How to Play Guild Wars 2 on Linux with Steam

Hey, what’s up?

Today, I wanted to share how you can play Guild Wars 2 on Linux with Steam.

ARENA.NET DOESN’T SUPPORT LINUX

Unfortunately, as of right now, Arena.net, the company that does Guild Wars 2, doesn’t seem to be supporting Linux users. It only has a version for Windows. It doesn’t even have a Mac version, which I find surprising.

Fortunately for us, there is a way to play the game through Steam with the help of Proton and some tinkering.

STEAM & PROTON

Firstly, Guild Wars 2 is available on Steam, you might want to add to your library and install it.

Once this is done, we’ll need to enable Proton in the Steam settings.

To do so, go to your Steam settings ⇾ Compatibility. Check both “Enable Steam Play for supported titles” and Enable Steam Play for all other titles”.

You might need to restart Steam to make to apply the changes. Restart it and come back to make sure that you’re running other titles with Proton. I would recommend using the latest version if possible. In my case, I’m using Proton Experimental, but do whatever works for you.

Proton is basically a compatibility tool that allow us to run and play games that would normally only run on Windows. Save and close.

TINKERING LAUNCH OPTIONS

The last need that we need to do is to make sure that we can connect to our Arena.net account. Since we are using Steam, Guild Wars 2 is going to use by default some sort of Steam account.

If that’s good for you, then don’t change anything. But overall, I think it’s probably best to avoid Third-Party accounts whenever possible because by using a Steam account to play Guild Wars 2, all your progress is now linked to Steam.

In my case, I have an Arena.Net account with all progress on it, so I obviously want to use that. To do so, we need to do some tinkering. Right-click the game in your Steam library and select “properties…”. Copy and paste this into the launch options.

-provider Portal

Once this is done, we should be able to launch the game and connect to your Arena.Net account.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, as of right now, Arena.Net doesn’t seem to support Linux users. Thankfully, we can play Guild Wars 2 through Steam with Proton and some tinkering.

That being said, I haven’t played much so far, but it seems a little buggy.

Hopefully, this guide helped you to reach that goal while making more sense.

So that’s pretty much it, I hope this was helpful to you. If this blog was valuable to you, you could consider following me on social media and if you have any thoughts or comments, you can leave them below.

I hope this helps, peace!