The Witcher 3 is something Linux users have been practically begging to have, but the problem is that it seems it will likely never come to Linux. An ex-Virtual Programming developer has taken to reddit explaining why this may have happened.
I should stress, for our own record here that this is not the official word from Virtual Programming or CD Projekt RED. This is the personal opinion of an ex-VP developer.
Here's the issue: The Linux version of The Witcher 2 was released in a poor state, it had poor performance and just didn't really work well at all. It was later fixed-up and last time I tried it, the performance was absolutely fine for me. The real problem, is the amount of hate that was sent towards the porters Virtual Programming and directly to CD Projekt RED as well. Even I personally saw some of the hate that was sent their way and it was downright idiotic and absolutely uncalled for.
I will absolutely hold my hands up as well, I made mistakes around it since I simply didn't know enough at the time, and to be honest three years ago I was still learning a lot about everything. I later corrected what I said, as I always aim to.
Writing on reddit, this developer said (source):
It seems we may have also seen a port of The Witcher 1 as well, as the developer also said (source):
There's also this post from another user, who said at the time The Witcher 2 released for Linux, CDProjekt apparently lost a fair amount on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. Apparently due to such a big backlash from the community about the initial release quality. I haven't verified that myself, but if true it would certainly make CDProjekt rather against doing another Linux port with anyone.
This is sad, really sad. I hope this makes a few people reconsider their attitude when talking to developer about the performance of ports. Performance can be worked on and fixed, burnt bridges are harder (and sometimes impossible) to fix.
This reminds me of the time the Blizzard President responded to a small petition asking for Linux ports of their games. The response to the petition was really nice to see from such a big company and truthfully the response I fully expected, but the original statement in reply to it from the petition author (now deleted by the author, but captured in my article) was downright childish and idiotic.
Yes problems are annoying, but throwing insults around helps no one and yes it does make us look bad. I get where people are coming from, to an extent, since some games do end up getting left in a terribly broken state for a long time and sometimes forever. However, in this case VP did good and continued working and now, as stated previously, The Witcher 2 seems fine. Their others ports are generally pretty decent too.
I just hope in future that this developer who got a massive amount of hate and CD Projekt RED can look past it somehow, for all the fans of their franchise on Linux.
Note: I personally spoke to this developer about publishing this with their approval, in the hopes that it might get a few people to re-think their initial attitude towards problems in games. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
I should stress, for our own record here that this is not the official word from Virtual Programming or CD Projekt RED. This is the personal opinion of an ex-VP developer.
Here's the issue: The Linux version of The Witcher 2 was released in a poor state, it had poor performance and just didn't really work well at all. It was later fixed-up and last time I tried it, the performance was absolutely fine for me. The real problem, is the amount of hate that was sent towards the porters Virtual Programming and directly to CD Projekt RED as well. Even I personally saw some of the hate that was sent their way and it was downright idiotic and absolutely uncalled for.
I will absolutely hold my hands up as well, I made mistakes around it since I simply didn't know enough at the time, and to be honest three years ago I was still learning a lot about everything. I later corrected what I said, as I always aim to.
Writing on reddit, this developer said (source):
QuoteI agree, things were not right on release... but the vocality of people went way beyond that. It was an all out hate campaign against VP, against CDPR for "lying about the port being native". I attempted to help people out in my own time and got absolutely roasted and abused for it.
The community needs to realise it simply cannot justify this sort of behaviour if they want to convince devs and publishers to support them. There is no excuse.
It seems we may have also seen a port of The Witcher 1 as well, as the developer also said (source):
QuoteThe vitriol was unbelievable. Yes we messed up the performance on release but we put it right. However a huge hate campaign ensued. Both VP and CDPR got lots of vengeful hate mail sent to them. I cannot help but feel this damaged CDPR's view of the Linux platform irrevocably.
They certainly didnt blame us, because they had us work on a Mac port of Witcher 1 to replace the non-functioning Wineskin version. The same port would have ran on Linux too with very little extra work, but they were not interested in releasing it.
There's also this post from another user, who said at the time The Witcher 2 released for Linux, CDProjekt apparently lost a fair amount on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. Apparently due to such a big backlash from the community about the initial release quality. I haven't verified that myself, but if true it would certainly make CDProjekt rather against doing another Linux port with anyone.
This is sad, really sad. I hope this makes a few people reconsider their attitude when talking to developer about the performance of ports. Performance can be worked on and fixed, burnt bridges are harder (and sometimes impossible) to fix.
This reminds me of the time the Blizzard President responded to a small petition asking for Linux ports of their games. The response to the petition was really nice to see from such a big company and truthfully the response I fully expected, but the original statement in reply to it from the petition author (now deleted by the author, but captured in my article) was downright childish and idiotic.
Yes problems are annoying, but throwing insults around helps no one and yes it does make us look bad. I get where people are coming from, to an extent, since some games do end up getting left in a terribly broken state for a long time and sometimes forever. However, in this case VP did good and continued working and now, as stated previously, The Witcher 2 seems fine. Their others ports are generally pretty decent too.
I just hope in future that this developer who got a massive amount of hate and CD Projekt RED can look past it somehow, for all the fans of their franchise on Linux.
Note: I personally spoke to this developer about publishing this with their approval, in the hopes that it might get a few people to re-think their initial attitude towards problems in games. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Note: I personally spoke to this developer about publishing this with their approval, in the hopes that it might get a few people to re-think their initial attitude towards problems in games.
I think they should reconsider their release policies. Blaming the angry mob for getting angry for spending money for a buggy game... it's rather cheeky - professionally speaking. Sure there are trolls and nasty people out there - they're everywhere, especially in the Windows gaming ecosystem, where most of the action is going on.
It boils down to this: if it's not ready, don't ship it. If you can't make it happen, don't make empty promises. Be responsible.
Now taking the idealist hat off, there should still be some mutual understanding between the developers/publishers and the consumers. Bugs are not the end of the world. But it's always the developers' hands that can save a game from an initial failure. And the best way to prevent failure is to test responsibly. Is the project too big to test with in-house people? Then do alpha/beta testing with a limited number of players who are willing to spend some time exposing themselves to a zoo full of bugs of all shapes and sizes.
Frankly, I dislike their attitude. Had they released a good game in the first place, this article wouldn't be here. There's nothing we can do about haters, except for avoiding to trigger them. But then they should also respect the customers who buy their games and suck it up until a fix comes. And not all the games get their happy ending, so people get more and more angry when games keep being released in a buggy state on day 1.
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Sure, some games are worse, but the gaming industry is probably the crappiest and the most irresponsible.
Is it bad? Well, as you said, label it BETA and even if you make it available to everyone for testing, at least you can say it's not the finished product. But when so many companies release games labeled as "final", that's a recipe for hatred for people who pre-ordered or bought the games soon after they were released.
It's much easier to understand overwhelmed servers that can't handle the flood of players in the first days after a release (like Diablo 3), and much harder to understand unplayable games.
Is it bad? Well, as you said, label it BETA and even if you make it available to everyone for testing, at least you can say it's not the finished product. But when so many companies release games labeled as "final", that's a recipe for hatred for people who pre-ordered or bought the games soon after they were released.
It's much easier to understand overwhelmed servers that can't handle the flood of players in the first days after a release (like Diablo 3), and much harder to understand unplayable games.
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While performance could have been better at release, to the best of my knowledge the game actually did work ok on supported systems when it was released, and I don't think there were that many issues (if you could run the game). Only nvidia blob drivers were supported of course, and it was tested in house quite a bit as far as I know - but of course, releasing into the wild showed a lot more problems that they simply hadn't encountered during testing.
I do think they should have released it with a beta tag first, but hindsight is wonderful like that, and quite frankly I've seen a lot of games with a lot more problems that have had a more favourable reception at full launch.
And while I did buy the game, I did not have a supported platform (fglrx drivers at the time, on an underpowered system). The game ran. Not fast (unplayable to be honest), but it ran without any graphical glitches, crashes, or anything like that. Couldn't even start the game via wine. So from that perspective, the port was, for me, a lot better than many others.
Similarly, I bought this ( and many other ) Linux games knowing that AMD might not be supported initially. I played it for 30 minutes trying to find a setting where it would not CTD, shrugged my shoulders and left it for a few weeks. When I went back to it, it had been updated and has worked fine ever since.
To be honest I was only faintly aware that there was a lot of anger at the time; most of it seemed to be clueless people talking about VP and how they hated them using a wrapper. I know VP have a wrapper tech if the source code for a game isn't available, but what I have on my disk now certainly looks like a native port.
Last edited by etonbears on 8 Jul 2017 at 10:22 pm UTC
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Maybe in the EU. Antitrust in the United States is effectively a dead letter at the moment. The monopolists have the richest lobbyists, and the richest lobbyists rule the US, ergo no antitrust enforcement.What stops anyone from partnering with Dell, and making them provide Linux options on all their models, and not just on a couple of laptops? I agree though it requires money. I'd also like to see KDE used for such purpose.Honestly, if someone tried that, Microsoft would strike back their own deal with Dell to keep it from happening....
They can be hit with anti-trust pretty hard if they'd do that.
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They can be hit with anti-trust pretty hard if they'd do that.Maybe in the EU. Antitrust in the United States is effectively a dead letter at the moment. The monopolists have the richest lobbyists, and the richest lobbyists rule the US, ergo no antitrust enforcement.[/quote]
Yeah, it's pretty corrupt. But sometimes stuff works in courts.
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slaapliedje 9 Jul 2017
From what I recall/have read, MS was on the verge of being split up for being a monopoly, but then there was the 4 year shift in government and the anti-trust case went away. Pays to have the right people in your pocket before they get power, I uess.
1 Likes, Who?
Maybe in the EU. Antitrust in the United States is effectively a dead letter at the moment. The monopolists have the richest lobbyists, and the richest lobbyists rule the US, ergo no antitrust enforcement.What stops anyone from partnering with Dell, and making them provide Linux options on all their models, and not just on a couple of laptops? I agree though it requires money. I'd also like to see KDE used for such purpose.Honestly, if someone tried that, Microsoft would strike back their own deal with Dell to keep it from happening....
They can be hit with anti-trust pretty hard if they'd do that.
Not entirely sure the EU is any more effective. They do give some anti-competitive companies a good kicking in the balance sheet, but not always for the right reasons, and almost always way too late to prevent damage to competition...
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slaapliedje 12 Jul 2017
when I was first trying it, worked perfect, second time around everyone was missing their lower portion of their bodies!
See https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=26114#notes
Still stuck on the first boss...
Do you mean the Beast? It can be somewhat annoying indeed. Make sure you use Specter Oil.
Ha, yeah the Beast. The problem is that my last save was at the beginning of the whole dungeon where you kill the guards then have to go through and kill more, then you run into the witch. So I have to re-do that so I can brew up some potions. Otherwise my current save was right before the boss due to the auto-save, so I have to skip through the cinematic every time.
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Well, Witcher 3 was promised AND cancelled long after that VP-storm. So they promised, don't mind to haters, and cancelled, don't mind to haters. In the end, it all comes down to the price. SteamOS and Steam machines are failed (though it was nice try), even Valve don't support VR stuff on their's own platform. But how many VR owners in Steam? 100k? (and I very optimistic there). VR of course much coster, than Alienware Steam machine (alpha counterpart). Not any gamer could use VR because of their health (I, for an example, cannot and not only due to bad vision). Almost any glasses owner couldn't, except the ones, who uses lenses.
...
Now I have about 50% of my library in Steam compatible with Linux. Sadly, most of them are indie (and some of them broken, I don't mind much).
...
Now I have about 50% of my library in Steam compatible with Linux. Sadly, most of them are indie (and some of them broken, I don't mind much).
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Well, Witcher 3 was promised AND cancelled long after that VP-storm. So they promised, don't mind to haters, and cancelled, don't mind to haters. In the end, it all comes down to the price. SteamOS and Steam machines are failed (though it was nice try), even Valve don't support VR stuff on their's own platform. But how many VR owners in Steam? 100k? (and I very optimistic there). VR of course much coster, than Alienware Steam machine (alpha counterpart). Not any gamer could use VR because of their health (I, for an example, cannot and not only due to bad vision). Almost any glasses owner couldn't, except the ones, who uses lenses.
...
Now I have about 50% of my library in Steam compatible with Linux. Sadly, most of them are indie (and some of them broken, I don't mind much).
Well witcher 3 was never officially cancelled CD and Valve just stopped talking about it
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Well witcher 3 was never officially cancelled CD and Valve just stopped talking about it
Valve never talked about it. They just posted two ads, clearly sanctioned by CDPR. And while it was never officially cancelled, it was de-facto cancelled.
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slaapliedje 21 Aug 2017
Well witcher 3 was never officially cancelled CD and Valve just stopped talking about it
Valve never talked about it. They just posted two ads, clearly sanctioned by CDPR. And while it was never officially cancelled, it was de-facto cancelled.
You never know... they may release it in 2077 when Cyberpunk is real and it's a Golden Oldie Retro. Might even release on a Micro-Mini-SSD card? :P
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walther von stolzing 21 Aug 2017
Well witcher 3 was never officially cancelled CD and Valve just stopped talking about it
Valve never talked about it. They just posted two ads, clearly sanctioned by CDPR. And while it was never officially cancelled, it was de-facto cancelled.
You never know... they may release it in 2077 when Cyberpunk is real and it's a Golden Oldie Retro. Might even release on a Micro-Mini-SSD card? :P
By 2077 the game will run inside a browser on a low end smartphone.
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slaapliedje 21 Aug 2017
Pretty sure by 2077 we'll all just be batteries for the AI... unless we already are...
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Going back there was a hole other situation back then.
Graphics driver wasn't up to par and full of bugs.
eON wasn't working as good as we wanted it to.
We had a lot of games ported to only support Nvidia which created some anger from AMD users.
Many ports wasn't especially good.
It was a moment 22 situation where porters needed better drivers with more extensions and the driver developers only wanted to add support for existing games and a top of that adding buggy drivers that didn't behave as expected.
I think much of the problems was that Linux wasn't ready yet.
Fast forward to today and it's a hole different situation with much better drivers, the ports is often better and even eON is better many things comes down to drivers but also porters have learned a lot and perfected their tools.
The Witcher 2 runs fantastic, i usually run it on my AMD APU in an laptop from 2013 with radeon open source driver.
I have no complaints on wither 2.
Last edited by Odin on 22 Aug 2017 at 12:34 pm UTC
Graphics driver wasn't up to par and full of bugs.
eON wasn't working as good as we wanted it to.
We had a lot of games ported to only support Nvidia which created some anger from AMD users.
Many ports wasn't especially good.
It was a moment 22 situation where porters needed better drivers with more extensions and the driver developers only wanted to add support for existing games and a top of that adding buggy drivers that didn't behave as expected.
I think much of the problems was that Linux wasn't ready yet.
Fast forward to today and it's a hole different situation with much better drivers, the ports is often better and even eON is better many things comes down to drivers but also porters have learned a lot and perfected their tools.
The Witcher 2 runs fantastic, i usually run it on my AMD APU in an laptop from 2013 with radeon open source driver.
I have no complaints on wither 2.
Last edited by Odin on 22 Aug 2017 at 12:34 pm UTC
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slaapliedje 22 Aug 2017
The thing is while I'd like to yell at developers for not supporting AMD upon release, it's really AMD's fault for having such crap drivers for so long. It's the reason I always buy nVidia. I also always buy Intel now because every time I get an AMD CPU/Chipset motherboard I have weird random issues.
Though I will say lately it's been Intel's latest chipset/cpu that has been having weird issues with it's microcode.
Though I will say lately it's been Intel's latest chipset/cpu that has been having weird issues with it's microcode.
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Well witcher 3 was never officially cancelled CD and Valve just stopped talking about it
Valve never talked about it. They just posted two ads, clearly sanctioned by CDPR. And while it was never officially cancelled, it was de-facto cancelled.
So you don't think advertising the game as coming and hyping it is talking about a game interesting
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appetrosyan 22 Aug 2017
And what's the point of having a "port" in the first place if it works worse than it does on Wine?
I understand, but consider that they were trying to pioneer a framework that would allow easy porting of future Windows titles to Linux. Unlike wine, the SDL bridge allowed for ALL graphical features to work. It ran poorly in the beginning, they fixed it. On Windows, that happens all the time, and since Linux is a relative newcomer, this is expected. We could have been at least as understanding as the Windows users.
Now, some commenters without doubt went overboard, but while Virtual Programming ultimately improved the Linux version, the backlash at the time was 100% justified.
No. It wasn't justified one iota. Writing software for Linux is significantly harder, even then, it would only account for a small fraction of the revenue. The people at CDPR took a leap of faith, for the first bloody time, and instead of saying, "thanks, we really appreciate the effort", we basically spat in their face.
And I say WE, because instead of telling those "commenters" to STFU and let the gentlemen do their job, we sat idly by.
There's a good chance Linux gaming would be in a worse spot than it is now if we didn't react to terrible ports with outrage
Like how exactly? We don't have a single complete franchise port to date. What ports we have, run slower by 20%, are rarely given prolonged support, and most of the time only support Nvidia hardware. These aren't signs of laziness, more like lack of resources and manpower. If anything, user backlash only makes it worse.
Shadow of war isn't coming, neither is Shadow Warrior 2. Deus Ex Human Revolution?
If we had Witcher 3, and it was marginally successful on Linux, we might have actually gotten some serious ports. It's unlikely now that even publishers that share the same ideology as the OSS community will even consider helping us. AMD gets backlash for drivers, LibreOffice team, for their efforts to give a true alternative. We shouldn't insult the people who share our views.
(beating Wine performance and functionality should be a barrier every single port should cross), even if we did get an official release of TW3 one way or another.
Wine, is another problem. Sure it can run a small subset of Windows games, and run them well. It would have actually made sense to package some non-native games like Doom 2016 as a Wine port. Just use the Linux Steam client, package it with Wine, and cut the hassle of the users. But those "commenters" sabotaged that possibility, and here's how.
If I did package a bottle, people would complain "that it's not native". If it worked well-enough, you wouldn't get any positive feedback, as none of the games media view Linux as a platform. However god forbid it didn't work half as well as we'd like. I'd get an inbox full of hate-mail. It's in my interests as a good publisher (of which there are few), to protect the companies that trust me with their games, from the Linux community.
It's our own goddamn fault. We roast the DE's or Distros we don't like on forums. Promising weekend projects get nothing but hate, because someone who has only learned how to code GUI, obviously should focus on fixing issues in the Gnome compositor, how dare he spend precious resources on stuff he actually likes.
Your defence comes from the right place, but you're wrong. Posting angry comments has no justification, even if it is well placed, (notice how I'm systematically proving a point, without invoking namecalling or somehow
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slaapliedje 8 Sep 2017
I don't know. If you think of it from the point of view of it NOT being a port and being an original game. If someone released a game that was 'complete' not labeled as an alpha or a beta, the people who were looking forward to it and purchased it only to have the performance be complete crap, and the stability being poor. Everyone would EXPECT the users to be pretty pissed off.
This is the same thing with Witcher 2. Do you expect any console gamer to be understanding and wait for their new game to be patched to work? Hell no. For some weird reason we've come to expect that a game is going to be a buggy pile of crap when it's released to us, so we just accept it and wait for a patch.
Or even worse, we buy it... then a week after it's released they announce that they're going to release some DLC, and a good portion of us decide we'll wait for that to come out before playing through.. and then the cycle continues when the next DLC comes out...
While yes you can't justify telling the developer/porter to go shoot themselves in the face because they're terrible people, that's just dumb. But you can tell them 'fix your shit please.'
This is the same thing with Witcher 2. Do you expect any console gamer to be understanding and wait for their new game to be patched to work? Hell no. For some weird reason we've come to expect that a game is going to be a buggy pile of crap when it's released to us, so we just accept it and wait for a patch.
Or even worse, we buy it... then a week after it's released they announce that they're going to release some DLC, and a good portion of us decide we'll wait for that to come out before playing through.. and then the cycle continues when the next DLC comes out...
While yes you can't justify telling the developer/porter to go shoot themselves in the face because they're terrible people, that's just dumb. But you can tell them 'fix your shit please.'
0 Likes
Mohandevir 8 Sep 2017
Yep!
I was forced, by my 11 years old daughter, to listen to Taylor Swift music...
"...Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play
And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate
Baby, I'm just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake
I shake it off, I shake it off..."
CDPR this is for you.
ROFL!
N.B. I'm not cautionning at all all the hate that was sent to CDPR and probably VP. Nothing justifies a lack of good-manners.
I was forced, by my 11 years old daughter, to listen to Taylor Swift music...
"...Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play
And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate
Baby, I'm just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake
I shake it off, I shake it off..."
CDPR this is for you.
ROFL!
N.B. I'm not cautionning at all all the hate that was sent to CDPR and probably VP. Nothing justifies a lack of good-manners.
1 Likes, Who?
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