Shadow of the Tomb Raider Definitive Edition from Crystal Dynamics, Eidos Montréal and Square Enix has been released today with a Linux port available from Feral Interactive.
If you're in the camp of preferring the first Tomb Raider reboot to Rise of the Tomb Raider, fear not, as Shadow of the Tomb Raider is apparently much better. However, I think you're all rather odd as I thoroughly enjoyed the first two games. That's okay though, different opinions on fun are what keep the world going. It's fantastic to see Linux get the full trilogy, since we often miss out.
Direct Link
Thanks to Linux getting the port later, we get the full Definitive Edition which comes with all seven DLC challenge tombs, as well as all downloadable weapons, outfits and skills.
Linux port details
Running with the Vulkan API, the Linux version should run well for most gamers. Ubuntu 18.04 64-bit is the main distribution they're supporting but it should (as with their other ports) work fine across most others.
As for specifications, Feral Interactive said for NVIDIA you need at least the 418.56 driver and AMD requires Mesa 19.0.1 or newer. Intel GPUs are not supported. On top of that you're going to want at a minimum a 2GB AMD R9 285 (GCN 3rd Generation) or a 2GB Nvidia GTX 680 according to their Steam listed specifications. To get the most out of it though? The recommended specifications on Steam are an 8GB AMD Radeon RX 480 or an 8GB Nvidia GTX 1080 .
Sometimes it really is the little things, like Feral Interactive's customized Linux launcher. It always looks great styled to the game and helps to show just how much attention they give to their ports:
Not just good looking though, as it's feature filled too. It will ask you if you want to send crash reports to Feral directly, helping them to further improve. Always good to see something like that. Many other helpful things included like setting you resolution and preferred screen, accessing the soundtrack and wallpapers, direct support links and more.
If you wish to get the most out of the performance, ensure your CPU is set into High Performance mode. You can do this manually if you wish, by entering this in your choice terminal app:
echo performance | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor
Played before and found your save game doesn't appear? You can try to copy it over to:
~/.local/share/feral-interactive/Shadow of the Tomb Raider/SaveData/[steamid]
As for the performance, during my testing this evening on Manjaro Linux it performs incredibly well. Even when absolutely maxed out (above the "Highest" preset), with anti-aliasing on the maximum SMAAT2x it was seeing an average of 125FPS which is awesome.
The 2080 Ti is obviously a very powerful card, so here's a look at how some other cards perform in comparison at various levels.
That's a very well optimised port, at least when going by benchmark results the Linux port performs extremely well. After playing a bunch of it myself, it holds up too. The actual real-world gameplay is quite often better than what the benchmark shows, regularly much higher as benchmarks are usually a stress-test of course.
During the gameplay, even with the 1060 on High settings it remained smooth and enjoyable. Certainly seems like Feral Interactive have done some outstanding work here.
Click to enlarge screenshots, all taken in the Linux version.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider is an incredibly pretty game, some of it is truly gorgeous. That intro scene too certainly got the blood flowing—how intense!
Much like the first two instalments, there's plenty of over the top action scenes that have you run, swing and leap to safety which I always enjoy. It's like being truly part of a movie at times, I once again feel like I need to own a Pickaxe as it seems they're handy for all occasions. It's a lot more of the same, with a few tweaks that doesn't really change the overall formula. That's to be expected though, since this is the third and final part of this story. It would be a little odd to see them drastically change it. So if you enjoyed Tomb Raider and Rise of the Tomb Raider, you will certainly have a lot of fun with this one as well.
However, there's a lot of newer little features and changes in Shadow. When climbing for example, you can now rappel down from rocks onto platforms below. It's only a small change but a welcome addition to everything else, especially as it helps keep the tension going. You're already running and leaping from one unstable platform to another, frantically tapping your key to grab on, now you've got to rappel and swing from a rope up high and hopefully not fall to your doom? Sure why not.
Where to buy
You can pick up Shadow of the Tomb Raider Definitive Edition from Humble Store, Feral Store and Steam. If you own the normal version, you should be able to upgrade. Recommended? A resounding yes.
We will be having a livestream of the release tonight on Twitch, Sin (our streamer) will also be showing off plenty more of it throughout the week.
As another reminder, we also still have Life is Strange 2 and Total War Saga: TROY to come from Feral Interactive as well.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
The series are a lot similar to Uncharted though, so you can completely ignore open world if you prefer to complete it quickly and move to something else.
Last edited by slapin on 8 November 2019 at 6:26 am UTC
slaapliedje Nov 8, 2019
Granted, I still haven't completed Rise of the Tomb Raider... But glad it came out for Linux!
Quoting: grumpytoadFERAL_SYSTEM_ASOUND and other environment variables are used in the startup script .local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Shadow of the Tomb Raider/ShadowOfTheTombRaider.sh, which attempts to override the ALSA dll used by the steam runtime with the system one. There's a comment in there about setting STEAM_RUNTIME_PREFER_HOST_LIBRARIES, so that might help ? In the past, when I haven't used pulseaudio, I recall using ALSA_PCM_CARD and ALSA_PCM_DEVICE to some degree of success.Ah, many thanks, I'll check it out :)
clatterfordslim Nov 8, 2019
The same with Life Is Strange 2, there is a switch to turn off copyrighted music and only the non copyrighted music will play. Cassidy a character who plays guitar and sings her own song in the game. I privately uploaded the full episode to YouTube of the game and got a strike for that particular song. Resident Evil 2 remake The part where Claire gets a phone call from chief Irons, CAPCOM complained saying they own the copyright to that part, my answer to that was hang on CAPCOM you made the game, so don't you own all of it? Still have not had a reply from them. YouTube is broken basically and no one there seems to care, or even listen to us the users of their website. YouTube are too big to listen to us the users I guess. So I hope that when Life Is Strange 2 gets ported that no one else who streams it to YouTube or any other AAA game gets a strike. I don't know about America's equivalent to Article 13 that got passed, it's getting to be a right pain though.
slaapliedje Nov 10, 2019
Quoting: slapinEverybody these days seems to talk to voices in their head when it comes to copyright, minorities, free speech, etc. I think something very bad will happen very soon. YT is useful platform if you want to vblog or showcase your own stuff though, but they tend to hit that direction too, as too many want to feed on what you do and new regulations are invented so they can. The reasons to this are quite well explained in Fahrenheit 451, read that, this might not be all bad thing. The more people communicate the more conflict arise and some people gain much more than others as the result, and as it is much easier to prohibit what is not liked, everything gets prohibited as for everything you can find some group of people who want to prohibit that thing. Same goes for social norms. As for copyright, there are huge players at stake, as huge media companies who have huge presence in governments, regulations, law making organs, who own all music in the world. Musicians have to sell their music for living and they lose all rights to it and all of that gets into bulk merchants hands who used to sell it for money. Internet broke their business model of 1000% profits and they intensified their government and law making efforts to increase their profits back and their greed is infinite, so unless something happens, new and new copyright regulations of Internet will come to guarantee profits. As they finish with piracy they will enforce $/munute payment scheme and go much farther (I have to listen to these ideas again and again as I worked close to media companies), they draw sums of billions of dollars daily stolen from them and that should stop. Nobody really cares for recipient comfort these days, only company profits which matters.There are more and more articles out there now about how Netflix and some othe streaming services have lowered the amount of piracy a lot. And then the different mega corps all decided they wanted a slice of that pie, and have all started their own, but because of that, people don't want to subscribe to 15 different services for their shows they want to see, and now people are returning to piracy.
Right now I think the only company that 'gets it' is Amazon, where you can sort of just plug in and choose which channels to subscribe to. My only complaint there is that they should mostly be less. Like CBS All Access should be like 3 USD a month, HBO/Showtime/Cinemax maybe 6. If they did that more people would just subscribe and forget about it. They are not like MMOs, so why they feel they should have MMO subscription models alludes me..
Quoting: mylkait is on sale now: -78%Oh boy, I really hope Feral can get enough cash out of this game..
Quoting: jensQuoting: mylkait is on sale now: -78%Oh boy, I really hope Feral can get enough cash out of this game..
That's a little unfair of Square Enix to do that so soon after the Linux release.
Quoting: pete910Maybe so, but this wasn't exactly hard to predict based on the discounts Square Enix tends to give their games a year after release.Quoting: jensQuoting: mylkait is on sale now: -78%Oh boy, I really hope Feral can get enough cash out of this game..
That's a little unfair of Square Enix to do that so soon after the Linux release.
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