Elder Scrolls Online (ESO) requires Wine-GE/Lutris-GE

[Arcitec]

I am just putting this information here to save time for other people.

Plain Wine, and Caffe, do not support Elder Scrolls Online. It crashes with "Unhandled page fault on read access to 0000000000000000". According to some players, it's caused by extra anticheat added to the game around November 2021.

A fix has existed in Wine-GE aka Lutris-GE since Wine-6.20-GE-1 or earlier (this is the first fixed Wine version the community pointed to but it may be actually fixed by some earlier release). That means the fix existed at/before October 2021.

The fix still exists in and works perfectly in Wine-7.1-GE-1, which is the latest Wine as of this writing.

I switched from Caffe to Wine-GE for this reason. And I am happy to announce this 7.1 version of Wine-GE seems to run perfectly in Bottles (previously I tried 7.0rc3 or so and it had a bunch of general wine errors and refused to install mono / dotnet etc). I dunno if it's stable for sure or if caffe is still needed to reliably install Dependencies etc, but I know one thing:

To run Elder Scrolls Online in Bottles, people need to use Wine-GE. There's no way with caffe/vaniglia/plain wine.

Guide:

• Extract the Wine-7.1-GE-1 runner into ~/.var/app/com.usebottles.bottles/data/bottles/runners (the Flatpak data location). Be sure that you place the inner "lutris-ge-7.1-1-x86_64" folder there. (Note: If someone uses Lutris too, place another copy of the runner in ~/.local/share/lutris/runners/wine).
• Restart Bottles.
• Configure your bottle and select that as your new runner.
• Now ESO works perfectly.

Perhaps it's possible to enable some feature/flag in Wine-TKG that would fix it too, so that Caffe could support the game, but I suspect that's way too much work to figure out since the fix could be literally any of the patches used by Wine-GE...

If I discover any issues with Wine-GE/Lutris-GE 7.1 inside Bottles, I'll post a followup comment to let people know if that runner has any issues with other games. If not, it'll be the runner I use for gaming.

---

Update: I decided to make a custom "test" bottle with lutris-ge-7.1-1 immediately, and then tried installing dotnet48 dependency in it. It seemed to work without any issues. So I think they have resolved whatever issue caused dotnet/mono errors during 7.0rc3.

I have also confirmed that lutris-ge-7.1-1 works with my other games. These tested so far, and I'm testing the Installers feature and then the app/game itself:

• Origin (via Installers): Works.
• Battlefield 5 (via Origin): Works.
• EA App (via Installers): Works.
• Elder Scrolls Online: Works.
• FFXIV (XIVLauncher): Works better than caffe/vinaglia/wine, doesn't crash instantly with a null pointer error. But it complains that it can't find DOTNET. That's a general problem in Bottles though. Regular winetricks does a much better job properly installing DOTNET. So I'll still need Lutris for FFXIV.
• Epic Games Launcher (via Installers): Works.
• Hitman 3 (via EGS): Not tested yet.

[Arcitec]

Update May 27th, 2022 with Caffe-7.9:

Unhandled exception: page fault on read access to 0x0000000000000000 in 64-bit code (0x000001420c8bee).
Register dump:

Elder Scrolls Online is unfortunately still not supported by Wine-TKG (Caffe).

I found that there's now a Wine-TKG ticket about it:

• Stil doesn't work with elder scroll online Frogging-Family/wine-tkg-git#759

Which points to this Wine ticket:

• https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51976

Where a comment seems to have found the exact patches that solve the crash, but that plain wine still has a black screen issue afterwards:

• https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51976#c12

[Arcitec]

Oh yeah I should mention something else:

I am stuck on this exact version of Wine-GE from February 14, 2022:

• https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/wine-ge-custom/releases/tag/7.2-GE-2

Because every version of wine-ge-custom after that is built in a new way. The version I link above is "Wine + Wine-Staging + Selected Proton patches". After that, GloriousEggroll unfortunately had the idea to change it into "Proton + Patches to un-Steamify it + Selected Wine/Staging patches" instead. So everything after the version I linked is a totally different codebase which is now based on Proton instead of being based on Wine.

As a result, lots of games and applications broke due to problems in Proton's code. So for me, the most compatible runner for all games and applications I use, is the exact one I just linked above. Sadly it will never receive updates. And Proton has thousands of bug tickets so chances are Proton will not really be getting fixes for the Proton-specific bugs anytime soon.

I'll live with that 7.2-GE-2 version for as long as all games still work perfectly with it... :/ :)