcode.
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Quoting: ShmerlQuoting: Whitewolfe80Well witcher 3 was never officially cancelled CD and Valve just stopped talking about it
Valve never talked about it. They just posted two ads, clearly sanctioned by CDPR. And while it was never officially cancelled, it was de-facto cancelled.
So you don't think advertising the game as coming and hyping it is talking about a game interesting
0 Likes
appetrosyan Aug 22, 2017
Quoting: KimmoKMAnd what's the point of having a "port" in the first place if it works worse than it does on Wine?
I understand, but consider that they were trying to pioneer a framework that would allow easy porting of future Windows titles to Linux. Unlike wine, the SDL bridge allowed for ALL graphical features to work. It ran poorly in the beginning, they fixed it. On Windows, that happens all the time, and since Linux is a relative newcomer, this is expected. We could have been at least as understanding as the Windows users.
Quoting: KimmoKMNow, some commenters without doubt went overboard, but while Virtual Programming ultimately improved the Linux version, the backlash at the time was 100% justified.
No. It wasn't justified one iota. Writing software for Linux is significantly harder, even then, it would only account for a small fraction of the revenue. The people at CDPR took a leap of faith, for the first bloody time, and instead of saying, "thanks, we really appreciate the effort", we basically spat in their face.
And I say WE, because instead of telling those "commenters" to STFU and let the gentlemen do their job, we sat idly by.
Quoting: KimmoKMThere's a good chance Linux gaming would be in a worse spot than it is now if we didn't react to terrible ports with outrage
Like how exactly? We don't have a single complete franchise port to date. What ports we have, run slower by 20%, are rarely given prolonged support, and most of the time only support Nvidia hardware. These aren't signs of laziness, more like lack of resources and manpower. If anything, user backlash only makes it worse.
Shadow of war isn't coming, neither is Shadow Warrior 2. Deus Ex Human Revolution?
If we had Witcher 3, and it was marginally successful on Linux, we might have actually gotten some serious ports. It's unlikely now that even publishers that share the same ideology as the OSS community will even consider helping us. AMD gets backlash for drivers, LibreOffice team, for their efforts to give a true alternative. We shouldn't insult the people who share our views.
Quoting: KimmoKM(beating Wine performance and functionality should be a barrier every single port should cross), even if we did get an official release of TW3 one way or another.
Wine, is another problem. Sure it can run a small subset of Windows games, and run them well. It would have actually made sense to package some non-native games like Doom 2016 as a Wine port. Just use the Linux Steam client, package it with Wine, and cut the hassle of the users. But those "commenters" sabotaged that possibility, and here's how.
If I did package a bottle, people would complain "that it's not native". If it worked well-enough, you wouldn't get any positive feedback, as none of the games media view Linux as a platform. However god forbid it didn't work half as well as we'd like. I'd get an inbox full of hate-mail. It's in my interests as a good publisher (of which there are few), to protect the companies that trust me with their games, from the Linux community.
It's our own goddamn fault. We roast the DE's or Distros we don't like on forums. Promising weekend projects get nothing but hate, because someone who has only learned how to code GUI, obviously should focus on fixing issues in the Gnome compositor, how dare he spend precious resources on stuff he actually likes.
Your defence comes from the right place, but you're wrong. Posting angry comments has no justification, even if it is well placed, (notice how I'm systematically proving a point, without invoking namecalling or somehow
6 Likes, Who?
slaapliedje Sep 8, 2017
I don't know. If you think of it from the point of view of it NOT being a port and being an original game. If someone released a game that was 'complete' not labeled as an alpha or a beta, the people who were looking forward to it and purchased it only to have the performance be complete crap, and the stability being poor. Everyone would EXPECT the users to be pretty pissed off.
This is the same thing with Witcher 2. Do you expect any console gamer to be understanding and wait for their new game to be patched to work? Hell no. For some weird reason we've come to expect that a game is going to be a buggy pile of crap when it's released to us, so we just accept it and wait for a patch.
Or even worse, we buy it... then a week after it's released they announce that they're going to release some DLC, and a good portion of us decide we'll wait for that to come out before playing through.. and then the cycle continues when the next DLC comes out...
While yes you can't justify telling the developer/porter to go shoot themselves in the face because they're terrible people, that's just dumb. But you can tell them 'fix your shit please.'
This is the same thing with Witcher 2. Do you expect any console gamer to be understanding and wait for their new game to be patched to work? Hell no. For some weird reason we've come to expect that a game is going to be a buggy pile of crap when it's released to us, so we just accept it and wait for a patch.
Or even worse, we buy it... then a week after it's released they announce that they're going to release some DLC, and a good portion of us decide we'll wait for that to come out before playing through.. and then the cycle continues when the next DLC comes out...
While yes you can't justify telling the developer/porter to go shoot themselves in the face because they're terrible people, that's just dumb. But you can tell them 'fix your shit please.'
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