Blizzard Entertainment Planning A Linux Game For 2013

[christian_frank]

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

if you own a recent nvidia gpu visit the winehq app page for sc2 .i made a post there howto greatly improve sc2 perf using nvidia driver threading and a wine patch .

[e8hffff]

It's important they support a new title since D3 was a dozy and Wow in on the decline.

[AJSB]

Please God !!! Make it Happen !!!

Linux native client for...

Company of Heroes 2 !!!

[iniudan]

So they will port an already released game? Fine.


It's getting tiresome to read this with every major announcement of a Linux port. :/

That mostly due to Ubuntu been one of the few distro left, with commercial interest backing it, that aim for mainstream user, all other distro, with a company behind them, mostly focus on enterprise market.

[AJSB]

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.

Well as a new proud owner of a A10-5800K APU, i stopped supporting NVIDIA...happier ?

[fettouhi]

So they will port an already released game? Fine.


It's getting tiresome to read this with every major announcement of a Linux port. :/

Which Linux distro should they then choose? People need to be realistic about how many distros a game company can and will support. If the game works in Ubuntu Linux it will work on Mint, Fedora, Arch, Gentoo without much work from the community as well...

[chrisr]

WoW being ported is a reason to release it.

WoW is already mostly ported.

So why not release it, if it already exists? Wouldn't that be the cheapest option because there'd be less to lose.

[deanjo]

Which Linux distro should they then choose?

How about just supporting the LSB?

[a user]

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.

because amd/ati gfx drivers still only support a part of the gfx-card features. this gets especially significant regarding video acceleration.

i wished so many times that i could switch to ati under linux but failed every time and had to go back to nvidia. either it was video accel or subpar 3d or issues with vsync or what ever, i always had to go nvidia.

on my htpc i have good onboard ati gfx but i had to buy a nvidia gt220 because the ati drivers do not support mpg hw decoding and have smaller issues on h264.

sure, on certin cases you can be satisfied with ati under linux. but that's more of rare case. nvidia is SADLY still the only more or less reliable way to go under linux. it is so idiotic and self destructiv how amd behaves here. i really cannot understand this.

EDIT: sorry, i have overlooked that you were specifically refering to oss drivers. anyhow, i let my post as it is.

[x616e]

I really don't have a problem with companies targeting Ubuntu. Ubuntu is not my favorite Linux version, but having to Dual Boot Ubuntu and another version of Linux or having to extract the .deb myself (or just put up with Ubuntu) is far better than the alternative of having to buy and dual boot that metro trash or something fruity. You have to look at things in stages, sure we all want everything to be open source, but you cannot just get people to jump from one end of the scale to the other instantly. It's a step in the right direction.

Personally I also hope it is not Diablo 3. I am not a fan of hack and slash style dungeon games, they get boring quickly. After the first play-though of Diablo 3 I just could not do it again.

One of my main reasons for stopping playing WoW seriously was I felt that I could not RAID reliably using WINE so I would quite welcome WoW. Although they would have to get rid of either the expansion upgrade costs or the monthly subscription, having both is a bit too much these days. When I first bought WoW I had at least a free month or something. A sixth month sub should get you the expansion free or vice versa. Definitely the annual pass really should have included the full version of MoP.

I would love to see the original Warcrafts on Linux. I am getting into DOTA 2 alot now, and as Valve are hopefully porting this sometime in 2013, I was actually going to move away from Blizzard and never look back. I think the only things that would get me to come back are Starcraft 2 or Warcraft 3. Or a stand alone Battle for Mount Hyjal raid .

WoW needs a lot more stand alone games that you can just get together with a bunch of friends and pick a bunch of pre-made characters and just play a dungeon or RAID together, without a subscription. It was so difficult to get anyone I knew IRL to actually level up a character.