Running Warcraft III on Linux under Wayland is possible! Step by step guide inside.

[yodeller]

My apologies if this is being posted in the wrong section, but I've checked them and the general Warcraft Discussion tab seemed the most appropriate. If this is not the case please let me know where this is more appropriate to be posted.

Hey everyone! Much like the title says: if you're a Linux player, or you found your way here from a google search, and were wondering whether or not you could play Warcraft III on Linux this is the right place.

This guide presumes that the user has some basic understandings of Linux.

First of all, if you're running a DE with X11 as display manager you're good to go with Lutris out of the box! No need to tinker with anything, it just works. I tested it with a previous installation of Manjaro XFCE, and everything works out of the box, even custom maps and custom campaigns.

If, like me, you made the switch to Wayland you also can play Warcraft III! With a bit more work, but you absolutely can!
(I have yet to try to install custom maps and custom campaigns so forgive me but I can't say it for sure, I will try to set them up later down the week as I get some free time)

1. Install Battle.net via Lutris by clicking install in this page. A small pop up window will ask you to complete this action with the Lutris installed in your system, click yes.
2. If Lutris is already running a pop up window with the install process for Battle.net will ask you to proceed, otherwise Lutris will start running with said pop up. Advance in the installation process.
3. I installed mine in a Games folder that's inside my ~/home, that way I have full access to it without going around .config or .local, I suggest to do the same for easy access later.
4. At some point the install process will proceed as normal, prompting the install language, whether to start battle.net on boot and so on.
5. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO LOG IN WHEN THE LOGIN WINDOW APPEARS DURING INSTALL. The Install window will also remind you this, do not attempt to log in. You will log in once the installation is done. Close down the Log In window.
6. Wait until the installation process is finished and only then do log in.
7. That's it! Battle.net is installed. Go ahead and install Warcraft III. You're free to try to run it in Lutris, but I've tried for a day and a half and had no luck running it in Lutris with Wine or Proton.
8. Now, open up Steam and under Games click Add a non steam product.
9. Go ahead and look for your Warcraft III launcher.exe and select it. This is usually in /home/$USER/Games/battlenet/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/Warcraft III/ if you installed everything in the Games folder I mentioned earlier.
10. Once Warcraft III launcher.exe appears in your steam library right click and open up Properties.
11. On the left click Compatibility, check Force the use of a specific Compatibility tool.
12. Now, here you're pretty much free to test with whatever layer you'd like, as of right now I've only attempted to run with Proton Experimental and had luck on my very first attempt.
13. GG! You'll get a window saying that the agent is being updated. After that you'll get a log in prompt for Battle.net, probably, and then you should be right in the Warcraft III tab of Battle.net. Start the game and you're good to go!

Why all of this just to run a game that's supposed to run "natively"? Because the battle.net agent under wayland has numerous issues running. If you try to run Warcraft III with Lutris, with wine staging as a runner the game will start, but you'll be hit by a black screen after the initial loading. Trying to run it through Proton-GE fails completely, as the battle.net agent refuses to start. I tried to manually stop the process through Mission Control, but there was no way whatsoever to make the Agent start.
I decided to test my luck by running it directly inside Steam, since its proton implementation is out of the box, and it works!

As of right now my free time is limited, I kind of used it all up just to try and run wc3 lol. I intend to do more tests with custom maps and custom campaigns, as well as other Proton layers to see if there are more ways to run the game.

Feel free to add your tips in the comments! I made this guide cause in these past two days I found little to no help online, and had to rely to chatgpt to troubleshoot errors and get some guidance. Hopefully this will help more people who are struggling to make this game run on Linux under wayland.

I'll to do my best to keep up with this post if people need help with setting it up, but please be patient! I'm approaching the final leg of my university journey and I'll probably be buried in books.

Happy gaming!

 

[Gismo359]

Here is my experience:

There are two installation scripts in lutris - one that reuses the same prefix as battle.net (and most other battle.net games) and one that creates another prefix specifically for Warcraft II Reforged (+ wc3champions)

The first one doesn't work out of the box, I always get a black screen when starting the game.

The second one works, but the first time I had to start it through the editor (via Test Map). After that, it runs normally with the exception that the UI is not fullscreen (I'm on 4k, so perhaps that's the reason) and the UI lags quite a bit. In game it doesn't lag as long as you switch from fullscreen to windowed fullscreen (or vice versa) which fixes the game not covering the whole screen. This doubled my FPS.

The main drawback of using the second installation is that it creates a second prefix and second installation of battle.net. I don't want having two for no reason, plus battle.net somehow confuses lutris and doesn't turn off properly sometimes.

I managed to install WC3R alongside the other BNET games by doing this:

• I used the Proton (Experimental) runner for both installation (via lutris settings) and for running the game (via game configuration settings)
  • GE-Proton (latest) can also run the game just fine, probably fine for installing it as well
  • If the login button never appears and/or you have a console appearing and disappearing constantly at the login screen, try switching to another runner
• Install WC3R + W3Champtions (from the second install script in lutris), following the instructions
  • Make sure the game is playable (if needed open through the editor)
• Start installing the game through the battle.net launcher in shared prefix
• Wait until it start downloading and stop the launcher (you don't need to wait for that)
• Select battle.net in lutris and from the bottom menu (next to Play) click on Open Bash terminal
  
  • In that terminal type in winetricks arial to install the Arial font (not sure if required, but wc3champions install script does it)
• After that you can copy your WC3R folder from the Wc3 champions prefix to the shared one (replacing if needed)
  • By default, this would be from ~/Games/battlenet/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/Warcraft III/ to ~/Games/battlenet/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/Warcraft III/
• You might have to start it through the editor for the first time again (through Test Map)
  • Afterwards, you should be able to start it normally and you should see a few more benefits:
    • Game properly starts in fullscreen even for 4k (most of the time)
    • Game UI is not laggy at all

 

[Gismo359]

I also found this repo which people might find useful: GitHub - clemenscodes/W3ChampionsOnLinux: A guide to install W3Champions on Linux

 

[yodeller]

The first one doesn't work out of the box, I always get a black screen when starting the game.

This unfortunately happened to me as well, hence why I went the Steam route, as per point 7 of my guide. I'm 99% sure it's a wayland issue, cause last year I was on xfce4 under x11, and I installed battle.net through lutris just fine, with wc3 running flawlessly under lutris.

The second one works, but the first time I had to start it through the editor (via Test Map). After that, it runs normally with the exception that the UI is not fullscreen (I'm on 4k, so perhaps that's the reason) and the UI lags quite a bit. In game it doesn't lag as long as you switch from fullscreen to windowed fullscreen (or vice versa) which fixes the game not covering the whole screen. This doubled my FPS.

I haven't tried this one, actually didn't even know it existed and will give it a shot when I can spare some free time. Unfortunately that's lacking as of right now lol

The main drawback of using the second installation is that it creates a second prefix and second installation of battle.net. I don't want having two for no reason, plus battle.net somehow confuses lutris and doesn't turn off properly sometimes.

This happens to me as well but it's not just a battle.net thing on lutris, it happens to a lot more games that I have installed through lutris, and it's probably an issue on how the runner opens up said applications. I usually have the log window open on a second monitor to see what's happening, and if I don't see it closing down that reminds me I'll have to close it down manually. Annoying, yes, but it works.

As per your guide, I'm glad you managed to get it running! You also got it to run at 4k, which is quite the feat I'm sure. Even windows struggles sometimes with games in 4k.

As for WC3Champions, I don't play ladder so I actually never took into consideration that people may want to install that as well, and I'm genuinely glad you got it to run. Hopefully, much like you stumbled upon this post, others that want to play this game under wayland will.


Happy gaming friend!

I also found this repo which people might find useful: GitHub - clemenscodes/W3ChampionsOnLinux: A guide to install W3Champions on Linux

Very nice find!! I'm pretty sure I can get this to work through Steam as well, but goddamn it I need time to test it. Hopefully in August I'll be able to cause this seems really well written and explained

 

[Gismo359]

This unfortunately happened to me as well, hence why I went the Steam route, as per point 7 of my guide. I'm 99% sure it's a wayland issue, cause last year I was on xfce4 under x11, and I installed battle.net through lutris just fine, with wc3 running flawlessly under lutris.

It's more of a wine + Chrome Embedded Framework issue and CEF is used for the Reforged UI. I had the same issue with Guild Wars 2 (CEF is used exclusively in the trading post UI for some reason). From what I could find, CEF is one of those things that breaks with both CEF versions and wine versions, so there's a bit of luck to that.

You also got it to run at 4k, which is quite the feat I'm sure.

A note on this: you must have fractional scaling disabled (at least on Gnome), otherwise lutris games get confused and don't see the proper resolution in their settings (the higher the scaling, the lower the resolution they see). This isn't specific to Wc3.

Afaik, you can use Gamescope to have the best of both worlds, but I couldn't get it to work, so I'm leaving that to the future me.