Quoting: StyromaniacHL2 is a good game, but there's not as much action as you'd expect from other FPS titles. Definitely more story and puzzles in trade of action. If you have spare time and nothing else to play, I'd say it's worth getting into.

Quoting: Avehicle7887That VP suggests a possible Virtual Programming eON port, this is getting interesting. I wonder how performance will fare with such a game in multiplayer.

Quoting: amonobeax

Quoting: fishxzthis makes even less sense, than a linux port will happen soon. why blizzard should do this for an outdated windows?

I guess neffo is right.

~90% of the market still uses windows XP. But their hardware is being upgraded. The result is ppl with very new GPU's featured locked by the API. That's how windows force/forced gamers into new Windows versions.

Why Vulkan not openGL? Well why not? The new API is a great promise for improvement. Blizzard is know to have games that work in low or high price PC's, if this API can increase this range even more AND give more performance to their games I really don't see why they shouldn't invest on it.

Quoting: neffo

Quoting: subWell, Newell said (see the GDC interview) Blizzard is a Vulkan supporter.
Why should they support it, if they're not aiming for SteamOS?
If they stick to Windows, they could just stay with Direct3D 12.

It's got nothing to do with Linux. The reason for the support is because of Windows XP.

Windows XP will never support DX12, Windows Vista and 7 might not either (although the later not getting support is unlikely). Blizzard games are net cafe favourites, and keeping the licensing requirements (and subsequently costs to the cafes) lower is important. It's much like the opposite of a Microsoft-published game (when they used to do that) Halo on PC required DX10 (although didn't show much for it). Vista was new and rubbish, but I'm sure some people installed Vista for the game. Take every Blizzard game, every Valve game (but notably even the recent ones), LoL, Quake Live - what do they have in common? They all have XP as a minimum requirement. DirectX 9.0c. An ancient (2004) API.

Vulkan could bring modern graphics to those machines.