The biggest problem is anti cheat software. As soon as they figure that out it’ll get a lot higher!
>The developer or Rust has already confirmed that on his devkit EAC was working as expected on the Steam Deck with SteamOS – while it will apparently require some modifications from the devs themselves to make it work (not as seamless as Proton itself).
SteamDeck, even if it doesn't break any sale records should still be enough to prove the viability of a gaming console PC that doesn't need Windows.
Doesn't "figure it out" likely mean rather invasive and user hostile kernel module(s) to prevent cheating? Because the alternative is that Linux becomes the preferred OS for cheaters and the game makers redouble their efforts to detect it; Valve's interests in promoting Linux are not necessarily aligned with studios' interests in promoting a cheater free experience.
Reminds me of a company I worked for as a junior dev, not gaming related, where our bread and butter application was hopelessly full of crash bugs, to the point where you couldn't even run it for more than an hour or so continuously without it crashing. Instead of investing in the effort needed to fix the crashers, they instructed me to create a separate "launcher" application that stays resident, waiting for the application to crash, and then re-launching it saving as much state as possible. It felt bonkers to me but I guess it made sense to somebody.
Obviously, the installer tries to install and start PB then errors out quite spectacularly, as one might imagine such a program to do in a wine prefix, but then you can just download the PB executable and run it in the wine prefix post-install no problem. Origin plays surprisingly nicely, too, though it generates a total of six windows that you can't close during play or it freaks out. There is some additional fuckery required; Wine's networking needs a bit of massaging to allow BF4 to advertise its ping to multiplayer servers, and you'll get kicked if you've got a ping of "-". [0]
Thing is, though, Proton is Wine-and-allied-trades. In the fullness of time I suspect new BF4 players won't have to jump through these hoops as Proton generally, and its script for BF4 specifically, gets updated. And others are already racing ahead, too, borrowing from and providing for Valve's fork of it. GloriousEggroll, recommended for BF4 [1], is the most robust varietal currently.
Multiplayer in a general sense is going to be a little bit more difficult to enable than merely waiting for updates, IMO. I'm not savvy enough to properly understand the arguments, but I've read that the translation layers for graphics, DXVK et al, could easily be repurposed by clever enough end-users to eg wallhack by making textures transparent, etc
As sibling comments point out, resistance on the part of the devs (or publishers?) to simply enable the Linux support that already exists is probably the biggest hurdle.
But CE never worked for me on Linux, quitting immediately. Maybe I'll give in another try when I have a chance to play.
Sometimes you get games that have a fully feature dev console and you can do it all in-game, but that's sadly much rarer these days.
Or I do it to fight boring grinding, because at my age I don't have time for such meaningless activities