Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic:
| Rating: | Silver |
| Release(s) Tested: | Steam |
| Application Version: | N/A |
| WINE/Proton Version: | GE-Proton8-1 |
| Test Scope: | Entire single-player campaign; all side quests
Mods: Items and Gameplay Mod, widescreen fix Tools: KotOR Save Editor (to fix glitches) |
| Input Method: | Keyboard & Mouse |
| Launch Options: | |
| Date of Report: | 16 June 2023 |
Summary
Playable, but with numerous graphical problems, occasional freezes, and a persistent stutter when exploring.
Installing & Running
Installs and runs out-of-box on Steam (but see issues below, especially regarding antialiasing).
Results & Issues
The game exhibited severe graphical problems with antialiasing enabled—black screens, missing textures, incorrect color palettes, and so on. The only way to resolve this was to disable antialiasing (AA) entirely within the game's settings.
However, disabling antialiasing made the game look very ugly in some places. Skyboxes already have a low resolution on both Windows and Linux; disabling AA made them especially jagged. The aliasing on many common objects (crates, storage cylinders, jars) and weapons (swords especially) was very distracting, and persisted throughout the entire game.
I was unable to get antialiasing working with third-party tools (vkBasalt, DXVK). At the time of this writing, NVIDIA drivers only support forcing AA on OpenGL games, which does not apply here.
There were several transparency issues and graphical oddities. The worst offender was the Shock Stick weapon type: the electrical effects were rendered (i.e. the sheathe), but the weapon base itself (the stick) was almost entirely invisible. Graphical oddities are not uncommon in this game even on Windows, but Linux presented far more of these issues.
The game occasionally froze, especially during startup. When skipping through movies, freezing was reduced by using the Escape key, rather than a mouse click. I could not find any means of reducing freezing during normal gameplay. The best strategy was to save often and in multiple slots (I used 8 rotating saves). Whenever a crash or freeze did occur, I never lost more than 10 minutes of progress using this method.
In general, performance in combat was smooth. However, the camera frequently stuttered when exploring, especially in low-ceiling areas (e.g. the sewers). The worst stuttering occurred when turning corners. This issue was not caused by shader compilation according to DXVK. I directly compared the same save files on both Linux and Windows, and did not observe any stuttering at all on the latter OS.
Notes
On many resolutions, KotOR may randomly minimize itself when playing movies. This occurs on both Windows and Linux. Movie playback and gameplay can be resumed by alt-tabbing back into the game, or by selecting its icon in the taskbar.
In some cases, cutscenes may not play properly if your party members are too far away. Reloading a prior save and bringing them closer before triggering the cutscene will resolve these issues. This occurs on both Windows and Linux.
During cutscenes, NPCs may not face each other when the speaker changes. This occurs on both Windows and Linux. The issue cannot be resolved, but will not break the cutscene itself.
There is a well-known bug in which the romance with Bastila gets reset near the end of the game. This bug occurs when the K_SWG_BASTILA numeric variable gets erroneously incremented from 12 to 13. This bug can be fixed by editing your save within the KotOR Save Editor, which works on Linux.
Spoiler-free fix: after you first land on the Unknown Planet, make a new save and open it with KotOR Save Editor. Browse to the numeric variable K_SWG_BASTILA. If this value is equal to 12, you don't need to do anything—the bug isn't affecting you. Otherwise, change the value to 12 and click Apply followed by Commit Changes. Load the save, and the romance should proceed normally from this point.