Indeed, and it’s not the one I expected a couple of weeks back. While we need to get an official confirmation (EDIT, actually confirmed, see below), Linux has been added to the OS list in SteamDB and it seems pretty legit. Again this is another big AAA game, following Borderlands 2 and Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel. We have however no idea when it will be released at this time. Maybe a nice christmas gift? EDIT: It was officially confirmed by 2K via Twitter that Bioshock Infinite is coming to Linux Early 2015.
Bioshock Infinite is certainly a pretty good game, and has high production values, as they say. However if you have ever played the previous Bioshock games, it may not be your favorite in the series. The world is beautifully portrayed but everything is a little too violent to my taste, while it could have been a perfect setup for an adventure/action game instead of a FPS.
There is a certain pattern in all the big AAA games coming on Linux though. Most of them are coming from 2K, a company very close to Valve (they are bringing Civilization: Beyond Earth to Linux as well through Aspyr). While we all appreciate the excellent effort from 2K, I personnally cannot wait to see other big publishers jump on the bandwagon. 2015 may be the year when this actually happens.
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The real question is, how are they wrapping DX10+ to OGL? This is something Wine hasn’t even accomplished, and yet the Wine translation layer gave much better performance (for me) in Witcher 2 than eON. Armed with that anecdotal evidence, I can conclude they don’t have much in common. They’ve either developed the hell out of their wrapper or we’re in for further disappointment. My expectations of them are not high.
Though improved, I still don’t find the Witcher 2 port on Linux performance acceptable. I’m using an i7-4930k and GTX780.
Honestly, we don’t even know how many folks they have behind their eON technology – developing a DX10 wrapper to OpenGL is certainly possible if you have the right people, the time and the resources. But maybe they are going a different way and removing such DX10+ effects for the Linux port. Who knows… As for the Witcher 2, yeah, but it’s a 2011 game and honestly it’s still great we have it on Linux no matter what. That’s another game I play for which I don’t need to boot in Windows. The performance may not be stellar, but it… Read more »
Rumors are it will be a Virtual Programming eON port, which is just wrapped in a wine-esque translation layer. I wouldn’t normally have a problem with it, but the two known eON ported games (Witcher 2 and Stronghold 3) have terrible performance on Linux.
I hope VP has their shit together this time.
Hey, before the GOL article was published I was under the same suspicion that it could be an eON port because someone I know at Virtual programming had been launching and relaunching Bioshock Infinite many times when I was online. Of course, it does not prove anything, but if they are working on it and trying to fix issues, that may be something they would do. As for Witcher 2, it runs pretty well on my configuration (not as well as in Windows, but I can live with it). As for Infinite, this is going to be more of a… Read more »