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Feral Interactive have released an absolute whopper—Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor is now actually available for Linux. This is a seriously good game! Initial port report now included.
Warning: AMD and Intel cards are NOT supported. If you wish to play the game using an AMD graphics card, you should update your graphics driver to version Catalyst 15.7 or higher. You should be able to run the game without experiencing stability issues or graphical glitches, but you may still experience poor performance.
As a big fan of the Tolkien universe this pleases me beyond words, and I can’t tell you how excited I am to have a game of this calibre on Linux.
Shadow of Mordor is an open world, action RPG with some excellent graphics. It has easy to manage combat with several fun abilities, parkour climbing (think Assassin's Creed) and a very interesting boss system.
The “Nemesis” system is the real killer in this game, as you have Uruk captains that command a bunch of soldiers, and defeating them can give you special upgrades. However, if they defeat you, they will get a lot stronger. This makes dying more interesting to the point of making you be careful about who you go after.
You can also have random events that happen between captains, as there’s a lot of in-fighting in the Uruk camps. You can chose to take part in these events, and favour one captain over another. There’s lots of fun little quests like that, and it’s part of what makes me love the game.
We will be giving it the full review, and no doubt the GOL Cast treatment on this one as it’s such a big (and extremely satisfying) title. Just give us some time to pump some hours into it to get a real feel for how it is.
We are downloading it now, please wait for the port report to be done. Feral kindly gave me a key, so we just need my internet to go into overdrive.
The early port report
Intel i5 4670k, Nvidia 970, 16GB RAM, 1080p resolution
Performance on Ultra was quite smooth, ranging from 40-70FPS, but sadly after a while it did crash to the desktop. Booting it up again gave me an error message that suggested I revert to lower settings. This is expected, as Ultra needs a lot of VRAM, and more than the Nvidia 970 has. I guess I need to invest in something even better...
Trying it on one notch below at Very High was fine performance wise, but I still encountered a crash bug. I was killed by a captain, and afterwards it refused to show me the captain screen where they move about and level up, so I had to force quit it. I have not since been able to reproduce it.
FPS wise on Very High settings it gave me a minimum of 46FPS and I saw it top off at 100FPS when not being able to see much going on, but the average is around 50-60FPS. It’s very much playable for the 970 on Very High, and that has me rather happy, as it looks fantastic.
What I do find very interesting, is that the game will seamlessly switch the on-screen prompts between gamepad and keyboard depending on what you last pressed. I’ve never seen that before, and it’s really quite a nifty little feature.
The game isn’t kidding about full controller support either, as my Logitech F310 has been utterly flawless. It’s incredibly responsive, and I couldn’t imagine playing it with the mouse.
For a brand new AAA game on Linux, to have only one real crash bug in two hours of testing is pretty incredible. The wait was worth it for sure!
Intel i5 4670k, Nvidia 560ti, 16GB RAM, 1080p resolution - For lower end users.
On very high settings the game was giving me an average of 20FPS, so it wasn’t playable at all.
On High settings it was between 27-36FPS, even with it dropping below 30FPS it was still surprisingly playable, not perfect, but still reasonable for such a demanding game. I know people will argue with me on it, but if the FPS counter was off, I wouldn’t be able to tell personally. It did crash once while alt+tabbed to the desktop, so that could be a window manager or driver issue.
On Medium settings there wasn’t much difference at all to high settings. It stayed around 30FPS a bit longer than on high settings, but it never went lower or higher than it did on High.
I would say it’s perfectly playable on Medium/High on a 560ti, so that should give the lower end guys something to go by performance wise. It’s worth noting that Mordor is only supported on Nvidia 6xx and up, so this lower card I tested is below their minimum requirements.
On Low settings the game went between 41-60FPS, with it mainly being around 50FPS. I honestly think the game still looks visually pleasing on Low settings, and it's a perfectly playable FPS for a rather old card now.
About the game (From Steam)
Fight through Mordor and uncover the truth of the spirit that compels you, discover the origins of the Rings of Power, build your legend and ultimately confront the evil of Sauron in this new chronicle of Middle-earth.
System Requirements
OS: Ubuntu 14.04.2 64-bit / SteamOS
Processor: 2.6 GHz
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: 1GB NVIDIA 640 or better with driver version 352.21 or later
Network: Broadband Internet connection
Hard Drive: 47 GB available space
RECOMMENDED:
OS: Ubuntu 14.04.2 64-bit / SteamOS
Processor: 3.4 GHz Intel
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: 4GB NVIDIA 9xx series card or better with driver version 352.21 or later
Network: Broadband Internet connection
Hard Drive: 47 GB available space
Check out Shadow of Mordor on Steam now.
You can also get it directly from the Feral Interactive store, and support their porting directly.
If you pick it up, be sure to come back and tell us how it runs for you and include your system specifications so we can get a rough idea.
You have my sword Feral, and my axe. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Warning: AMD and Intel cards are NOT supported. If you wish to play the game using an AMD graphics card, you should update your graphics driver to version Catalyst 15.7 or higher. You should be able to run the game without experiencing stability issues or graphical glitches, but you may still experience poor performance.
As a big fan of the Tolkien universe this pleases me beyond words, and I can’t tell you how excited I am to have a game of this calibre on Linux.
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Shadow of Mordor is an open world, action RPG with some excellent graphics. It has easy to manage combat with several fun abilities, parkour climbing (think Assassin's Creed) and a very interesting boss system.
The “Nemesis” system is the real killer in this game, as you have Uruk captains that command a bunch of soldiers, and defeating them can give you special upgrades. However, if they defeat you, they will get a lot stronger. This makes dying more interesting to the point of making you be careful about who you go after.
You can also have random events that happen between captains, as there’s a lot of in-fighting in the Uruk camps. You can chose to take part in these events, and favour one captain over another. There’s lots of fun little quests like that, and it’s part of what makes me love the game.
We will be giving it the full review, and no doubt the GOL Cast treatment on this one as it’s such a big (and extremely satisfying) title. Just give us some time to pump some hours into it to get a real feel for how it is.
We are downloading it now, please wait for the port report to be done. Feral kindly gave me a key, so we just need my internet to go into overdrive.
The early port report
Intel i5 4670k, Nvidia 970, 16GB RAM, 1080p resolution
Performance on Ultra was quite smooth, ranging from 40-70FPS, but sadly after a while it did crash to the desktop. Booting it up again gave me an error message that suggested I revert to lower settings. This is expected, as Ultra needs a lot of VRAM, and more than the Nvidia 970 has. I guess I need to invest in something even better...
Trying it on one notch below at Very High was fine performance wise, but I still encountered a crash bug. I was killed by a captain, and afterwards it refused to show me the captain screen where they move about and level up, so I had to force quit it. I have not since been able to reproduce it.
FPS wise on Very High settings it gave me a minimum of 46FPS and I saw it top off at 100FPS when not being able to see much going on, but the average is around 50-60FPS. It’s very much playable for the 970 on Very High, and that has me rather happy, as it looks fantastic.
What I do find very interesting, is that the game will seamlessly switch the on-screen prompts between gamepad and keyboard depending on what you last pressed. I’ve never seen that before, and it’s really quite a nifty little feature.
The game isn’t kidding about full controller support either, as my Logitech F310 has been utterly flawless. It’s incredibly responsive, and I couldn’t imagine playing it with the mouse.
For a brand new AAA game on Linux, to have only one real crash bug in two hours of testing is pretty incredible. The wait was worth it for sure!
Intel i5 4670k, Nvidia 560ti, 16GB RAM, 1080p resolution - For lower end users.
On very high settings the game was giving me an average of 20FPS, so it wasn’t playable at all.
On High settings it was between 27-36FPS, even with it dropping below 30FPS it was still surprisingly playable, not perfect, but still reasonable for such a demanding game. I know people will argue with me on it, but if the FPS counter was off, I wouldn’t be able to tell personally. It did crash once while alt+tabbed to the desktop, so that could be a window manager or driver issue.
On Medium settings there wasn’t much difference at all to high settings. It stayed around 30FPS a bit longer than on high settings, but it never went lower or higher than it did on High.
I would say it’s perfectly playable on Medium/High on a 560ti, so that should give the lower end guys something to go by performance wise. It’s worth noting that Mordor is only supported on Nvidia 6xx and up, so this lower card I tested is below their minimum requirements.
On Low settings the game went between 41-60FPS, with it mainly being around 50FPS. I honestly think the game still looks visually pleasing on Low settings, and it's a perfectly playable FPS for a rather old card now.
About the game (From Steam)
Fight through Mordor and uncover the truth of the spirit that compels you, discover the origins of the Rings of Power, build your legend and ultimately confront the evil of Sauron in this new chronicle of Middle-earth.
System Requirements
OS: Ubuntu 14.04.2 64-bit / SteamOS
Processor: 2.6 GHz
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: 1GB NVIDIA 640 or better with driver version 352.21 or later
Network: Broadband Internet connection
Hard Drive: 47 GB available space
RECOMMENDED:
OS: Ubuntu 14.04.2 64-bit / SteamOS
Processor: 3.4 GHz Intel
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: 4GB NVIDIA 9xx series card or better with driver version 352.21 or later
Network: Broadband Internet connection
Hard Drive: 47 GB available space
Check out Shadow of Mordor on Steam now.
You can also get it directly from the Feral Interactive store, and support their porting directly.
If you pick it up, be sure to come back and tell us how it runs for you and include your system specifications so we can get a rough idea.
You have my sword Feral, and my axe. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Added testing from my 560ti, which is below the min system requirements.
Thank you Liam! :D
Did you use the recomended drivers or the 348 ones?
0 Likes
Wait, what do you mean by Nvidia 970? Are we talking about the Geforce GTX 970? Isn't that almost double the gflop speed of PS4 with 4GB of VRAM? I don't see the performance good at all for such a beast card, unless you are talking about a different card.
0 Likes
LinuxGamesTV Jul 31, 2015
Thx Fera for this great Game.
Last edited by LinuxGamesTV on 31 July 2015 at 2:05 am UTC
Last edited by LinuxGamesTV on 31 July 2015 at 2:05 am UTC
0 Likes
Played few minutes on SteamOS.
In short, performance is good although few will be able to play it at Ultra (too much V-RAM required).
It depends now on what you consider to be an acceptable framerate, but the game has sufficient settings options to reach a good compromise between good graphics and good performance.
Even at lower settings the game is still looking pretty nice.
I tried also the automated configuration but the resulted settings were way too low for my system.
View video on youtube.com
In short, performance is good although few will be able to play it at Ultra (too much V-RAM required).
It depends now on what you consider to be an acceptable framerate, but the game has sufficient settings options to reach a good compromise between good graphics and good performance.
Even at lower settings the game is still looking pretty nice.
I tried also the automated configuration but the resulted settings were way too low for my system.
View video on youtube.com
2 Likes, Who?
Mountain Man Jul 31, 2015
i wanted to play this...but crashes starting up.Yeah, I'm not having much luck either. I figured out that there are two missing libraries -- "libSDL2-2.0.so.0" and "libSDL2_image-2.0.so.0" -- even though they're supposed to be included in the Steam runtime. When I installed the Ubuntu versions, it got me past the missing library error but then immediately crashed without even getting to the splash screen.
0 Likes
It's cheaper (including all the DLC through BundleStars guys:
http://www.bundlestars.com/all-bundles/middle-earth-shadow-of-mordor-bundle/
I'm downloading and updating my video drivers in preperation. Woop!
http://www.bundlestars.com/all-bundles/middle-earth-shadow-of-mordor-bundle/
I'm downloading and updating my video drivers in preperation. Woop!
0 Likes
Weird....
I was playing Mordor at resolution 2560x1440 on Ultra around 20-30 fps max
So I have switched to high setting in order to get around 40-50 fps
But in the morning when I launched the game I have noticed that my high settings were +60fps so was a bit surprised and I have switched again to Ultra and I was getting around 50-55 Fps @ 2560x1440 :D
So I quieted the game to eat some breakfast and when I launched the game again was back to 20-30 Fps :(
If I have also Ultra Settings I cant go to advanced options is crashing the game...
Last edited by wolfyrion on 31 July 2015 at 5:18 am UTC
I was playing Mordor at resolution 2560x1440 on Ultra around 20-30 fps max
So I have switched to high setting in order to get around 40-50 fps
But in the morning when I launched the game I have noticed that my high settings were +60fps so was a bit surprised and I have switched again to Ultra and I was getting around 50-55 Fps @ 2560x1440 :D
So I quieted the game to eat some breakfast and when I launched the game again was back to 20-30 Fps :(
If I have also Ultra Settings I cant go to advanced options is crashing the game...
Last edited by wolfyrion on 31 July 2015 at 5:18 am UTC
0 Likes
mulletdeath Jul 31, 2015
Bought it from Feral. Going in basically totally blind-- never actually watched any videos, much less played it, but I know it will be awesome. That download though! Will have to wait until tomorrow at the earliest to try it out
0 Likes
edddeduck_feral Jul 31, 2015
So I quieted the game to eat some breakfast and when I launched the game again was back to 20-30 Fps :(
Some settings require a full reboot to enable as the engine needs to restart, when you enabled Ultra from High without restart this is why the FPS didn't drop. Playing on full Ultra you really need a high end 6GB VRAM Nvidia card. Ultra really means Ultra for this game!
4 Likes, Who?
edddeduck_feral Jul 31, 2015
i wanted to play this...but crashes starting up.Yeah, I'm not having much luck either. I figured out that there are two missing libraries -- "libSDL2-2.0.so.0" and "libSDL2_image-2.0.so.0" -- even though they're supposed to be included in the Steam runtime. When I installed the Ubuntu versions, it got me past the missing library error but then immediately crashed without even getting to the splash screen.
Contact Feral support with your setup information, however could you check a supported distro first just to confirm it's not that which is the factor?
0 Likes
lucifertdark Jul 31, 2015
Bought it just now, just have to wait 3-4 hours for it to download, HUUUUUGE THANKS Feral guys & girls. :D
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Hey, just bought the key from a Linux distribution on Steam, but not through client but through Firefox. Can someone explain whether that counts a Linux sale?? (Steam did register my OS and displayed corresponding games on the store page).
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edddeduck_feral Jul 31, 2015
Hey, just bought the key from a Linux distribution on Steam, but not through client but through Firefox. Can someone explain whether that counts a Linux sale?? (Steam did register my OS and displayed corresponding games on the store page).
Yes it does
1 Likes, Who?
It's cheaper (including all the DLC through BundleStars guys:
http://www.***********.com/all-bundles/middle-earth-shadow-of-mordor-bundle/
I'm downloading and updating my video drivers in preperation. Woop!
And Feral doesn't see a cent of it. Good job!
2 Likes, Who?
Hey, just bought the key from a Linux distribution on Steam, but not through client but through Firefox. Can someone explain whether that counts a Linux sale?? (Steam did register my OS and displayed corresponding games on the store page).
Yes it does
Do you know if buying on BundleStar and then using the Steam key under Linux counts?
We appreciate each and every crumb of information what is counted as Linux sale and what not.
Help us to help you. :)
Last edited by Eike on 31 July 2015 at 7:54 am UTC
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edddeduck_feral Jul 31, 2015
Hey, just bought the key from a Linux distribution on Steam, but not through client but through Firefox. Can someone explain whether that counts a Linux sale?? (Steam did register my OS and displayed corresponding games on the store page).
Yes it does
Do you know if buying on BundleStar and then using the Steam key under Linux counts?
We appreciate each and every crumb of information what is counted as Linux sale and what not.
Help us to help you. :)
If you buy from a third party and they don't explicitly say they are selling Linux or Mac keys then you've bought a Windows key. Bundle-star for example sell Windows keys.
Doesn't matter where you play the game on third party stores the sale is based on the steam keys they have purchased. Humble Bundle for example have a set of keys tagged as Windows, Mac and Linux and hand out the correct ones based on your platform so that the correct platform sale is recorded.
5 Likes, Who?
Has the game been tested with AMD Phenom II CPUs? I'm not too concerned about AMD GPU limitations, but the CPU could be an issue.
0 Likes
If you buy from a third party and they don't explicitly say they are selling Linux or Mac keys then you've bought a Windows key. Bundle-star for example sell Windows keys.
Doesn't matter where you play the game on third party stores the sale is based on the steam keys they have purchased. Humble Bundle for example have a set of keys tagged as Windows, Mac and Linux and hand out the correct ones based on your platform so that the correct platform sale is recorded.
Good to know, thanks!
Not Feral's problem, but I fear I've got Pillars of Eternity stamped wrong then for buying it as a box. :-(
But it was just so beautiful, buying a Linux game in the store around the corner...!
@Liam: You should note this in your growing list of things to do and not to do to support Linux gaming. :)
Last edited by Eike on 31 July 2015 at 9:07 am UTC
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