Saw that coming from a million miles away. If they wanted to support Linux they would have a long time ago. At one point they had a working WoW client for Linux that some of the employees used internally. I don't know if it is still up to date or not but if it worked at one point I would think it would be trivial to make work now if it happens to be out of date.

It would be nice to see them bring their games to Linux as they are popular games, but they really have not made anything good (IMO) since Warcraft 3. I own Diablo3, played through it one time, it was just "meh", I also own the original SC2 and it was "meh" as well and I didn't even bother with they other SC2 "DLC". Blizzard lost its soul the minute they let Activision buy them out.

Honestly I think support is probably their biggest hold up. I'm sure support is already swamped with all the people they have playing on windows and adding Linux would probably be a nightmare for them. Like everyone else they would need to choose one distro to support and sorry to the others. Those WoW kiddies already get their panties all in a bunch when they have problems.

If Valve succeeds in turning Linux into a really viable gaming platform then maybe Blizzard will change their tune. Until then this is all we are going to get out of them.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

AHH! I see! That makes more sense. I was trying to figure out how old of hardware you had to be limited to 3.3 :huh: I'll buy it either way more than likely, I just hope it runs well and is not horribly downgraded to make it playable if they choose to use such an outdated core profile. If I wanted to play downgraded games I would own a console. I still dual boot to play some more demanding titles because of my multi-gpu/multi-monitor gaming rig, but one day I hope Linux will support it and I wont need it anymore as games are the only thing installed on "that other partition" ^_^

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I have not changed any settings from last time I tried to play this in Linux and now I'm getting 50-60 fps outdoors. So a pretty big improvement if you ask me. Though I can't remember if I had AA on before and it is obviously disabled now so that could be where most of the perf came from.

EDIT* I've mentioned this before, but I'm going to mention it again. If you are someone who dual boots. DO NOT let steam cloud manage your saves. The Linux and Windows saves seems to not be completely compatible and it will tell you there are problems with your save that it "fixed" but you will still have trouble.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: MaelraneActually I do hope they use OpenGL 3.3 but nothing more. Else I can't buy, nor play on Linux. :) I couldn't care less for graphics.

My apologies for sounding harsh but, if you can't use anything above OGL 3.3, then it is time for you to get new hardware or just deal with the fact you have outdated hardware and there will be games you cannot play. If past games are any indication (they usually are) this game would get 15-20fps (if not worse) @ 1080p with an gtx970-980 with all the settings turned up which is completely unacceptable and they shouldn't even bother wasting their time to port it. On the other hand we have the Metro Redux games where they said to hell with older hardware, used OGL 4 and it ran 55-60fps most of the time with everything turned up (except SSAA) on one of my 970's @ 1080p. There were people who were butt hurt they couldn't play it, but it looked and ran really well on Linux. That series is one of my favorites from recent years as well.

Again, a bit harsh but it is the reality. We don't want Linux games getting the name of cut down like consoles because we can't run them. We are already a niche, don't turn it into a complete joke too. Remember this is also a DX11 only game for windows users so your card would not play it there either.

Quoting: edqeI think the game is one of the most overrated games released recently. It is extremely repetitive from the beginning and after an hour there nothing to see anymore. Nemesis-system is fun first 30 minutes but even that is boring and extremely simple if you have played Crusder Kings 2 (sure, different genre).

That is kind of sad to hear. Really makes me glad I didn't buy it at full price but also raises the question how in the hell did it win a GOTY award @ GDC of all places? Due to its high profile and coming to Linux I will still feel obligated to buy it if nothing more than to support Feral. ASSUMING it is not just complete trash on Linux and I know Liam or one of the others will SURELY let us know ASAP <3

View this comment - View article - View full comments

This is going to mac too I believe. What worries me is that they will target the same OpenGL for both platforms leaving us with an older opengl core profile so it either won't look as good or it will look as good using extensions and performance won't be so great. From what I did see of this on Windows it is a stunning game graphic wise and with the GOTY title the game was obviously good as well. I know they did a great job with xcom, but graphic wise this is in a whole other ballpark. Would like to see OpenGL 4.4 at least and used to its fullest potential! Guess we are going to have to wait and see.

I'll end up buying it either way because it has been a game I've been interested in. Was mostly just waiting for the price to come down because I wasn't $60 worth of interested so hopefully it turns out to be a fantastic port.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Interesting. Sort of Zelda like. Other than the parts with turn based combat it looks like it could be fun. I usually can't deal with turn based stuff, watching paint dry is more exciting to me than waiting for all NPC's and baddies to get through their turn.. there has only been one exception for me and that was Wasteland 2 (kind of), which unfortunately even after probably 40 hours I've never finished as the combat just got too boring. I know there are tons of people who like that kind of game play so hopefully it turns out to be a good one.

What Linux needs is more Torchligh/diablo style RPG's IMO. I finished my first play though of T2 last night and played some mapworks dungeons and I plan on doing a game+ play through as well. I went looking for something similar and there really isn't any that are linux native :(

View this comment - View article - View full comments

[ekrboi@linux ~]$ begin_rant
Rant initializing.....

If a gamer cares so much and is adamant against proprietary technology in their games then they wont be playing any games with Nvidia PhysX in them anyways. Stick to Supertuxcart, Xonotic, 0 A.D., etc. If the game is for sale on any distribution platform (Steam, GOG etc..) or in a store then odds are it is NOT a FOSS game and therefore you shouldn't be playing them, simple as that. I also hope your PC/laptop is running libreboot, linux-libre, and your hardware requires absolutely NO binary blobs for everything to work. You should also probably make daily ritualistic sacrifices to Richard Stallman.

People cry about Nvidia and their proprietary technologies when they don't share and some of those same people cry when they do share! Nvidia is a business, a very successful one at that. They spend crap loads of $$ to research and make the technology that they do. They have gifted and bright employees to pay and they also need to churn a profit in order to pay for further RnD and their investors.

They can't give everything away. When a hardware company does that you end up with AMD (Decades long AMD processor user until recently BTW), they run out of $$ and their products become sub par and when they realize this and it is too late they barely have enough $$ to fix/replace the broken and/or sub par architecture. How long have they been milking the bulldozer uarch line? TOO long and it really shows. The bulldozer uarch line should have died with bulldozer. (I owned an FX-8350 btw)

Kudos to Nvidia for sharing their hard work.

end rant.
[ekrboi@linux ~]$ mv ~/.opinions /dev/null
[ekrboi@linux ~]$ echo $USER goes and puts on his full body armor.

:D :D :D

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I put another 9 (yes nine) hours into this yesterday evening/night, I was up til 4am playing. :P The ONLY "glitch" I saw was ONE loot chest had a weird shadow flicker, but it was gone as soon as I moved it off screen and back again. 99.9999% perfect port so far.

Well, I've done my chores for the day, so I'm off to make some coffee and probably spend the rest of it playing TII :woot:

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I fired it up and played for a couple of hours last night. I enjoy the hack-n-slash type RPG genre a lot. It can be hard for me to get into a turn based game. I am so far finding it enjoyable, although maybe a little too easy? I leveled my character to 7 with the difficulty set to normal I believe, and I don't know if it is just normally "easy" or what. I'm going to give it a little more time before starting over on a higher difficulty.

On the performance side of things I give them an A+. Even though Linux will only make use of one of my 970's I'm still able to play this @ 5760x1080 with pretty damn rock solid 60fps even in battles with quite a few enemies. I'm stoked to have another game to play in Linux that I'm not forced to windows to play due to lack of real multi gpu support in Linux. It is a pretty game but it is not exactly pushing a ton of polygons though.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: crunchpaste

Quoting: EKRboiI think the big problem here compared to XBone and PS4 is that the people making these have to make a profit on them. MS and Sony can sell theirs as a loss leader. Segata is right. Valve needs to produce these themselves for either 0 profit or even at a bit of a loss.

And then lock the software down so that you could only buy from Steam, sell games for twice the price and make you pay a monthly subscription to play online? Don't worry about the price... having multiple OEMs guarantees that free market will take care of it.

I believe Steam Machines shouldn't compete with consoles in price as if you just buy 2-3 AAA games at console prices and pay the subscription for just an year makes a console with inferior performance more expensive (or at least balances the prices) than a low-mid range Steam Machine.

Edit: So as it comes to price I just decided to calculate how much I've spent on Steam. It's a total of £92.28 for a total of 47 games I own. And I know that buying on sale is not supporting the developers but I'm poor and believe giving back less is better than nothing. And these games were equal to hundreds of hours of fun. So the point I'm trying to make is why would they lower the price of hardware therefore lowering the profits of the OEMs, lowering the chances of them making a second generation of Steam Machines and therefore lowering the general interest in the platform when consoles couldn't even get close in terms of game prices?

Because that would be shooting themselves(valve) in the foot. The cost if these are not going to get console gamers to buy one. That is who steam machines are aimed at. I didn't say NOT to allow other companies to make them, I just said valve needs to get the cost of them down. The easiest way I can think to do that would be to also make them themselves. Another route could be that they subsidize the cost of the more modest ones to OriginPC, Alienware, etc.

I know exactly what you're saying about saving money on games and subscriptions, but people who are not already apart of PC gaming are not going to see it that way. What they are going to see is a $600-700 game console that will produce graphics only marginally better (if at all) than an XBone or PS4. At best they can hope for better frame rates.

View this comment - View article - View full comments