Last Epoch drops the Native Linux version, devs tell players to use Proton

This is especially egregious for those of us that backed the KS specifically due to the native Linux client. They only met their funding goal by about $45K, and that could have been due to the Linux version availability.

And I can tell you now as I've spent a LOT of time on developing to improve margins. 45K isn't enough to fund a Linux version itself.

However, they could still provide an old Linux build as beta for those who are stubborn about "native" builds.

Terrible idea. Then the Steam forums would be full of complaints about missing features and bugs - which besides would never be fixed.

Situations like this are proof that having a Native Linux port is no guarantee of continued support. Proton doesn't offer any guarantees either, but it's certainly more reliable.

Realistically, I would rather a studio just make one good version and make sure it runs well on proton. Be up front about that decision. I know money is a big factor. I don't want a bad version, no one patches, handed to me to play.

I bought Kingdom Come Deliverance on Kickstarter many years ago, with the promise of a native Linux version. They pulled out of that at the last minute. I still have it in my library and have never played it. It pisses me off every time I look at it.

I got it refunded and later in a bundle for free. Still never played it. But back in the day I would back pretty much anything that promised a Linux version. Things have changed dramatically over the last couple of years. Now my pile of shame is growing every month and pretty much any title would be playable on my Linux rig.

It's fine
the game was good before they started to add that pollution named "chat" like in D4 it takes so much space on the UI, it's annoying you can't get rid of because they wanted to go online than solo.

This game had potential then useless players asked for online feature...

It could have been at the same level as Grim Dawn

You can run the game in true offline offline mode which runs only locally and has no online connection at all, therefore no chat.

Unfortunately their language around this is terrible and extremely confusing. There's

Online Online
Online Offline
Offline Offline

modes of play. You have to launch it with a specific option to get into offline offline. That's how I played the entire game through to the endgame and had an absolute blast, and had no chat at all, which I completely agree with you: is super annoying.

Regarding this post: I feel the same as what others have said: This seems totally okay to me, but they should have done a WAY better job communicating this to their players and fans. The way they did it with no comms at all is so amateur hour. They're a big studio, they should know way better.


Last edited by Jarmer on 20 September 2024 at 6:12 pm UTC

This is becoming a common occurrence it would seem.

I do understand the reasoning for it as proton has become the better option. I recently decided to play Dirt Rally and was forced to use proton to get the game running as the native version is now completely broken. I am getting better reliability and performance using proton as well.

I think native builds will soon become a thing of the past until such a time that Linux market share grows to a big enough number to justify the extra work.

To me, this serves as a good example for why I wouldn't trust game developers to support Linux with a native build, unless the game and/or engine is Open Source.

Even if a certain game developer uses a FOSS game engine that supports Linux, that doesn't necessarily mean the game will support Linux.

Also, it's incredibly hard for game developers to release their source code in this day and age.

Honestly, I get really annoyed by the "Proton/WINE isn't native" arguments. If WINE or Proton were Emulation tools, I'd agree, but where emulation tries to mimic hardware and other aspects that simply can't be done "natively", WINE and Proton's other tools are actually rebuilding the Windows and DX APIs for use within Linux. As such, Proton/WINE are absolutely native but the very definition of what an API does. I'm speaking of this as a Software Dev myself that works with various APIs every day. I've said it before and I'll say it again, if WINE/Proton isn't "native", then no API is native.

Agreed. Most people don't realize it, on Windows, WoW64 is a translation layer as well. It stands for Windows (32bit) on Windows64. All the old Windows 32 bit games are going through a translation layer. Any games that install to the Program Files(32) folder all run through WoW64.

Edit: Back in the day, WINE released a libwine library for Windows applications. If you programmed with libwine that would make your program compatible with Linux using WINE. I don't know how much use it got or if it ever got any traction. But, I've said this before, Valve should be developing a libproton library. Or at the very least investing in libwine and promoting that. Future games starting with libproton and Vulkan would be 100% compatible with Linux at that point and use 1:1 translations just like WoW64 does for older Windows programs and games.


Last edited by Highball on 20 September 2024 at 7:20 pm UTC

Edit: Back in the day, WINE released a libwine library for Windows applications. If you programmed with libwine that would make your program compatible with Linux using WINE. I don't know how much use it got or if it ever got any traction. But, I've said this before, Valve should be developing a libproton library. Or at the very least investing in libwine and promoting that. Future games starting with libproton and Vulkan would be 100% compatible with Linux at that point and use 1:1 translations just like WoW64 does for older Windows programs and games.

I think Winelib is still a thing, at least the user guide looks up to date?

But its a native port by any other name. With the same problems. You need active developer support, you have two versions to keep up to date, you need to manage dependencies etc.

Edit: Back in the day, WINE released a libwine library for Windows applications. If you programmed with libwine that would make your program compatible with Linux using WINE. I don't know how much use it got or if it ever got any traction. But, I've said this before, Valve should be developing a libproton library. Or at the very least investing in libwine and promoting that. Future games starting with libproton and Vulkan would be 100% compatible with Linux at that point and use 1:1 translations just like WoW64 does for older Windows programs and games.

I think Winelib is still a thing, at least the user guide looks up to date?

But its a native port by any other name. With the same problems. You need active developer support, you have two versions to keep up to date, you need to manage dependencies etc.

Hmmm, that is not how I remember libwine(Winelib). What a mistake. Valve definitely needs a libproton(Protonlib, haha) then.

This is especially egregious for those of us that backed the KS specifically due to the native Linux client. They only met their funding goal by about $45K, and that could have been due to the Linux version availability.

And I can tell you now as I've spent a LOT of time on developing to improve margins. 45K isn't enough to fund a Linux version itself.

The idea that they were being either stupid or dishonest in promising a Linux version for a small funding goal does not imply that them failing to live up to their promise is optimal behaviour.

Native Linux can be a hassle to support at the best of times. And it isn't exactly all roses for users either. Who here hasn't had to perform dependency surgery on a GOG or Humble Bundle native Linux game at some point? That is MUCH less of an issue with Proton.

Until Linux can further mitigate breakage, we need something *like* Wine and Proton for stability and reliability's sake.


Last edited by Desum on 21 September 2024 at 4:32 am UTC

Oh... Damn. OK that's it, Kickstarter etc won't see my money anymore, it's definitely over.
As a backer of the campaign I'm "mad", but that's just the end of it at least, now I can forget this game.
Don't forget:

GOG support? dropped
macOS version? dropped
Linux version? dropped

What a mess...

Native Linux can be a hassle to support at the best of times. And it isn't exactly all roses for users either. Who here hasn't had to perform dependency surgery on a GOG or Humble Bundle native Linux game fat some point? That is MUCH less of an issue with Proton.

Until Linux can further mitigate breakage, we need something *like* Wine and Proton for stability and reliability's sake.

This can't be stressed enough. One of the biggest reasons gamedev is so much easier on Windows is because of Microsoft's commitment to backwards compatibility.... something a lot of Linux distros don't do well. Which usually means gamedevs have to package their external libs with the game (which many Linux diehards seem to dislike), use the Steam Runtime (which requires Steam).

Both options which are royal pains as I've had to do this myself for non-game related packaging where the libraries needed in the application I built were not available on some/most server distros because the system packages were far too old (in most cases actually End Of Life from the upstream maintainers of the programming language AND libraries) leading to either having to build for the least common denominator or building the entire thing into the package myself............ I'm forever scarred from that experience.

Which usually means gamedevs have to package their external libs with the game (which many Linux diehards seem to dislike)

I've been around Linux for many years and I've never heard of anyone objecting to games doing this.

It's not optimal for open source software that's part of the general Linux software ecosystem; the expectation is that that stuff will keep on getting updated more or less forever and if it keeps upgrading to the latest libraries you'll get the best function, security and so on, and you avoid duplication by using system libraries. It's all kind of messy but has a lot of advantages, and it's pretty clear from the history of Linux that it can be made to work.

But clearly closed source, commercial games are different and I think everyone knows that. Have you really seen "many Linux diehards" complain about games including libraries?

Can someone recommend a GOG Linux game that doesn't work out of the box? I randomly(ish) bought and downloaded a game called Silver because:

Works on:
Windows (7, 8, 10, 11), Linux (Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 18.04)
Release date:
August 31, 1999

I thought for sure this is not going to work. I'm running Ubuntu 24.04. But everything worked. I was shocked and disappointed, haha. The last update according to the change log in GOG is from 2018. Seems like they have something figured out.

You can complain, but it shows the power of open source. Even developer of closed software is behind developers of proton.

Can someone recommend a GOG Linux game that doesn't work out of the box? I randomly(ish) bought and downloaded a game called Silver because:

Works on:
Windows (7, 8, 10, 11), Linux (Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 18.04)
Release date:
August 31, 1999

I thought for sure this is not going to work. I'm running Ubuntu 24.04. But everything worked. I was shocked and disappointed, haha. The last update according to the change log in GOG is from 2018. Seems like they have something figured out.

Just a heads up in case you plan on actually playing the game. The Linux port had some horrible bugs when I played it in 2019 and I ended up using Proton instead.

If it was last updated in 2018 I guess those issues haven't been fixed...

Unitys Linux build system is out of beta for a very long time now. Game devs should be able to expect that as long as they don't write platform specific code themselves and choose compatible middleware, there should be minimal hassle. That's not how it works and the fault lies mainly with Unity. There should be no need to hire an expert, pay extra to get the source code of the engine and debug it into it's subsystems to grasp why it's faulting out and find a workaround. Finding why it's mildly misbehaving is even nastier. But that's the state it's in. You can blame it on the devs for trusting Unity, but same can be said about people who are really into "native" Linux games. No game dev will fix the damn engine, you know what to expect.

Can someone recommend a GOG Linux game that doesn't work out of the box? I randomly(ish) bought and downloaded a game called Silver because:

Works on:
Windows (7, 8, 10, 11), Linux (Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 18.04)
Release date:
August 31, 1999

I thought for sure this is not going to work. I'm running Ubuntu 24.04. But everything worked. I was shocked and disappointed, haha. The last update according to the change log in GOG is from 2018. Seems like they have something figured out.

Give the Grim Fandango Remaster a shot.