Firewatch on Linux and the pain of Guild Wars 2
Week 2 of my Linux Gaming experience was a mixture of sweet triumph and bitter frustration. In this blog post I will cover Firewatch on Linux and the never ending Guild Wars 2 (PlayonLinux and Wine) installation.
Firewatch on Linux
With great excitement I sat in front of my computer waiting to install my first new linux game… Firewatch. The Steam download didn’t take too long only problem was, I was clicking the play button and nothing was happening.
After a small amount of investigation, it turns out that Steam had named the folder incorrectly. Linux file systems are case sensitive and Steam had named the folder ‘firewatch’ but was looking for ‘Firewatch’. I simply had to go into the game folder and rename it.
As simple as this was, it was slightly frustrating. Quite surprising this somehow manage to slip through Steam’s QA department.
Once running, the game looked and sounded great. It was super smooth and load times were minimal. Quite the opposite to what Apps was experiencing on the PS4. I am a happy gamer.
Guild Wars 2
The Dimp Digital Team have recently dusted off Guild Wars 2. I have owned the games for a few years but lost contact with it when my Windows machine started playing up. So what better time to try out PlayonLinux and get Guild Wars 2 working on Linux.
I had watched a video or 2 and the install seemed quite straightforward. Download the 32 bit GW2 client and then start the install with Playonlinux.
I tried this a few times but it just seemed to be bork every time without even downloading the first patch. After the third time of this stalling my system I removed the install and thought I would try to install just using Wine.
Apparently I simply needed to navigate to the folder where I had downloaded the client and run:
wine Gw2.exe -dx9single
This did seem to get me further, I managed to log in and the game was downloading to the point where there is enough downloaded to play. After about 30 minutes the game stalled again. I restarted and re-ran GW2. Unfortunately, now everytime I do this it stall my machine. For the minute I have parked GW2. I am an unhappy gamer.
