Looking to play an awesome open-world MMO on your open-source machine? Well you most certianly can play Guild Wars 2 on Linux!

Here are my system specs. Note that I did not have to install or configure any special graphics drivers. If you have an Nvidea or AMD/Radeon graphics card, you may want to set up those 3rd party drivers before attempting this.

Step 1: Get and install Wine

IMPORTANT: Remove any previous Wine install, including any package of which the old Wine is a dependency. Since I was starting with a clean Mint install, I did not have anything to un-install.

Once Wine has been fully removed from your system, run these commands.

I used the official Wine install instructions, available here: https://wiki.winehq.org/Ubuntu but I have also duplicated them below for convenience.

# If your system is 64-bit, like mine, enable 32-bit architecture
sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386

# Add Wine repository key
wget -nc https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/Release.key
sudo apt-key add Release.key

# Add Wine repository
# On Linux Mint 18.x, use this line. It is different for Mint 17.x.
sudo apt-add-repository 'deb https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/ xenial main'

# Update your packages list
sudo apt-get update

# Install Stable branch of Wine
sudo apt-get install --install-recommends winehq-stable

Step 2: Get and install Guild Wars 2

• Download the Guild Wars 2 Windows installer (“Gw2Setup(-64).exe”) from the ArenaNet website. If you don’t have an account yet, you’ll want to create one there on the website as well.
• Run installer with Wine (e.g. wine64 "~/Downloads/Gw2Setup-64.exe")
• Follow the installer’s instructions.

If you’ve already downloaded and installed GW2 on another machine, you can save time by using that large (~35GB) data file from the old install, in the new installation. Otherwise, the client will download this file for you.

• After the game is installed and starts downloading packages (shown above), close it.
• From the old/existing install find the Gw2.dat file (again, normally about 35GB). You’ll find this in the GW2 install directory, such as “C:/Program Files/Guild Wars 2/".
• Copy that file into the new install directory, right next to the “Gw2-64.exe” file. If there is an existing Gw2.dat file which is rather small, copy over (replace) it with our larger one. It was the file being downloaded before we closed the application.
• Now launch GW2 (e.g. wine64 "/home/username/bin/Guild Wars 2/Gw2-64.exe"). After a few moments, and possibly downloading any updates, it should open to the login screen!

This is all I had to do to get started. However, you can improve performance a little bit by turning off debugging messages in wine. I made a launch script to do this for me.

#!/bin/bash

# https://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/319.32/README/openglenvvariables.html
#export LD_PRELOAD="libpthread.so.0 libGL.so.1";
#export __GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATIONS=1;

# Disable all Wine debug output, both to the terminal and to any log files
# https://wiki.winehq.org/Debug_Channels
export WINEDEBUG=-all;
export LOGFILE=/dev/null;

# GW2 Client cmdline args are documented here:
# https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Command_line_arguments
# "-dx9single" is common for Wine
# I find "-mapLoadInfo" to be kind of nice as well.
wine64 "/home/username/bin/Guild Wars 2/Gw2-64.exe" -dx9single -mapLoadInfo

From here, it’s up to you to try out settings that may or may not improve performance on your system. I don’t have a gaming setup at all. Heck, the embedded graphics in my CPU uses shared RAM even. Even so, I get a solid 30 FPS. This is about 10 FPS less than running GW2 on Windows on the same machine. I find the game very playable nonetheless.

You may find lots of helpful info on the Guild Wars 2 Wiki pages.

• https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Guild_Wars_2_on_Wine

I hope this was useful! Feel free to let me know in the comments if I missed something.

Cheers!