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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edddeduck_feral Jul 31, 2015
Quoting: FredOHas 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.
Quoting: Mountain ManQuoting: doctorxI just got this back from support:I wonder what they mean by "soon"? Hours? Days?
Thank you for your purchase of Shadow of Mordor. We are sorry to hear that you have experienced an issue.
Is your CPU an AMD Phenom II? If so, we are looking into an issue where this older CPU is unable to launch. We are working on a fix and hopefully will have good news for you soon. I will be in touch when I have more information.
It isnt a distro problem... but cpu issue. I have never had any issues tied to running an amd. I can still play most of my games in 4k even without much issue. Looks like they are aware of it and working on a fix though.
The AMD Phenom II is a pretty old CPU design now and it is missing some maths library features that modern games and compilers often use. With things like physics being able to use some SSE instructions can be very useful.
The Phenom II CPU does support SSE3 and older so we are looking into disabling the SSE4 optimisations to allow these older design CPUs to run the title. If you are own a Phenom II CPU and own (or are thinking of owning) the game please feel free to contact our support and we can keep you informed.
We don't want to give estimates before we investigated which is why we said "soon", if you make an estimate before you have fully investigated the problem you can find the internet usually turns it from an "estimate" to a guaranteed date within a few hours ;)
I can say the solution won't be before the weekend given it's 7pm on a Friday night in the UK right now but we plan to email people via support with a status update next week once we have some concrete news to report. We'll also likely distribute a beta update via the same method to those effected to verify the fix works once we have it before it's released on the main branch.
Last edited by edddeduck_feral on 31 July 2015 at 6:16 pm UTC
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Mountain Man Jul 31, 2015
Quoting: edddeduckferalI can say the solution won't be before the weekend given it's 7pm on a Friday night in the UK right now but we plan to email people via support with a status update next week once we have some concrete news to report.So that puts it at "days". That's what I wanted to know. Thanks.
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Quoting: edddeduckferalQuoting: FredOHas 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.
Quoting: Mountain ManQuoting: doctorxI just got this back from support:I wonder what they mean by "soon"? Hours? Days?
Thank you for your purchase of Shadow of Mordor. We are sorry to hear that you have experienced an issue.
Is your CPU an AMD Phenom II? If so, we are looking into an issue where this older CPU is unable to launch. We are working on a fix and hopefully will have good news for you soon. I will be in touch when I have more information.
It isnt a distro problem... but cpu issue. I have never had any issues tied to running an amd. I can still play most of my games in 4k even without much issue. Looks like they are aware of it and working on a fix though.
The AMD Phenom II is a pretty old CPU design now and it is missing some maths library features that modern games and compilers often use. With things like physics being able to use some SSE instructions can be very useful.
The Phenom II CPU does support SSE3 and older so we are looking into disabling the SSE4 optimisations to allow these older design CPUs to run the title. If you are own a Phenom II CPU and own (or are thinking of owning) the game please feel free to contact our support and we can keep you informed.
We don't want to give estimates before we investigated which is why we said "soon", if you make an estimate before you have fully investigated the problem you can find the internet usually turns it from an "estimate" to a guaranteed date within a few hours ;)
I can say the solution won't be before the weekend given it's 7pm on a Friday night in the UK right now but we plan to email people via support with a status update next week once we have some concrete news to report. We'll also likely distribute a beta update via the same method to those effected to verify the fix works once we have it before it's released on the main branch.
Thank you so much for the explanation! You guys are top notch! Ill be waiting.
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I'm little dissapointed with performance of this game. When i've played it on windows right after release, i could run the game smooth on high/medium with pretty stable fps. On linux i'm running it on low with unstable fps. I hope there will be an update fixing the performance.
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Quoting: Mountain ManQuoting: edddeduckferalI can say the solution won't be before the weekend given it's 7pm on a Friday night in the UK right now but we plan to email people via support with a status update next week once we have some concrete news to report.So that puts it at "days". That's what I wanted to know. Thanks.
"Hours" in my humble opinion would be unreasonably fast for any non-trivial problem.
(I'm software developer, and the project I'm involved in couldn't even do a new complete software build in that time.)
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Quoting: edddeduckferalThe AMD Phenom II is a pretty old CPU design now and it is missing some maths library features that modern games and compilers often use. With things like physics being able to use some SSE instructions can be very useful.
Thanks for the info.
I own a Phenom II X4 940. Yes, it's old (2009?).
Thing is - it's still doing a very good job with new AAA games alongside a Radeon HD 7950... on Windows.
It seems games that are making effective use of multi threading will still make fun with this CPU when coupled
with a reasonable GPU.
Unfortunately, my experience is that many AAA Linux ports seem to rely on high single-core
performance because they either drop multi threading completely or doing it less optimized.
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Well, bought direct from feral too :D
Will see what its like on mageia 5 with a 290x. :S:
They have done a good job with the 15.5's and 7's so I have confidence ..
***** 5+hrs to download :( I need fibre......
Will see what its like on mageia 5 with a 290x. :S:
They have done a good job with the 15.5's and 7's so I have confidence ..
***** 5+hrs to download :( I need fibre......
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Quoting: oldrocker99I have to wait until tomorrow (pension) to buy it.
Oh man how I love that quote, on so many levels.
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Quoting: BeamboomQuoting: oldrocker99I have to wait until tomorrow (pension) to buy it.
Oh man how I love that quote, on so many levels.
GOL serves all races, and ages. Love it.
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Purchased! I wanted to purchase it right from Feral's store but the +$3 to use Paypal was a no-go for me. I understand that paypal likes to take a cut, but I'm pretty sure paypal takes a smaller cut (I may be wrong?) than Valve does when I buy it through Steam. Maybe they should rethink that.
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