I can confirm this, "fatal error" in all versions of proton even GE, after update to halo 4.
Hardware / Software
Ubuntu 20.10 ; Mesa 21 git ; amdgpu/oibaf-ppa ; linux-image-zen+ 5.9.6
Ryzen 2700x , RX 580 , asrock b450

Yeah, mine won't launch at all now. Just goes right back to the play button, quite frustrating.

Microsoft probably pushed drm of some kind to the binary.

Some clever person made a patch that gets Halo working again on Linux, See here:

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/2907#issuecomment-729208128

I downloaded the "mcc_patch.zip" and needed to install a package called "bsdiff" to get the bspatch command line tool,
Then just followed the Edit: binary patch instructions and it now Loads and works.

Did have no keyboard input for some reason and sort off did a Gnome alt+esc to get back to steam then when i went back to the game with alt+tab the keyboard was working again??

Found another problem, After doing the Patch above and then coming back to play the Game later, I still had the Fatal Error Problem and have now found out you can only run the Game in Window Mode, Boarderless and Full-Screen will still cause the fatal error.

You need to edit this file:

.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata/976730/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/AppData/LocalLow/MCC/Saved/Config/WindowsNoEditor/GameUserSettings.ini

And edit these 3 lines to below settings (0=fullscreen,1=boarderless, 2=window)

FullscreenMode=2
LastConfirmedFullscreenMode=2
PreferredFullscreenMode=2

Game should work every time now.

Very interesting! For me it worked flawlessly as before. Could it be because you use the latest Proton 5.13? I stick to vanilla 5.0-10 because 5.13 is still in beta supposedly and it uses containers which (I think) can affect a lot how games run and interact with the system. So if 5.0 works for you it's best to stick to it until 5.13 is more polished. I just checked again and was able to run Halo 4 just fine. I only used the GE builds for games that failed to show videos and Halo isn't one of them, all video cutscenes work fine.

It's a strange bug (Fatal Error) and also effects some Windows user too, But as i said i tried all sorts of versions of Proton including going back to 5.0.10 and also the GE versions, deleted all wine stuff in folder compatdata/976730 and let it re-build with other versions of proton, Only way i could play again was with the patch and in window mode, and as for performance with Proton 5.13 it's good as i'm getting 100+ fps at highest settings at 1080.

I stopped playing it a couple months ago when Easy Anti Cheat stopped working for it in Proton. I'll try it again and see what happens.

Update: I got the same fatal error when launching, haven't tried anything to resolve it yet.

Last edited by m2mg2 on 19 November 2020 at 7:26 pm UTC

Quoting: TheReaperUKIt's a strange bug (Fatal Error) and also effects some Windows user too, But as i said i tried all sorts of versions of Proton including going back to 5.0.10 and also the GE versions, deleted all wine stuff in folder compatdata/976730 and let it re-build with other versions of proton, Only way i could play again was with the patch and in window mode, and as for performance with Proton 5.13 it's good as i'm getting 100+ fps at highest settings at 1080.

That's weird. I remember it freezing for a while (20 seconds or so) when I changed display mode to fullscreen and then back to borderless but I've never had fatal errors. I wonder what the differences between our systems might be there. I checked the files just to be sure and there were no errors. I have only these DLCs installed (since multiplayer doesn't work anyway and I don't need other content/languages):
My GPU driver version is 450.80.02 and kernel version is 5.9.0, other than that I can't think of anything that might affect it at this low level...

Interestingly, I've just got this error after a long game session. I turned the game off for a lunch and then it didn't work anymore showing me this "Fatal error". During that session I had a long freeze (thought the game had crashed but it resumed normally) right after taking a screenshot, I have the same exact freezes after changing the display mode. Now I can only run it with "-windowed" parameter though I could run it in borderless mode before just fine. Visually there's no difference at all for me, both modes look like fullscreen (and "fullscreen" too). If I leave this setting as is and exit the game I can relaunch it normally even without -windowed. So no idea why it worked before and why it stopped today (though that freeze is most probably what caused it but why would the display mode change after pressing F12?)