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by Mike Schramm 
Jun 28th 2008 at 3:15PM
During the dev panel a few minutes ago, Tom Chilton told us something interesting about playing World of Warcraft on the Linux platform -- Blizzard has actually had it working. For "compatibility purposes," they apparently had an internal build of the game that worked on Linux. But unfortunately for Linux users, they have no plans at all to bring the final game out on the system. They didn't expound much more than that, but of course we can imagine all kinds of reasons they'd hesitate to release a Linux version, first and foremost being that in terms of gamers on the platform, the marketshare just isn't there.Of course, this doesn't mean you can't ever play WoW on Linux, it just means you can't do so off the shelf. WoWWiki has some really great information on how to play WoW with WINE (which just, by the way, reached a 1.1.0 release, and allows you to play Windows programs on other platforms). Transgaming's Cedega is also supposed to work with World of Warcraft (and you probably won't get banned), and Codeweaver's CrossOver also is approved to work with World of Warcraft on Linux.
So there are ways to play it, but you might have to do some tweaking. Still, we wish they'd told us more about why they don't want to release the client they builtt
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends, Blizzard, Hardware, Worldwide Invitational
Reader Comments (Page 2 of 2)
Vadim P. Jun 29th 2008 8:14AM
Well, WoW works great under Wine, so I guess that's the compatibility they were speaking of.
But come on - just release the thing. No need for support, we can figure that out (for the most part, unless your client will be really, really messing up).
sunny beach Jun 30th 2008 3:43AM
I don't see much motivation to release a Linux client since the existing Windows client already works decently using Wine. It's cool that they've at least considered a Linux client thought.
Spad Jun 29th 2008 1:30PM
Er...
I run wow under hardy and it required no tweaking other than manually setting the desired graphics resolution in wtf.config.
I just copied the entire Warcraft folder from my housemates PC and launched the .exe (after installing WINE of course).
Maybe I made lucky hardware choices. I'd say there's no need for them to release a linux client though. It would require just as much Linux knowledge to get it installed as it would to get WINE installed.
garreth Jun 30th 2008 5:17PM
Moving to Linux has been one of the more rewarding things I've done. Yes, it's a hurdle. Yes, you have to relearn a lot of what you thought you new about PCs. But the freedom and the control and the security are mind boggling. Great thread here on squeezing a lot of performance out of WoW on Linux (via a secondary xserver): http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=2512086468&sid=1&pageNo=1
hpavc Jul 27th 2008 11:35AM
Dovetailing with this, do they have an in house Windows 64bit client or a SMP client?
I could see them even having a xbox client (as rumors had it), just to keep things smartly done. Even if the client was stale or a crippled proof of concept.