Anyone able to play Star Wars Battlefront 2 on Zorin

Greetings everyone,

I have a simple question: Does anyone play Star Wars Battlefront 2 (the new one) on Zorin?

I have seen that it works using Linux on other distros, but I never see anyone using it on Zorin. These last couple weeks I have been trying to get the game to work on Steam to no avail. You can see from https://www.protondb.com/app/1237950?device=pc that many people get the game working using various proton versions and other fixes, but nothing has worked for me so far.

If anyone does play Battlefront 2 could you please provide the setup you use to get it to work? I would really appreciate it.

It's only $4 right now so I'll buy it and see what I can accomplish.

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Hey, thanks! I bought it because it was that cheap too. I hope you have better luck than I did.

Worked for me with no configuration of any kind necessary. I was using Proton Hotfix. Caveats: Shader compile takes FOREVER, but you can see it working before it even launches the EA app. The game itself is... well, $4 felt like a fair price, I'll leave it at that.

Wow, OK. Thank you for letting me know. I wonder what is wrong with my system. I'll just have to keep trying stuff because clearly it can work lol.

Well, which Proton runner are you trying with it, and what's it's behavior when you try to run it?

Perhaps a .deb vs. Flatpak issue? Or video card or driver issue?

It may be playable on Xbox cloud gaming (I do own it on steam but I don't have the space or power on my Zorin Laptop to run it)

I have tried Proton Hotfix, Proton Experimental, GE Proton10-4, Proton 9.0-4, Proton 10.0-1 (beta), Proton 7.0-6, and Proton 6.3-8. Plus, I tried using different launch options people suggested on ProtonDB, but I didn't truly understand what they did.

As for the behavior of the game, I was able to download the EA app just fine, but the main error occurred when launching the game. Most of the time (sometimes other random errors happened, which I assume was from my tinkering) it would try to launch the game, but the game would not open. The EA app opens and then nothing happens. Sometimes the EA app would just go all black and, again, do nothing.

Are you referring to the what installation of Steam I have installed? I downloaded it through Flatpak. I think I read somewhere that the .deb version may work better, is that correct?

Also, I don't think my graphics card would be causing problems; I have a NVIDIA RTX 4090, so it should be able to handle the game. I also have the proper NVIDIA drivers installed and working; in all my other games the graphics card works as intended. However, I am still a little green in all this, so I could be missing something.

When you have installed steam as flatpak you should also install flatseal to grant steam permissions to system and users files.

You can install it by entering

"sudo apt install flatseal"

in terminal.

With the .deb version you don't have this problems with permissions. You can easily install it in terminal with

"sudo apt install steam"

or search for the steam installer at "software"
Please remove the flatpak version before you install the .deb version.

Play Games - Zorin Help Play Games - Zorin Help

How to manage Flatpak permissions with Flatseal https://share.google/ziKf3uHAczaUXbwl3

You may wish to check which driver version you have, as some of us have had problems with some versions and not others. I would recommend switching to the .deb version of the game, if I were you. You can save yourself some considerable time on downloads if you have a second HDD or SSD in your system by creating a new Steam library and moving all the games there (that can be done in Steam's settings, but with a flatpak version, you're going to need to use Flatseal as Forpli said above, to give the Steam Flatpak access to the drive the library will go on.

Valve doesn't actually create the flatpak, or the .deb in our repos. I'm not aware of any reason to avoid the steam .deb you can get via APT, but I personally choose to use the .deb provided by Valve. The only problem I've ever had with Valve's .deb wasn't their fault; there was an issue with the packaging of the graphics driver (which is also why I've switched to using Nvidia's installers instead of the drivers provided by Zorin/Ubuntu.)

After reading what y'all said I uninstalled my Flatpak steam and downloaded it again as the .deb through the Zorin repository. Sadly, that didn't magically fix Battlefront, however some progress might have been made. After I launch the game, it now brings up a small black EA window, and after waiting a moment it throws this error:

After looking at the EA help article, I tried disabling my VPN and that did nothing; I still get the same error. Anyone have any ideas on this error?

Your screenshot reminded me of this recent post:

Have you tried allowing that port?

No I have not. I do not have the firewall enabled, so I assume allowing the port is unnecessary. I am no expert in cybersecurity, so is it really bad to have the firewall disabled? (That should probably be its own thread, but whatever :rofl:.)

I think if your doing one solo action like playing a game

having it disabled is fine, on some distros it can come turned on by default.

However if you were gaming and doing other things at the same time it's best to have a firewall up incase of random malicious stuff.

Do search firewall and see if yours is on or not,

If it's on allow the ports through
If it's off turn it on then off again and retry before allowing the ports (could be a bug)

You can see in the "firewall configuration app" by searching in the menu and control everything via GUI

Or,

Run

Sudo ufw status

In terminal
And that will also tell you (the UI is pretty good so I'd recommend that experience)

On GnuLinux, no. Mine is disabled because it mostly gets in my way.
Is it more secure to have it enabled - yes.
But firewall is one method of hardening a system. I use other methods, instead.

Your launcher communicated this time; it failed to connect to port 3216; so if not the built in firewall, I would think VPN.
Disabling the VPN alone would not adequately test this as, depending on the VPN, some come with their own kind of firewall, built in. Disabling the VPN will not disable its built in firewall.
Other VPN's carry their own Routing Tables - which are configuration file that is present whether the VPN is active or not. They may carry DNS Overrides, also a configuration file.

As a First Test; Try fully disabling the VPN, then reboot the computer. Once booted, ensure that the VPN is still disabled (Rebooting is to ensure no modules are loaded for the VPN), then test launching Battlefront 2.

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@Aravisian Thank you for the quick explanation on the firewall. I am going to have to research it more.

As for Battlefront, after I shut down the VPN and restarted the error went away, however the game returned to its previous behavior of not launching. The EA app just says "preparing game" and then nothing happens. For testing, I enabled the VPN again, tried to launch the game, and it did the exact same thing; no error and no game.

I remember the same error popping up while I was trying to get this to work about a week ago. It similarly went away on its own and I haven't seen it again until now. Very strange.

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Hey, I haven’t played it on Zorin myself, but I’ve seen it work on other similar Linux distros. Have you tried using Proton GE or changing the Proton version in Steam? Sometimes that does the trick. Hopefully someone here has it working on Zorin and can share what they did.

Good luck!

I won't sign my life away to EA for 3.99!

One of the reasons you could be having issues, could be due to one of these listed items. Way too much snoopfest, way beyond the scope, SW games are long since dead to me.

Last SW games I played were, Jedi Academy, and Force Unleashed. 2000's era of gaming. And did you hear, EA has laid off many of their workforce, which killed the only new SW game I'd be interested in, an actual FPS game.