Blizzard Entertainment Planning A Linux Game For 2013

[by.peroux]

I hope they'll port SC2 as well. It's the only game I play actually. It's a pain to play it via WINE since performance is sub optimal.

But as far as we know, WoW seems to be closer to a port than SC2

[bug77]

Not going to buy it. D3 sucked major ass. That's coming from a guy who played Diablo 2 for about a gazillion hours. They just wanted to make a WoW rip off with WoW graphics and Diablo Characters so they can piggyback on Diablo 2s success.

+1
I've been a huge Blizzard fan up until D2. Nothing worthy came out after that. Well, maybe SC2 if you're into that (I'm not), but even so people complained it's just more SC to begin with.

[vortex]

I still think this will end up as a big failed experiment.
The main reason is the open source video drivers just plain suck, and many of those people who only use those drivers instead of the binary blobs will just ruin it for everyone else.
It would be better if the distros installed the binary blobs by default, but in many cases, they just won't do that.

Speaking of open source drivers, I fail to see why many people choose to support nvidia instead of AMD when picking the gfx cards themselves. AMD releases lots of docs, nvidia hasn't released much of anything really, yet, those same anti-binary blob people continue to support a company like nvidia by buying their products.

[Mike Frett]

d3wow

Yeah I really disliked D3, but thankfully, Torchlight gave me much pleasure and I hope Torchlight 2 is ported over here eventually. As for WoW, when you unsub, they ask why; the reason I gave was that I use Linux now and wasn't interested in using Wine because it ran fairly slow for me. And no offense to anyone here, but Wine isn't really a solution for me, I'd rather have native. I've been doing my part in my one year on Xubuntu by buying as many games as I can from the Software Center.

I frequently hear users of other Linux flavors asking what's so special about it. Well, just click buy and it installs, that's why. When Shank 2 was corrupt on the HB site, It installed perfectly from the software center. That's a main reason I use *buntu, It's a consumer friendly alternative that I have found nowhere else in the Linux world. This is only my opinion of course, please don't be offended, I'm on your side. =)

This is also my first post and I'm very excited to be part of the Community here! =)

[ElderSnake]

Haven't bought a Blizzard game since D2, but if they release a game for Linux, I would totally buy it.

[chrisr]

But Blizzard must know how many existing users are using Wine.

It has to be StarCraft 2. D3's gotten boring after a month. WoW's always been boring because of it being an MMO. SC2 however ... already played >2000 matches, still fun.

I would try a native Linux WoW client. It would need to be at least as functional as the OpenGL client under Wine, but I would be disappointed if it were only equally functional. And I use Fedora instead of Ubuntu.

[d2kx]

WoW is already mostly ported, Diablo 3 isn't news... I assume it's the forthcoming StarCraft II addon.

[hanglekuk]

Well, I'm pretty curious how much Mr. ML will milk this topic. Since steam is pretty much mainstream and drying up, this looks like a potential visit-attracting cow.

[Thaodan]

hope its true, a World of Warcraft client woud be nice. I hope that the client will contain now Ubuntisms.

[chrisr]

The OpenGL drivers are already sufficient for playing WoW

The main reason is the open source video drivers just plain suck, and many of those people who only use those drivers instead of the binary blobs will just ruin it for everyone else.

I play WoW under Wine using both the NVIDIA binary blob and the Radeon Open Source drivers, and the OpenGL client works just fine with both of them. You obviously lose some of the fancier graphics effects under OpenGL because Windows strongly prefers DirectX. I would hope that a native Linux client would implement some of those, but I think we'd need distros to pick up OpenGL 3.x support for Radeon first.