Beyond Divinity

What works

Played the game completely on Linux all the way to its conclusion.  It was quite stable with almost no crashes.  Speech, music, graphical effects, just about everything worked.  All of the crashes I experienced were bugs encountered even on Windows, so WINE did a great job of keeping things faithful there too!  I put about 65 hours into this game and completed every quest and battlefield dungeon.  One quest in Act 4 will corrupt your save if you complete it, but once again this is a known issue with the digital versions of the game even on Windows.

What does not

Transition videos between acts don't play.  I actually didn't know about this until I came to here to post my results and read another user's experience.  Sure enough, they're located in the Static directory.  You can just play them manually.  Like the previous game, the videos are in a low 640x480 resolution it appears.  Maybe 800x600.  Fortunately, they do NOT crash the game now.  They just don't play.

I loaded up the post-game content briefly and it crashed when I stepped through a portal.  I didn't bother troubleshooting or attempting again as I had played enough of the game and I didn't really want to deal with anymore battlefields as they were fairly boring affairs.

Workarounds

You have to use a 32-bit WINE prefix.  Installing the game with a 64-bit prefix gives you graphics that look like you're playing the game in Windows Safe Mode.  Not only that, but it crashes almost immediately.  In addition to installing with a 32-bit prefix, I used winetricks to install the corefonts and tacoma, d3dx9 and gdiplus.  I set the environment to Windows XP and video RAM to 2048.  I also played it in a virtual desktop, but that may not have been necessary as I was able to load the game without that as well.

What was not tested

Post-game battlefields.  As mentioned before, it crashed when I tried to load a battlefield, but I was quite finished with the game by then anyway.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU: Nvidia
• Driver: proprietary

Additional Comments

Overall I'd say it works great on Linux, but you have to follow my advice above in Workarounds to get it going.  Technically the version offered by GOG now is 1.506 according to the game screen.  They also say it does NOT work on Windows 10 or 11, so maybe us Linux users can play something that they can't now.  :)