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The Linux GOTY award is now over, here are the results!
By Geppeto35, 30 January 2017 at 3:20 pm UTC

I add my well done to Feral (I voted for) and the others have not demerited! I would have likje to be able to vote for more than one candidate in some (all?) series.

I really enjoyed Xcom2 this year (as the first opus in its time), Rimworld and I still play Civ V from aspyr from time to time. Since one or two months, I really enjoy Everspace (Idea-tag for Feral to port? ;) ) that definitely bury Star citizen and all "star" promising stuff, and Ghost of A Tale but I have to boot on windows for that..., and I would insta-fund or pledge for their port on gnu/linux (let's say 60€)

Like many here, I would love to see a port of skyrim, doom, TheWitcher3, etc. And IRL I wait for Civ VI, Yooka-Laylee that announces to be fun and Total War:Warhammer when all dlc and stuffs will calm down on an honest price.

Votes show me that I should give a try to Valley, Life is strange and DeusEx. I yet bought DeusEx and played it 1h max. Not captivated (the gameplay), Bad start? I will give him a second chance later.

Feral Interactive are teasing a new Linux port again
By skinnyraf, 30 January 2017 at 2:55 pm UTC

Quoting: elbuglioneToday, i think skyrim for Linux (Vulkan version), have not technical problems to be a real thing. the only real problem is absolutely "commercial thing"

I wonder if it's "commercial thing" though. It looks like some ideology rather than business. Just think of DOOM: from what we can read, the game was developed with portability in mind, a perfect candidate for a Linux port, probably with little work. And yet no Linux port. If Bethesda doesn't want to port it themselves, there are a few companies that can do it for them.

The Linux GOTY award is now over, here are the results!
By jith_feral, 30 January 2017 at 2:48 pm UTC Likes: 8

Quoting: boltronicsFeral Interactive's done well this year and I agree that much of our love for them is related to their positive interactions with the community. Having said that, I personally feel that some of their releases could use a bit more testing at times (I'm still suffering the 0byte DoW2 download bug every time I open Steam). More importantly, I'm often put off by the sheer number of titles they release that claim to only work on Nvidia, and the (usually completely pointless) warnings that have to be clicked past on many of their games when running on AMD drivers - drivers that more often than not work flawlessly. It detracts from the overall experience. Do they really have to show them every. single. time?

A stable Mesa release should appear this year with OpenGL shader caching, at which point I sincerely hope Feral switches off all such warnings and updates their game requirement pages. I'll be watching to see if this happens and factoring Feral's reaction (or lack thereof) to such releases when voting on Favourite Linux game porter of 2017.

Hello, have you got in touch with Feral Support about the download issue? If not, please email [email protected] and we'll do our best to look into it, but it may be an issue with Steam and therefore out of our control.

We've had feedback about the warnings, so based on that we've added an option to hide the warnings forever in newer versions of our game launcher. This new game launcher may make it into some of our older games.

We do update the specs for games if we've tested and confirmed that performance is up to our standards (e.g. XCOM 2 recently gained AMD support

The Linux GOTY award is now over, here are the results!
By dubigrasu, 30 January 2017 at 2:29 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: scaine
Quoting: dubigrasuEqually surprised and disappointed that Valley isn't anywhere among the winners.
Probably for most people the game went well bellow the radar, although it was mentioned here few times.
Do yourself a favor and try it, is been a while since I was so surprised by a game.

Valley was superb. I'm pretty sure I added it an entrant, but given the competition, it maybe just didn't stand out in any one particular area strongly enough to make the listings? It's a shame, because as a whole, it's a fantastic game. I'll be replaying it in the near future - especially now that the latest patch lets you skip the cut-scenes.

It is superb indeed, and the freedom feeling that you get while playing it is unmatched by any other game that I played (at least recently). Sometimes I fire it up and just run and jump around giving life to everything and enjoying the rush. Game exploration at its best.
Is also the game that restored my faith in the Unity engine, because it doesn't look at all like the usual "Unity graphics" we often see, and instead the landscapes/graphics/soundtrack (remember the level when you learn how to skip across the water?) are just amazing.
Even Jim Sterling the sob that he is was mesmerized by it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2W3NkTTFOos

Act fast to get Payday 2 plus some DLC for $1 from Humble Bundle's 72 hour bundle
By Dribbleondo, 30 January 2017 at 2:19 pm UTC

Quoting: g000hHehe, just thinking a Trump mask would be good DLC for Payday 2.

They're Called "The 45th" and "God Emperor"

Feral Interactive are teasing a new Linux port again
By elbuglione, 30 January 2017 at 2:19 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: monsieursauce
Quoting: Leopard
Quoting: sigzFeral already said multiple times in the IRC chan that skyrim would be too complex to port.

Did you know that Bethesda already ported it for Nintendo Switch,which use Vulkan?

Does it mean the Switch can be an incentive to develop Linux ports?

Vulkan has been designed to make "ports" between platforms a real piece of kake.

If one version of a game have native support to Vulkan and native support to any UnixLike OS like OrbisOS(PS4), MacOS, iOS, Android, ShitchOS (whatever his name is), etc...
It supposed to compile and run WITHOUT BUGS in cuestion of minutes. maybe not with the best perform although

Today, i think skyrim for Linux (Vulkan version), have not technical problems to be a real thing. the only real problem is absolutely "commercial thing"

The Linux GOTY award is now over, here are the results!
By scaine, 30 January 2017 at 2:03 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: dubigrasuEqually surprised and disappointed that Valley isn't anywhere among the winners.
Probably for most people the game went well bellow the radar, although it was mentioned here few times.
Do yourself a favor and try it, is been a while since I was so surprised by a game.

Valley was superb. I'm pretty sure I added it an entrant, but given the competition, it maybe just didn't stand out in any one particular area strongly enough to make the listings? It's a shame, because as a whole, it's a fantastic game. I'll be replaying it in the near future - especially now that the latest patch lets you skip the cut-scenes.

The Linux GOTY award is now over, here are the results!
By Liam Dawe, 30 January 2017 at 2:01 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: Xpanderi still can't understand how is War Thunder best free game released in 2016? wasnt it released for linux back in 2014 even?
From 21st December 2016 https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/war-thunder-officially-released-with-a-huge-update-and-a-sale-on-premium-accounts.8775

It was actually in Beta.

The Linux GOTY award is now over, here are the results!
By WorMzy, 30 January 2017 at 1:58 pm UTC

I didn't vote for most of these winners, but wow, the margin of victory for some of them is amazing! Well done to all the games/companies involved!

Liam, could you add the total number of voters to the article? Also if there's massive differences in the nuber of voters per category, perhaps include per-category totals too?

The Linux GOTY award is now over, here are the results!
By Mountain Man, 30 January 2017 at 1:58 pm UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: cRaZy-bisCuiTIt would be better not to have ported Warhammer at all, if there's no chance to get Multiplayer working.
Whaaaaaa?

The Linux GOTY award is now over, here are the results!
By Xpander, 30 January 2017 at 1:56 pm UTC

i still can't understand how is War Thunder best free game released in 2016? wasnt it released for linux back in 2014 even?


Also i don't get the Civ VI hype, but thats me, i never got into the Civ V.

Deus Ex indeed has really good graphics but sadly its pretty much unplayable on my setup. i cant tolerate those few places where it drops down to 25FPS.. no matter what graphics settings enabled.

The Linux GOTY award is now over, here are the results!
By dubigrasu, 30 January 2017 at 1:52 pm UTC Likes: 4

Equally surprised and disappointed that Valley isn't anywhere among the winners.
Probably for most people the game went well bellow the radar, although it was mentioned here few times.
Do yourself a favor and try it, is been a while since I was so surprised by a game.

The Linux GOTY award is now over, here are the results!
By boltronics, 30 January 2017 at 1:36 pm UTC Likes: 6

Feral Interactive's done well this year and I agree that much of our love for them is related to their positive interactions with the community. Having said that, I personally feel that some of their releases could use a bit more testing at times (I'm still suffering the 0byte DoW2 download bug every time I open Steam). More importantly, I'm often put off by the sheer number of titles they release that claim to only work on Nvidia, and the (usually completely pointless) warnings that have to be clicked past on many of their games when running on AMD drivers - drivers that more often than not work flawlessly. It detracts from the overall experience. Do they really have to show them every. single. time?

A stable Mesa release should appear this year with OpenGL shader caching, at which point I sincerely hope Feral switches off all such warnings and updates their game requirement pages. I'll be watching to see if this happens and factoring Feral's reaction (or lack thereof) to such releases when voting on Favourite Linux game porter of 2017.

However 2017 should be a great year. Already with Mesa 17.0.0-rc2 my Fury X is running far more stable than ever before. I anticipate Wine will have a large number of D3D11 titles running well, and AMD cards should have almost all of the features games want from free software drivers including FreeSync, Audio over HDMI/DP and a more competitive (perhaps even superior?) Vulkan implementation by way of RADV. Speaking of Vulkan, I eagerly look forward to games making use of multiple GPUs, and hope to see at least a couple of titles that make full use of available hardware. We already know Feral Interactive is set to release Vulkan ports in the near future.

Things that I don't expect will happen in 2017? Well, I'm not holding my breath on AMD living up to their promises about freeing up source code for their proprietary Vulkan implementation (not that it seems we need it at this point). We probably won't see GoG release GNU/Linux builds of their Galaxy client, which will surely eventually be cancelled and turn into vaporware when they work up the guts to make the announcement. I can't see anybody using VR on GNU/Linux with free software drivers this year, at least not as a supported experience by game developers. I doubt Telltale are going to start releasing GNU/Linux ports this year either, despite previously expressing interest.

Things I'm on the fence about? The LEDs on my Fury X GPUs still don't work since AMD replaced Catalyst (fglrx) with AMDGPU Pro. I don't understand how AMD can push people with their most expensive consumer GPUs through an "upgrade" path that drops such an obvious feature. I'd like to think AMD will sort this issue out at some point this year, but I've yet to see any indication AMD are interested in fixing it. It will certainly make me think twice about purchasing high-end cards from them in future unless the support is already 100%.

I'd love to see Bethesda, Ubisoft or EA test the waters with a GNU/Linux release or two this year. To be fair, Ubisoft already did in late 2015 with Grow Home, but then for 2016 decided not to bother porting the sequel Grow Up (yet, at least). Too bad they didn't try porting a more well known title, and too bad they released the GNU/Linux port so long after Windows, so not exactly a fair test.

Bethesda is in the best position to start adding GNU/Linux ports. Surely Bethesda took note of how much interest there was in running Doom under Wine - many months after the game was released, no less. Further, unlike EA (with Origin) and Ubisoft (with Uplay), Bethesda don't have a store client. That's one big road block they don't have to contend with. Lastly, Bethesda is the most likely of the three to release a Vulkan-only game, which presumably means less QA work for them to deal with. If they released a game with GNU/Linux support this year, I wouldn't be too surprised (but would be very happy).

Despite my general pessimism, it still looks like 2017 has quite a lot going for it.

CAYNE, the free point & click horror game set in the STASIS universe is now out and it's damn good
By Liam Dawe, 30 January 2017 at 1:31 pm UTC Likes: 1

I would have included their new Kickstarter, but they couldn't tell me if Linux would happen no matter what. So I chose not to, as I won't show a Kickstarter than isn't actually confirmed for us.

The Linux GOTY award is now over, here are the results!
By abelthorne, 30 January 2017 at 1:04 pm UTC

I'm a bit surprised to see Faeria in the best free games released in 2016, as it's technically still in early access and not even officially on Linux, though it works pretty well. The game is supposed to have its official release in march (I guess it'll get a Linux/SteamOS icon then).

The Linux GOTY award is now over, here are the results!
By Corben, 30 January 2017 at 12:36 pm UTC Likes: 6

For the poll next year, I would like to be able to check all porters as favorite Linux game porters ;)

AMDGPU-PRO 16.60 released for Linux, adds support for even more cards including GCN 1.0
By Leopard, 30 January 2017 at 12:34 pm UTC

Quoting: M@yeulCI am really puzzled by all the PRO driver users. As far as I know, it has been stated before (I didn't bother to find a reference from an AMD developer, as I am writing this on my phone) that it is useful only if:

- you need OpenCL (clover is slower, and has no support for OpenCL 2.1)
- you need an OpenGL compatibility profile (professional CAD tools often do)
- you need a driver that has been validated against a certain piece of software (or OpenGL 4.5 certified with conformance tests)
- you need Vulkan support (although it has been said many times that this part would be opened, and radv looks like a viable alternative)
- arguably, if you have abysmal performance with one of your games or applications.

In most other cases, you would be better with the FLOSS driver.
So, what's your special use case? I suspect for instance that @Vandenplas might require OpenCL to use it with blender.

Mostly a habit from Windows days.Hardware manufacturer does the drivers,that's it.

The Linux GOTY award is now over, here are the results!
By Zlopez, 30 January 2017 at 12:29 pm UTC

I was surprised to see, that Star Citizen will come to Linux. I didn't knew that.

I also want to thanks to Feral Interactive for doing really awesome job. Their 1st place is well deserved.

CAYNE, the free point & click horror game set in the STASIS universe is now out and it's damn good
By Corben, 30 January 2017 at 12:14 pm UTC Likes: 3

@Ehvis: It is playing in the same universe, but won't spoil Stasis at all.

I was lucky to beta test Cayne, and the issue with the text of PDAs and terminal screens being off is known and looks like it's a Unity Linux issue. The Brotherhood will release an update as soon as this is fixed.

From what I've read, Cayne was as stretch goal of the Stasis kickstarter campaign, a free prequel to Stasis. The friendly devs wrote to me:
QuoteI hope the Linux community forgives us for the late port of STASIS, that will happen soonish :)
I don't mind at all. They show quite some Linux love and are working on fixing issues, which is really great. Especially as you can play Stasis on Linux through the beta already.

Their new game "Beautiful Desolation" is on Kickstarter right now, and they say about Linux:
QuoteWhat Platforms will you initially release on? Windows. We will endeavor to also publish on Mac and Linux, however this may not be a day one release.

Civilization VI has entered final testing for Linux, could release soon, should be on sale too
By Tetractys, 30 January 2017 at 11:59 am UTC

Great work Aspyr!
Ready to grab is as soon will be available!

The Linux GOTY award is now over, here are the results!
By jith_feral, 30 January 2017 at 11:58 am UTC Likes: 22

Quoting: cRaZy-bisCuiTInteresting to skim through the results. Still I'm not to happy with Feral Interactive. They do make perfect quality ports, there's no doubt about it. I do appreciate that as well! Still they do split the Linux and MacOS community by porting games that doesn't have a cross-platform multiplayer. It would be better not to have ported Warhammer at all, if there's no chance to get Multiplayer working. There are ~400-500 people playing the game on Windows at weekends. Most of the time there's not a single Linux game being hosted. We don't even have to talk about quickmatch ranked matches....

We try to bring cross-platform multiplayer to our games, but sometimes this just isn't possible due to operating system differences.

Total War: WARHAMMER isn't out for Mac yet, but when it is, Linux gamers will be able to play with those on Mac.

If you're looking for people to play with, check out the Mac & Linux multiplayer group on Steam.

The Linux GOTY award is now over, here are the results!
By cRaZy-bisCuiT, 30 January 2017 at 11:36 am UTC

Interesting to skim through the results. Still I'm not to happy with Feral Interactive. They do make perfect quality ports, there's no doubt about it. I do appreciate that as well! Still they do split the Linux and MacOS community by porting games that doesn't have a cross-platform multiplayer. It would be better not to have ported Warhammer at all, if there's no chance to get Multiplayer working. There are ~400-500 people playing the game on Windows at weekends. Most of the time there's not a single Linux game being hosted. We don't even have to talk about quickmatch ranked matches....

CAYNE, the free point & click horror game set in the STASIS universe is now out and it's damn good
By Ehvis, 30 January 2017 at 11:32 am UTC Likes: 1

I'm assuming that this game does not spoil Stasis. Can anybody confirm that?

The Linux GOTY award is now over, here are the results!
By Ehvis, 30 January 2017 at 11:30 am UTC Likes: 2

It's interesting that there are at least two games in the "most anticipated for 2017" category for which there is absolutely no indication that they will come this year (or at all).

No huge surprises in the result. Although, while I expected Feral to win the favourite porter, the margin is quite a bit bigger than I expected. I think the most important reason for them to win is not the number of releases, but their community involvement.

Typoman: Revised is coming to Linux & SteamOS and they require Beta testers
By cRaZy-bisCuiT, 30 January 2017 at 10:56 am UTC

I'd be happy to test the game on Manjaro Linux x64. How do I register?

Edit: Sorry, I re-read the text and registered.

Typoman: Revised is coming to Linux & SteamOS and they require Beta testers
By Liam Dawe, 30 January 2017 at 10:54 am UTC

Quoting: dascandyLooks great. How do I register as a candidate beta tester? Professional software engineer running Ubuntu 16.10 on a NVidia laptop.
Read the quoted text.

Typoman: Revised is coming to Linux & SteamOS and they require Beta testers
By dascandy, 30 January 2017 at 10:49 am UTC

Looks great. How do I register as a candidate beta tester? Professional software engineer running Ubuntu 16.10 on a NVidia laptop.

Feral Interactive are teasing a new Linux port again
By Leopard, 30 January 2017 at 10:44 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: monsieursauce
Quoting: Leopard
Quoting: sigzFeral already said multiple times in the IRC chan that skyrim would be too complex to port.

Did you know that Bethesda already ported it for Nintendo Switch,which use Vulkan?

Does it mean the Switch can be an incentive to develop Linux ports?

It means Vulkan is using by big studios and Bethesda has a version with Vulkan already.Just Feral or Aspyr needed to publish it with Linux support.

Shadow of Mordor patch released for Linux, fixes issue with NVIDIA cards and more
By jith_feral, 30 January 2017 at 10:37 am UTC

Quoting: MaCroX95Some huge performance drops for me unfortunately on GTX970 :( The benchmark is better but in actual game it keeps stuttering much...

Can you please email [email protected] so that the team there can look into this?

Typoman: Revised is coming to Linux & SteamOS and they require Beta testers
By Guppy, 30 January 2017 at 10:23 am UTC

Looks quite interesting.

Tough to be honest 'elevator pitch' needs a bit of work "Inspired by the life of devoted writers ..." was enough that I almost didn't bother watching the video, I'm glad I did as it looks like a well crafted and interesting game mechanic.