Baldur's Gate 3 Gets Native Linux Build

In a surprising development, Larian Studios announced last week that their hugely successful Baldur's Gate 3 now has a native Linux build. The build, targeted primarily toward Steam Deck and portable users is nonetheless available for all Linux users.

Since releasing in August 2023, Baldur's Gate 3 catapulted developer Larian Studios, previously known almost exclusively for their Divinity series of games, to stardom. Boasting almost 700,000 reviews at an "Overwhelmingly Positive" level on Steam, the game last reported over 15 million sales at the end of the last year.

Larian previously considered releasing a large scale DLC for the game, but eventually abandoned these plans to begin work in earnest on their next (non-Baldur's Gate) game. So it's perhaps surprising that Larian have released a native Linux build for the game over two years after release.

The initial release of the build lead to a little confusion within the community, as despite it being configured for both Steam Deck and Linux, attempting to download it on Linux desktop caused an empty download. This caused the game to be unplayable unless players manually changed the compatibility settings to Proton, forcing Steam to download the Windows version.

These issues appear to now be fixed, and the native build is now playable both on Linux and Steam Deck, though Larian have stated that the build is only officially supported on the Deck. In their announcement post, they also state that the removal of the overhead caused by the Proton compability layer should make "running the game natively on the Steam Deck requires less CPU usage and memory consumption overall!"

The game should be fully compatible with existing mods, where players are logged into their Larian account and connected to mod.io.

Anecdotal evidence from the community so far shows some mixed results, with some players reporting higher high FPS, but lower lows as well. It's likely there will be some optimisation to come in future hotfix releases now the build is in the wild.

It's fantastic to see just a big, successful game come to native Linux. And it's undoubtedly in good company, joining such games as Tomb Raider (2013), Cities: Skylines and Stardew Valley.

It's also a welcome contrast to some major publisher's like EA and Rockstar actively excluding Linux gamers through the use of kernel-level anticheat solutions (even ones that can work on Linux, in Rockstar's case).