Age of Empires IV just got a fresh 2024 patch and excitingly, it gets an official fix for Steam Deck / Desktop Linux multiplayer problems.
This has been a long-standing issue. Single-player was fine, but when trying online play the game would desync at some point. So unless you went through some manual fixing (which didn't work for everyone), it just wasn't playable online for Steam Deck / Desktop Linux players with Proton.
In the patch notes for the update released January 30th it notes clearly "Fixed an issue causing desyncs on Steam Decks when playing online." amongst fixes and improvements across various other areas of the game. Nice to see more Xbox Game Studios published titles getting improvements for us. What a time to be alive.
Where to buy:
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Three things I wish worked in AoE2 are:
- native multiplayer desync fix
- multicore support
- Xbox live sign-in
ElamanOpiskelija Jan 31
- Microsoft... has fixed...
- Wait, Valve?
- NONONONONO... MICROSOFT... has fixed... they have fixed... their game to run on Linux.
This is a very long standing, very prolific issue. These are the same binaries needed to fix the online desyncs for Age of Empires 2, Mortal Kombat 11... very recently Tekken 8.
Proton normally doesn't address this (think AoE2-old) so I never expected this to be fixed by Valve, so I recently recommended someone just to never play Age of Empires 4 on Linux.
So in summary, Microsoft just shut my mouth big time.
Anyway I will still maintain, this is not a game to play with gamepad controllers!
rustigsmed Feb 2
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