Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Technical & Gameplay Problems [BUG] BG III fails to launch in Steam on Linux

Using Steam on an Ubuntu 20.04.1 based system, Baldur's Gate III tries to launch but fails.

Installed game, on GNU+Linux, tried to launch it: fail
Opened properties, set to Force Proton 5.09: fail
Opened properties, set to Force Steam Linux runtime: fail
Closed and relaunched Steam, set to Proton 5:09 again, huge download starts again, attempt to launch: fails


Baldur's Gate III currently does not run on GNU+Linux.

I am awaiting Divine Intervention on this. I hope somebody else has success somehow and lets us know.

It works for me now by starting from the commandline, avoiding the launcher!

What I did so far:

Attempt to start the game in steam. This will install everything you need in the compatdata directory.
Open a terminal
> export STEAM_COMPAT_DATA_PATH=<STEAM_LIBRARY_DIR>/SteamLibrary/steamapps/compatdata/1086940/
> <STEAM_LIBRARY_DIR>/SteamLibrary/steamapps/common/Proton\ 5.0/proton run /<STEAM_LIBRARY_DIR>/steamapps/common/Baldurs\ Gate\ 3/bin/bg3.exe

Once the game starts I had to change the graphics settings to windowed for the game not to crash my PC.
Haven't tried much yet, I chose a default character and skipped the videos, but the videos do seem to run.

JohnW, thanks for this. It did not solve my problem directly, but definitely put me on the right trail.

First off, I was running an older version of Proton. So I brought it up to version 5. Secondly, Wine complained that it could not find the proper FreeType font library -- not a deal breaker. The interesting bit for me was that in the background, crashpad issued a "File not found error" and puked up a distinctly MS-esque error in a "DEVICE LOST" window stemming from Vulcan (unrecoverable Vulcan error). I finally got the game to launch by forcing the BG3 executable to evaluate an invalid argument (-x)

The invalid argument also gave the 'device lost error' but in addition noted the improper optional parameter and offered me the option of cancelling the launch of the game (which went ahead and launched in the background anyway). Cancelling out of those errors terminates the game. Leaving the error boxes up allows the game to continue to the opening screen.

Weird. I will have to find a better way to trace what is going on under the covers, but in the meantime I think I will see how far I can get the game to go.

Again, thank you for taking the time to post.

Happy to help! I know how frustrating it is to want to play the game when it's not possible to do so.

I just finished my first hour of playing and I am very happy with the way it runs! It seems like once it starts there are no further problems.

In the mean time, by now there are much more people who have found a way to run the game, if you don't know it yet, protonDB has a lot of tricks to get this to run: https://www.protondb.com/app/1086940

Good information. I played an hour into the opening dungeon (the ship) and nothing crashed or went wonky. I wrote a quick BG3EA duct tape script to invoke the game this way until this particular debug story makes its way out of backlog. Hopefully Larian is getting good some good telemetry from all this. Game is slick so far.

This was an aggravating problem for me, but I got the game to run properly by creating a huge (20G) swap space, lowering the graphics quality to low on all settings, and adding " --skip-launcher " to the properties manager in steam.This game isn't playable without a large SSD, I suspect this won't work with a motorized HDD.