Baldur's Gate 3

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Baldur’s Gate 3 is a story-rich, party-based RPG set in the universe of Dungeons & Dragons, where your choices shape a tale of fellowship and betrayal, survival and sacrifice, and the lure of absolute power. (Website)

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(SOLVED!) Please help with Running Baldur's Gate 3 on linux (Debian) (self.baldurs_gate_3)

submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by Jozzo to c/baldurs_gate_3

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EDIT: The issue was caused by my SSD being formatted in exFAT, which doesn't support symlinks. I backed up my SSD & reformatted it to btrfs, and then I could install .NET without hassle & the game runs!

Original Post:

I'm having an issue running this game on linux, every time I click play in Steam I get the following popup:

"you must install .NET desktop runtime to run this application"

Clicking "yes" takes me to download a Windows .exe which of course can't run on linux. I manually installed the .NET runtime following linux instructions here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/install/linux-debian but the game still gives me this error.

Other things I've tried:

Reinstalling BG3
Completely deleting every file from steamapps/common for BG3 & reinstalling
Reinstalling Proton
Skipping the launcher
Tried with proton experimental, 9, 8, 7

My launch args are STEAM_COMPAT_DATA_PATH=/home/user/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata gamemoderun %command% --skip-launcher

On protondb everybody else seems to be running the game fine, but I don't understand how to get past this error.

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[–] Jozzo 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I think you've just pointed me in the direction of a solution...

The comment you're referring to seems to be this one:

mv Launcher Launcherbak
ln -s bin Launcher
ln -s ./bin/bg3_dx11.exe ./bin/LariLauncher.exe
cp ./Launcherbak/*.dll ./bin

creating a symlink to trick steam into thinking it's running the launcher when it actually runs the game. BUT ... my SSD is formatted as exFAT, which doesn't support symlinks, so I can't do this.

So I'm guessing proton is trying to create a symlink at pfx/dosdevices/c when it installs .NET, but fails, which is also probably why everyone else seems to have a breezy time with it. Not sure why my other games haven't run into this though... maybe they haven't needed to install anything there?

I will report back after reformatting my entire SSD lol

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

That symlink approach is one way to run the game executable directly, but it's a little heavy handed, and likely to be reverted whenever the game gets updates or you verify the game files.

Sometimes you can put something like /path/to/game/executable.exe %command% in the Steam launch options to accomplish the same thing without symlinks. I suggest reading more of those comments to see if anyone had success with this approach.

It might still be a good idea to replace exFAT, though. Symlinks are often useful. :)

[–] Jozzo 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Reporting back!

Reformatted with btrfs, steam now does this when I open the game (didn't before):

anddd it works! Can't believe this whole headache was just exfat all along lol!

Thank you for your help :D

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

Hooray!

Have fun on the Sword Coast!