Strange and sad news, Deep Silver responded to me on twitter to let me know that Dead Island Riptide Definitive Edition and Dead Island Definitive Edition are not coming to Linux. I find this odd going by the recent SteamDB activity.
I tweeted to them on the 15th and they have only just replied today (my emails went completely unanswered as usual):
@gamingonlinux We currently don't have plans for Linux versions for these editions.
— Deep Silver UK (@DeepSilverUK) May 26, 2016
This is really weird, because both games have Linux in the "oslist" and only within the last day did they both add in the "linuxclienticon". I pointed this out to Deep Silver, but no reply yet.
There could be many reasons for this. It could be that Deep Silver simply has their wires crossed, it could be for testing purposes only or even being announced at a later date.
If it is true that the new editions are not coming to Linux, this will mean Linux/SteamOS gamers will not be able to buy Dead Island at all, as the old editions are being removed.
These days, Wine isn't good enough to play the latest games. All AAA games require DirectX11, which Wine hasn't implemented enough of. Even if it did, Wine seems to need OpenGL 4.3 or higher for some of the translations which Mesa still doesn't support in a stable release that distributions would include (but you do want to use Mesa for Gallium Nine, for older DirectX9 titles). Then you've got Shadow of Mordor, which seems to require OpenGL 4.4 or 4.5, so even development versions of Mesa likely won't cut it - and if it's anything like Tomb Raider on Mesa, the performance will be absolutely horrible.
It feels like we're in this awkward spot right now where there is no perfect gaming solution. You can use proprietary drivers and miss out on Gallium Nine, or you can use free software drivers and forgo compatibility with some AAA games and get reduced performance.
Next year we should be in a really nice place. Mesa should have easily finished off OpenGL 4.5 for all modern hardware and will be working on performance improvements. Wine should be running a large chunk of DirectX 11 games, if not most of them. Hopefully AMD's had some time to implement FreeSync and Crossfire support into AMDGPU. And then AMD's new high-end cards will be out next year too with what we can expect will be day 1 support via free software drivers. I just hope the performance of the hardware is competitive.
When GNU/Linux gets to that gaming nirvana sometime next year, I'm hopeful we'll start seeing more companies develop for GNU/Linux because it will be easier to support, be easier to use (for those with AMD at least) and be more competitive with other operating systems. This is even more true when you consider most people will be Khronos-ready, especially since AMD have committed to releasing the source code for their implementation - so we can reasonably expect to see it in all distributions out of the box.
And who knows... maybe next year sometime, even GOG will have gotten around to releasing Galaxy?
Last edited by boltronics on 27 May 2016 at 9:33 am UTC
Last edited by liberodark on 27 May 2016 at 9:40 am UTC
Last edited by leillo1975 on 27 May 2016 at 12:47 pm UTC
Im asked directly Techland but they not response, I think because in Poland is now loong week (celebration on Thursday and a lot of free Friday, which gives people four days off. So rather for the whole Techland is free.)
Last edited by DamonLinuxPL on 27 May 2016 at 1:44 pm UTC
Still doesn't show Linux support on Steam itself, but I was able to pre-load.
Last edited by Liam Dawe on 27 May 2016 at 1:52 pm UTC
https://www.deepsilver.com/es/ayuda/
Last edited by leillo1975 on 27 May 2016 at 2:05 pm UTC
Quoting: m2mg2For those of you who have preloaded it, can you browse local files and see any linux specific files (executables, game related .so files)?
I preloaded it, but couldn't find the files. It did take up the space on my drive though. Only a few days to go, but I'm feeling optimistic thanks to the person who got in touch with Koch media.
Quoting: Shutup-FoolPretty sure pre-loading actually keeps it in some sort of encrypted file, which gets extracted at release.Quoting: m2mg2For those of you who have preloaded it, can you browse local files and see any linux specific files (executables, game related .so files)?
I preloaded it, but couldn't find the files. It did take up the space on my drive though. Only a few days to go, but I'm feeling optimistic thanks to the person who got in touch with Koch media.
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