Yesterday, it was announced that Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor GOTY edition was officially released on Linux and MacOS. This is one of the first truly great games in its prime to see the light of day on Linux in recent years. This is largely due to the influence of Valve and it's gaming machine push. It is largely to be seen if Valve can continue this trend and make Steam machines viable enough for the masses upon release. Here is some great Linux specific coverage of the release. If you wish to support Linux gaming and the porting house directly responsible, you should buy it directly from them (and receive a steam key to redeem). With the state of gaming on Linux being one reason many have given for years regarding the lack of Linux desktop acceptance, this excuse may be starting to disappear. If Valve sees its dream come to fruition, we will see whether that point has been valid all along or not.
From a Gamasutra article:
Feral Interactive today announced that the open-world action adventure game Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor Game of the Year Edition is out now on Mac and Linux via Steam, and will be released on the Mac App Store by early August. Developed by Monolith Productions and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment for consoles and Windows, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor received high praise for its innovative gameplay and immersive setting. Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor delivers a dynamic game environment where the player orchestrates their personal plan of vengeance as they bend Mordor to their will. The game begins on the night of Sauron's return to Mordor, as his Black Captains brutally execute the Rangers of the Black Gate. Players become Talion, a ranger who loses his family and everything he holds dear, only to be returned from death by a mysterious Spirit of vengeance.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by wantkitteh on Saturday August 01 2015, @01:32PM
Good news! It seems Windows, consoles and mobile platforms all rate above Linux in the gaming pecking order these days, yet my recent experiment building a Linux-based gaming system has been a resounding success - even factoring in the problems I've had with my AMD graphics card! I'll admit, I'm more of a KSP/indie gamer than a AAA-addicted Assassins Creed of Honour Black Ops kinda guy, and KSP is having major issues on Linux for me right now, but everything else I enjoy (just recently: Hotline Miami, Borderlands 2, Torchlight 2) is going great. Windows titles under compatibility layers are more hit and miss - Pokemon Uranium works fine after a little tweaking, as does World of Warcraft, but World of Tanks hated the graphics drivers and performed terribly with horrific graphical corruption (note to self: test it again post-AMD driver update). I've also been having prolonged problems with Flash, but that's more because of the extraordinary measures browser authors have been taking since the last crop of 0-day's showed up...
So yeah. Nothing devastatingly show-stopping, but still work to be done. 7.8/10
(Disclaimer: Running Linux Mint, Windows available as a secondary boot drive for comparison purposes)
(Score: 2) by CoolHand on Saturday August 01 2015, @01:43PM
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job-Douglas Adams
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Saturday August 01 2015, @02:03PM
I didn't think I was going to be into that much either, I completed Diablo 2 once and was like 'meh, whatever'. That's not the case with TL2 - got about 100-120 hours in so far, completed it twice and I now tell everyone that it's the game Diablo 3 wishes it was. I've been running Elite Hardcore builds just recently. Not getting very far yet, but I'm improving. TL2 was actually the reason I decided to give a Linux gaming rig a shot - it's Linux release was a bit of a surprise to me after the eons of silence after it's original Windows-only release.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 01 2015, @05:42PM
*high fives*
(Score: 2) by khedoros on Saturday August 01 2015, @07:11PM
(Score: 3, Informative) by Marand on Saturday August 01 2015, @09:50PM
I saw somewhere that it's "not supported" because they don't guarantee good, playable framerates on those GPUs. Same situation for Borderlands 2 on Linux, and most every other ported game so far. Currently, anything not nvidia is uncharted territory and you're on your own, probably in part because Valve's GPU support with SteamOS was originally nvidia-only.
The good news is that Valve implemented a refund policy for Steam recently. If you determine the performance is unacceptable, you can get a refund within two weeks if your play time is low enough (less than two hours, I think).
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Sunday August 02 2015, @10:30AM
It seems they're following Valve's lead in declaring Nvidia pretty much the only graphics chipset manufacturer to have drivers that are up to scratch for gaming. When SteamOS beta first came out, a lot of questions were raised about why only Nvidia graphics cards were officially supported by the OS. Quite simple, AMD [steamcommunity.com] had neglected to write proper Linux drivers for their kit - that's something I can personally vouch for, although recent driver releases have dramatically improved the situation, with quality and performance both getting much better since the 15.7 Catalyst release (the one that claims to be 15.20 once it's installed). While Intel have had good OSS drivers for their graphics systems for a while, gaming performance has never been their strong suit, so I guess they've officially said they don't support them so they don't have to field questions from folks with underpowered chips wondering why graphics feature X doesn't work or makes the game freak out or whatever.
(Score: 1) by Dr. Manhattan on Monday August 03 2015, @12:16PM
That didn't work for Shadow of Mordor. It still seems to want to download the whole darn game. Ah, well - at least I don't pay by the GB. It'll just take a day or so before I can play it.