Steam Deck killed any need for A Total War Saga: Troy's Linux port
A port in a storm
Professional porters Feral Interactive are no longer working on a native Linux port of A Total War Saga: Troy. Valve’s work on Proton, a game-specific compatibility layer that’ll power their Steam Deck portable, has created “generally less demand for native titles,” according to Feral, meaning the upcoming Steam release will rely on Proton, or other compatibility programs, to run instead.
The port was paused when the game was made an Epic Game Store exclusive last year. EGS has no Linux support, so the exclusivity delayed any work Feral had planned. In the meantime, Valve’s work on Proton and SteamOS, designed to allow Windows titles to run on Linux so people are able to access their entire Steam library on Valve's portable device, has killed off any need for a native port.
Gaming On Linux spotted Feral’s tweet: “The Linux port was put on hold while Troy was exclusive to Epic, and we are not resuming development for the Steam release. We will continue to assess the feasibility of porting games to Linux, but there is generally less demand for native titles since Valve’s launch of Proton.”
In the comments of the Gaming On Linux article, user "Leopard" stated that their EGS version of the game already runs well with "Wine+DXVK". So Linux users won't even have to wait until SteamOS is released for the game to be playable.
As GoL points out, the previously ported Feral Interactive Linux titles didn’t allow for game saves to be shared between Linux and Windows, a huge deal when you think of the Steam Deck as an extension of your gaming library. Taking your progress from your desktop to a portable PC is one of the selling points. Funnily enough, Proton might be the Trojan Horse needed to get gamers to take up Linux, while killing native gaming along the way.
A Total War Saga: Troy is out on Steam on September 2nd.