I was aiming to come back to this game at some point to finish up the story and maybe write a proper review, but unfortunately Ubisoft has forced my hand.
I just received an email today that tells me they are ramping up anticheat measures, and so, very soon, 'FOR HONOR' will no longer be available to Linux users.
So for that reason alone: I don't recommend this game.
Now, onto my conspiracy theory.
In this same email, they also shill something called 'Xbox Cloud Gaming'. Here is the full paragraph:
"This means that For Honor will no longer be playable natively on Steam Deck starting September 10. We will keep looking into ways to improve anti-cheating on Linux with the possibility of reopening the platform in the future and in the meantime, we would like to invite you to benefit from cross-progression and join the fight on cloud gaming services like the Xbox Cloud Gaming which runs natively on Steam Deck."
I don't know if you've noticed, but I have noticed a trend personally in the past year or two of random ass games, specifically popular multiplayer games made in the west, games that have not used anticheat or haven't had a reason to use anticheat, etc, so on, suddenly making the decision to go all-in on kernel-level anticheat.
Actually, speaking of which - I wonder if that's what they're planning to implement, since anticheat measures such as EAC and I believe also at least some versions of BattleEye, do actually work on Linux. There's other anticheat solutions as well that work, it's not just those.
Anyway, my conspiracy theory is this, that Microsoft is paying off these publishers, and asking them to implement anticheat into their games, in an effort to help curtail the growing Linux userbase.
The thing that kept most people off of Linux for a very long time, is games. One of the things that built Windows in fact, was games, this is way back in the day. So Microsoft has to be at least partially aware of this thing.
So with the advent of games, like the Battlefield series for example - huge series, very popular - suddenly incorporating kernel-level anticheat plus TPM, Trusted Computing, what have you, I suspect Microsoft is like trying their best to stop a wider Linux adoption by targeting the bigger multiplayer games. Mass appeal video games that, they hope, will kill the Steam Deck and Linux dead.
This is just a conspiracy theory, of course, but it just feels too strange to me that so many games... I mean, look at Battlefield 1, that game is like a decade old now but very recently, in the past year or two, they suddenly added anticheat to it, preventing it from running on Linux computers.
