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While the newer official launcher for FINAL FANTASY XIV Online is incredibly problematic with Steam Play Proton, a third-party launcher has recently come to Linux to help with that.

A game I know a great many people enjoyed, and now that XIVLauncher is properly available for Linux and installable from Flathub, it should allow more people to continue playing on Linux and the Steam Deck. The team behind it even set up a full guide to getting it running on Steam Deck. It even includes a special build of Wine that has been tuned just for getting FINAL FANTASY XIV Online running nicely.

Hopefully at some point it won't be needed, if Square Enix can look at the issues with their official launcher, but once again the community delivers to get a game more easily playable on Linux and Steam Deck. Currently, it has an Unsupported rating for the Steam Deck, largely due to the launcher. So if you wanted to get FINAL FANTASY XIV Online working on Linux and Steam Deck — this is for you!

As always with third-party launchers, use at your own risk.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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14 comments
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Leopard May 11, 2022
QuoteHopefully at some point it won't be needed, if Square Enix can look at the issues with their official launcher

It works just fine on their targeted platform (Windows), why they should have?

Thing is; they announced they will be switching to new launcher for good like 1.5 years ago.

So if one party should be blamed here; i would say Wine/Proton.

Square Enix or any other company whom are pushing Windows builds do not have any obligations for SteamOS/Proton users.
Mar2ck May 11, 2022
Quoting: LeopardSquare Enix or any other company whom are pushing Windows builds do not have any obligations for SteamOS/Proton users.
They don't have any obligation but neither did all of the other devs who made adjustments to their windows-only games to get them running better on Deck.
Liam Dawe May 11, 2022
Quoting: Leopard
QuoteHopefully at some point it won't be needed, if Square Enix can look at the issues with their official launcher

It works just fine on their targeted platform (Windows), why they should have?

Thing is; they announced they will be switching to new launcher for good like 1.5 years ago.

So if one party should be blamed here; i would say Wine/Proton.

Square Enix or any other company whom are pushing Windows builds do not have any obligations for SteamOS/Proton users.
You're asking for the obvious here: why? Uh, to give players a better experience on a brand new popular handheld that it can run on that plenty of people wish to play it on. No they don't have any obligation, but it's a "nice to have".
Maki May 11, 2022
I linked this article to a friend of mine, but they wondered how it fits in Square Enix' ruling against using third party tools?
They linked me to a video about that; https://youtu.be/DBBcTa8esps
silverhikari May 11, 2022
i wonder how well their custom version of wine works with reshade/gshade/stormshade/etc?
STiAT May 11, 2022
Quoting: Mar2ck
Quoting: LeopardSquare Enix or any other company whom are pushing Windows builds do not have any obligations for SteamOS/Proton users.
They don't have any obligation but neither did all of the other devs who made adjustments to their windows-only games to get them running better on Deck.

It actually should not be that hard to get away from MSHTML. But you are right, they need not to since MSHTML will receive security updates till 2029.

With a history of terrible launchers for FFXIV, I doubt this will change any time soon, especially since that piece is not that old.

I am fine with XIVLauncher if they do not start banning us for using it (which I doubt, even with their more aggressive stance to non-standard addons I am pretty sure they are aware of XIVLauncher and will not break it on purpose). I actually use the XIVLauncher windows version inside the FFXIV prefix at the moment, which works well too (and stays there on my HDD when I decide to switch distros).

The flatpak is cool though, didn't think they'd be going for that.


Last edited by STiAT on 11 May 2022 at 6:04 pm UTC
ruskie May 11, 2022
Quoting: Leopard
QuoteHopefully at some point it won't be needed, if Square Enix can look at the issues with their official launcher

It works just fine on their targeted platform (Windows), why they should have?

Thing is; they announced they will be switching to new launcher for good like 1.5 years ago.

So if one party should be blamed here; i would say Wine/Proton.

Square Enix or any other company whom are pushing Windows builds do not have any obligations for SteamOS/Proton users.

Yes it works fine - to the point where a friend of mine had to make a workaround to copy a config file each time before starting the launcher because the launcher decided to delete it.

Another friend couldn't get it working with the new version on Windows - you know the environment that they officially support.

These are things they need to solve in general for all platforms. I'm generally not affected since I play on playstation but I have played for almost a year on linux as well at some point due to reasons. And we are talking about paying customers - you don't need to officially support but you can do minor tweaks that cost you next to nothing to make it work and thus gain good will and more paying customers(FFXIV is a sub based game).
ridge May 11, 2022
I used the Windows version of this launcher when I played FFXIV, and even if the official launcher gets fixed up I highly recommend using this one anyways. The mod support it enables is stellar!
silverhikari May 12, 2022
Quoting: silverhikarii wonder how well their custom version of wine works with reshade/gshade/stormshade/etc?


well after installing the launcher and getting the game running i can say it seems to run gshade. using the gshade installer bash script it seems the gshade setting menu does appear in the menu and the shaders seem to be running correctly though i was not able to test ingame, though it uses the wine installed on the system which cause a popup asking for wine-mono to be installed to the prefix though i do not know if this will cause problems later.
here is the command to run with the script(replace USER with your username)

WINEPREFIX="/home/USER/.xlcore/wineprefix/" ./gshade_installer.sh dx11 "/home/USER/.xlcore/ffxiv/game/ffxiv_dx11.exe"
fenglengshun May 12, 2022
Holy shit. This and the news on Nvidia open source driver? It really is the year of Linux Gaming. I'm looking to see if there's any other non-Steam games interested in packing themselves as a Flatpak (whether officially or not), because that really would be really accessible for everyone.

My "final bar" would be if Genshin could get some sort of Linux release, because then that's it, we've reached critical mass where the ball's rolling on their own.
Quoting: silverhikarihere is the command to run with the script(replace USER with your username)
Perhaps change "/home/USER" to just $HOME then?


Last edited by fenglengshun on 12 May 2022 at 2:13 am UTC
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