Linux games

[robinturner]

I was in a gaming mood tonight, so rebooted into Windows to play Mount & Blade (my all-time favourite game). Unfortunately, it was yet again not playing nice with my graphics card, so I booted back into Linux, thinking, "Ah, by now there must be some decent Linux games." Searching through various Linux gamesites showed me that not much has changed (and in fact, much has got worse since the demise of Loki). The problem with Linux gaming is that the Open Source world is full of brilliant programmers and crappy artists. Most of the games remind me of my first happy gaming experiences on an Atari, but nostalgia can only take you so far. I don't need the latest accelerated pixel-shaded antialiased graphics (which would kill my video card anyway) but I do want art that doesn't resemble finger-painting. This seems only to be found in first person shooters; kudos to the game designers, but I'm too old for FPS.

What I would really like is a game that

• has strong role-playing (which means more than character-stats);
• has some real-time action but isn't just another FPS;
• has a world worth exploring (which means, but is not restricted to, no macaroni art);
• doesn't require me to be online for hours at a time;
• doesn't require memorizing dozens of key bindings;
• is free or cheap;
• has hot chicks.

In the meantime, I'm trying to choose between having another attempt at Vegastrike or shelling out for Guild Wars.

Comments

[trochee.livejournal.com]

if you find such a game, please let me know. not that I need to be on the computer more.

[kristian.livejournal.com]

I've heard some Good (and some bad) things about The Witcher, though it's not free, unless you want to support terrorists and torrent/emule it. I've just found "The great game experiement" website, which has lots of free/indie software. Light on hot chicks and stuffs, but heavy on free and interesting ideas.

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

If you're willing to give up on graphics entirely, there are still a lot of MUDs out there. Some are beautifully written, some are fully role-play, and some are both. They do require being online, though.

[solri.livejournal.com]

I played around with lambdaMOO a bit last year when I was teaching a course on games (one of the texts was about the infamous lambdaMOO cyber-rape). I may have another look, especially since I'll be covering similar ground in my upcoming course on virtual worlds. The problem for me with text-based games is that so much of my life revolves around texts, when I'm playing, I want to relax with some eye-candy. On the other hand, no graphics are better than bad graphics.

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

When we had to visit Second Life for the imagination seminar I took last term, I realized just how strongly I prefer text-based virtual worlds. I still relax perfectly well with text, though, in general (fantasy novels and travelogues, mostly). Of course, I haven't dared visit any decent graphical ones, for fear I'd get hooked.

Here are websites with connection info for three muds I'm familiar with:

Shattered Kingdoms (no relation to Mercedes Lackey) - this one's seriously role-play and has areas worth exploring.

Necromium - when I took a break from my regular mud, a friend and I had a great time exploring this one, probably the most fun I've ever had on a mud.

Gizmo - I've been an administrator on this one for ten years, although it's not a very good quality one (and I don't care; my connections there are social). It allows multis (up to four characters controlled by one person) and has a stagnant player base, so there's almost no role play aspect at all. If you feel inspired to visit it anyway and the 'who' list shows you that Monsters is on, send him a tell and ask to talk to Evie - I hide from the mortals but he does not. (I doubt our schedules overlap enough to make that connection, though.)

[rodneyorpheus.livejournal.com]

Guild Wars won't run natively on Linux either - you need to use Cedega (which is what I use. although you have to pay for a small amount for it, it's worth it), WINE (free, works, but may require some hacking to get it running right, or Crossover Office (free trial to check it out). Once you have one of those though, you can play most Windows games, including near-perfect Guild Wars at Windows speeds (sometimes faster than Windows even). GW is cheap to buy and free to play - and more than fits your criteria above. And still the best online MMO around, period.

For Linux native stuff, still the best bet there is the original Neverwinter Nights and its expansions, which although long in the tooth is a very fine game. Not NWN2 though, it's junk and Windows only.

Second Life has a native Linux client also, but that's totally Sadsville. There's a Linux client for EVE Online, but that's a pay monthly situation, which you probably dont' want...

[solri.livejournal.com]

I haven't used Cedega since when it was winex - compiled it from source code and had a bugger configuring it. Maybe I'll give it another go. Guild Wars is by far the most attractive online game out there, but that's the problem - it's a MMORPG, which means I can't just fire it up for half an hour when I need a break from work.

The Linux SL client is indeed buggy, but there again, it's alpha and a clone of a pretty buggy original. If I want to go into SL, I always boot into Windows. I've posted my feelings on SL before: the idea is brilliant, but the architecture is crappy and 90% of the world is boring. shopping and small talk are the kind of things I go online to escape from. Some of the role-playing enclaves have potential, especially for a role-playing experience that's a bit closer to table-top RPGs. I imagine in a few years, either SL will turn into something a bit more like it was meant to be (i.e. Neal Stephenson's Metaverse) or it'll be replaced by the competition.

[rodneyorpheus.livejournal.com]

Cedega is totally simple to set up and use now, and even does DirectX 9 pretty much perfectly. It's worth the few bucks it costs to give you so much more potential.

SL is a horse that doesn't need flogging any more. It's vile.

And Guild Wars *is* the kind of game you can fire up for half an hour - you can jump right in to PvP at full level after 5 minutes of play if you want OR you can play it like a conventionial MMO, that's the beauty of it. And you can buy a brand-new copy of it for just a few quid now and play as long or as little as you want without paying a penny in online fees. And very well supported under Cedega.

http://cedegawiki.sweetleafstudios.com/wiki/Guild_Wars

(I wrote some of this BTW)

[solri.livejournal.com]

It looks like GW works under vanilla Wine. I downloaded what was supposed to be a demo for Prophecies but looked more like a full version (minus key) of Gwen and it installed OK.

[rodneyorpheus.livejournal.com]

There's only one Guild Wars client, for all chapters. You just need a key to unlock travel to the different continents. So once you've installed any part of it, you have the whole thing. And yes, it works fine under WINE now apparently.

[solri.livejournal.com]

So which key do you recommend I buy: Prophecies, Factions or Nightfall?

[rodneyorpheus.livejournal.com]

Each one unlocks a different continent, with a different vibe and play style.

Prophecies is the traditional European fantasy style, good storyline, relatively slow levelling and easy learning curve. Professions are Warrior, Ranger, Elementalist, Mesmer, Necromancer, and Monk

Factions is set in a more Far East style environment, has very fast levelling, excellent PvP, but weaker storyline and a steeper learning curve. You also get two extra professions: Ritualist and Assassin.

Nightfall has a North African / Egyptian style, and falls somewhere between the other two for story and learning curve. The two extra professions here are Dervish and Paragon.

So it's hard to give a fast ruling on this. For most new players Prophecies is probably the best bet. Right now in our Guild most people are working through the Nightfall storyline, so that's also a good choice. But if you like Asian style stuff (which I know you do) Factions is great...

Hell they are all so cheap now you'll probably end up buying them all down the line, so take whichever is easiest and cheapest to get :-)

I believe we still have your previous test account character in our Guild list, so if you remember that account name and password you can apply a new key to it and come straight in...

[solri.livejournal.com]

I thought I'd try Nightfall (I fancy being a dervish) so logged into playNC. They refused to let me buy it because they suspected me of credit card fraud. (Huh? If I was any good at that kind of stuff, I wouldn't be pissing around teaching English.) So then I went to amazon.co.uk and found they had Nightfall for nine quid ... but then found they won't ship Guild Wars to Turkey. Gnnnnnn. Maybe I'll get them to send it to my mum and have her mail me the key.

[rodneyorpheus.livejournal.com]

I just did that with a Brazilian friend, so if you want you can ship it to me and I'll email you the key. rodney [at] rodneyorpheus.com

[solri.livejournal.com]

Thanks, but I just sent it to mum. I think she can handle the key thing, so I should be in-game in a few days.

[rodneyorpheus.livejournal.com]

Excellent! In the meantime you might want to load up the client and leave it sitting at the login screen overnight. It will sense you aren't playing and download any data you don't already have on your hard drive. So when you do start playing it'll be instant action.

You can also get the same result by running it once with the flag "-image" which tells it to make a disk image of all data on the server.

Also check out:

guildwars.abrahadabra.net

[solri.livejournal.com]

Bugger, it looks like the Collectors Edition key doesn't work with the downloaded client - I'll have to wait until the CDs arrive from Blighty. Just my luck - I have a week's holiday starting on Saturday and hoping to get in some serious online self-indulgence.

Love the dancing elves, by the way.

[rodneyorpheus.livejournal.com]

There is only one client - the CDs are EXACTLY the same as the download. So the key has to work.

Triple check that you have it entered correctly - I've gotten stuck for 20 minutes entering it until I realised I had repeatedly entered an incorrect letter. Make sure you're using the "I have a new key" function in the login screen to enter it.

If you're still stuck send me the key by email and I can try to set up an account for you and send you back the password - or at least figure out what's going on.

[solri.livejournal.com]

Hah - wrong key. My mum didn't realise that you had to scratch off the grey stuff. I'm now in with a new character: Yunus Bekri.

[rodneyorpheus.livejournal.com]

Sent you a Guild invite. I can see you online, but you're not answering me :-)

[solri.livejournal.com]

That's because I fell asleep while the island was downloading!

Commercial Games?

[(Anonymous)]

Sounds like what you are wanting a commercial game for Linux. High quality games with assets like art work, in-depth story of a world worth exploring, and details making it worth playing for hours at a time, takes a lot of time and effort by creative people who live off copy restricted work.

Good for you that there are already lots of commercial games available for Linux, where the publishers support your Linux desktop. You can find a list of recent commercial Linux games at http://www.linuxgamingworld.com/games-catalog/

Don't be so quick to not purchase a game. These developers make their living of sales, and they will not bother to support Linux on their next release unless people purchase their products. Think of it as investing in future Linux games that you'll want to play in a couple years.

Re: Commercial Games?

[solri.livejournal.com]

I don't mind purchasing games, so long as they're not exorbitantly priced: Mount & Blade was the best $20 I spent in my life (annoyingly, they won't bring out a Linux version or even a Cedega compatible one because of some stupid copy protection software they're using). I've bookmarked that list you linked to and will check it out when I've done enough work to justify some playtime.

Coincidence

[hfx-ben.livejournal.com]

I came across this going through "stale" email.
Earlier today I came across an article talking about how, once upon a time, a buncha guys at World or Warcraft came up with a Linux version ... which was never released ... which has recently been kinda finished.

Should I see if I can dig up the article? A full tutorial and getting whatevuh *nix install up to speed, drivers and all that.

Re: Coincidence

[solri.livejournal.com]

Thanks, but don't bother - Guild Wars is already taking up an alarming amount of my time, and if I start another RPG, I'll never get any work done! Nice to hear they've produced a native Linux client, though.

Re: Coincidence

[hfx-ben.livejournal.com]

Ok ... and I know what you mean about the time. I say that I regret how this 300MHz box keeps me away from good MPOGs but heh it's kind of a blessing!
:-)