Gothic II Gold Classic: How to Play on Linux

This guide is meant to be used when Gothic II doesn’t work out of the box on your system, especially if your hardware is as old as mine and so your graphics card doesn’t understand Vulkan.
I’m assuming here that you already have Wine and Winetricks installed on your system. When you see “your-user-name” in a directory’s path, change it to the name you gave to your user account on you Linux system (for instance: if your login name is “mike”, put “mike” in every occurrence of “your-user-name”).

If you have not done it yet, go to Steam > Settings > Steam Play. Check the box “Enable Steam Play for all other titles”. On the drop down menu, choose the version of Proton you want to use. I’m using proton 4.11-13, it may also work with newer versions depending on your hardware (my graphics card is pretty old).

Go to your Steam Library and install Gothic II normally as you would do on a Windows computer.

Before running the game, open the directory

/home/your-user-name/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata

and keep an eye on it. There will be some directories here named with numbers only (for instance: 356788 ). These directories are generated when you run a game for the first time and the numbers are random.

With that directory opened, click to start the game through Steam. Steam will then run the game for the first time on your system, installing some dependencies as it does on Windows. It will probably crash (or I wouldn’t be writing this guide). Now the important part: you will notice a new generated directory inside “compatdata”. It will be named with a new number that wasn’t there before. This new directory is your brand new wineprefix that Steam have created for Gothic II.

Open the directory just created and inside it there will be another one named “pfx”. Open a terminal inside there, type “pwd” to see the full path (or just copy the path from your file manager), it will be something like the following:

/home/your-user-name/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/directory-number/pfx

where “directory-number” is the number-name of the directory generated when you ran the game for the first time. Copy that path to proceed to the next step.

Open a terminal. Type into it:

env WINEPREFIX=/home/your-user-name/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/directory-number/pfx winetricks directmusic

Wait the installation to finish.

Now type into the terminal the following command:

env WINEPREFIX=/home/your-user-name/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/directory-number/pfx WINEPATH=“/home/your-user-name/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Proton 4.11/dist/bin/wine64” winecfg

Change “Proton 4.11” to the version you are using. Check it out inside “…steamapps/common/” to see the correct name. For the command above, you need to type it with the quotations “”. Also, don’t forget to change the other directory names (“your-user-name” and “directory-number”) to the ones on your system. If done correctly, the “winecfg” window will pop up. It has a drop down menu called “Windows Version”, change it to “Windows XP”.

With that pop up window opened, change it to the tab called “Libraries”. Inside “Existing overrides” click the one called “*dsound (native)”, then on the right side click “Remove”. You can close the pop up window now. The picture bellow should help you, however I have already removed dsound on mine, so it doesn’t show up there. If you don’t do this step the game will probably break. Winetricks does way too many overrides when installing directmusic, dsound is unneeded, so we just remove it manually.

It is done. At this point the game should run perfectly fine. You don’t need to install any mod. The game comes with the patch to make it work on modern systems.