Hi all,
I have a really weird issue. I've been playing "Horizon Zero Dawn" on Bottles with wine-GE. It was working fine. At one point, it stopped working and started crashing after initial loading screen, without any detail in the pop up message. I tried to reset everything but the problem kept occurring.
I reinstalled steam and then the game immediately starts working again, even though it uses Bottles, not steam. Then I remembered that I uninstalled steam shortly before the game stopped working.
Why would this be happening? Anyway to make it work without having steam installed?
I use gentoo Linux with bspwm. I also have Hyprland installed but don't use it for gaming. I have an nvidia 3060 Ti and the nvidia drivers installed. I have bottles installed through flatpak.
Most games sold on steam do a "does your account really own this" check. There is a "goldberg emulator" that I've heard deals with that, haven't tried it myself.
I don't think this should have to do with it, as I run the game outside of steam in bottles. I am running a GOG copy.
Quite a few drm-free game builds still come with "steamapi.dll". It's supposed to be neutered, but maybe it still saw dregs of your steam install and tried talking to steam anyways? It might just need a "steam_appid.txt" file (with just the appid # inside) to nicely ask it to back off. Or the game might go merrily along with removing the steam dlls.