Play Epic Store Games With Legendary

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Don’t want to use the Epic Store launcher to play one of those freebies you got with it? That’s not a problem now, thanks to the open-source Legendary. (License GPL 3)

The news is a little old now, but it’s still worth covering. The thread for Legendary exploded in popularity on r/linux_gaming in just a matter of days. The author, derrod, modestly acknowledged he needed Linux testers, but so far it’s been pretty easy to use and I haven’t encountered a hitch yet. It uses a text-based interface; the developer’s goal is to eventually incorporate a graphical user interface.

The proof in video, before we go into details…

Getting Legendary

Obtaining Legendary can be done in a number of ways:

1. Clone the source, then install the Python-based application with:

git clone https://github.com/derrod/legendary.git
cd legendary
sudo python3.8 setup.py install

You will need Python 3.8 or later installed on your system, as well as python3-requests and python3-setuptools-git.

2. Legendary is available in the AUR and in the official Fedora repositories. Note that the time of writing, the package in the AUR will fail to work if you don’t have python wheels installed (pip install wheel). EDIT: fixed by AUR package maintainer.

3. You can go to the releases section on the Github page, download the binary, mark it as executable, then run it.

4. Install Legendary via PyPi:

pip install legendary-gl

Basic Usage

You’ll need to get an authentication code in order to use Legendary. Run this through the terminal:

legendary auth

epic store games with legendary

Your default web browser will be launched and you will be asked to log in to your Epic Games account if you’re not already logged in. After logging in you’ll receive an authentication code:

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Copy this code, without the quotation marks, then paste it into the terminal you used to authenticate:

Hit Enter. The script should tell you the username of the account you’ve successfully logged into.

Note: should you want to use another account, you’ll need to delete the “user.json” file located in ~/.config/legendary and authenticate once again.

To get a list of the games that have been registered to your account, run:

legendary list-games

Installing a game is as simple as typing legendary install followed by the app name. So, if I wanted to install Axiom Verge, I would enter, as per the screenshot above, the app name “Puffin” (sometimes app names can be somewhat cryptic - like a hash - but it would still work. This happens for the game “A Short Hike”):

legendary install Puffin

Download and installation took about ten seconds. Literally. Now, to verify that it’s been installed, as well as check for any updates for installed games, enter the following:

legendary list-installed --check-updates

Now here’s the best part: running the installed game. To launch Axiom Verge:

legendary launch Puffin

A custom version of Wine will be installed. Install everything that Wine asks for, including Mono, and you’re good to go!

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Sound works as well as gamepad support. If you’re a technical nerd you can check what’s going on behind the scenes with the game from the terminal.

Note: you can launch most games without online authentication by adding the “–offline” flag when running the launch command.

For more usage commands, as well as additional configuration that can be made to the application itself or to individual games, check out the Github documentation.

Big thanks to derrod for this application, for giving us access to our Epic Crap Store trove without having to use that hideous launcher!