Howto Install multiple Blizzard/Battle.net Games

Heya, I am new to Lutris (basically new to Linux on the Desktop, Majaro KDE since 2 weeks or so) and while I am quite happy how good my Games are running on Linux (far better than expected) I am nevertheless looking for a more streamlined experience with four of my games, namely SC2, SC:R, WC3 and D3 - all of them are battle.net based games. I have installed D3 and SC2 one after another, and both have their own battle.net instance - which seems odd to me. Can I use them from one battle.net instance? If yes, how would be the installation done? I have yet to try WC3 and SC:R, because I want to fix this “issue” first. Any help would be appreciated.

About your experience with gaming on Linux: yay! :sunglasses:

I’m not familiar with battle.net but I’ve seen this problem with other applications under WINE (which runs the game - Lutris steers WINE, WINE launches game).

I see two routes.

Use the battle.net installer
There is an installer for battle.net on the Lutris site. I expect that you’ll get one installation and Battle.net installs everything in the WINE bottle which was created for it. If that’s the case, this route is the easiest one and you have all games in one place.

Again, not familiar with Battle.net.

Now the fun part
There are separate installers for each game. Each one creates a specific WINE bottle for that game with all optimizations for it. This probably installs Battle.net with it and thus creates all the copies.

A WINE bottle b.t.w. is the directory (or folder) where the game is installed.

When you do actually need specific WINE bottles to run the games because one game needs a winetrick which breaks another (again, I’m not familiar with the specifics) then the next solution could be an option.

A winetrick, again b.t.w., is a set of libraries which are installed to make an application work. But when other applications are running in the same bottle there is the risk that those will break.

This will require some experimentation. But that’s a game in itself. :grin:

Centralize with symbolic links
What I did in my case was to move the application which I wanted to centralize to one location and after that I created a symbolic link from the WINE bottle to that location.

The idea behind a WINE bottle is that an environment is created which is optimized to run the Windows executable. That’s the reason of all the copies of battle.net.

I would move battle.net to one location. Install every game as you did the first two, remove battle.net from those installations, create a symbolic link to the centralized battle.net directory.

This way you have one physical copy of battle.net and still have separate WINE bottles for each game. In this scenario Battle.net would probably not see every game installed. You could make symbolic links from the battle.net directory to the other games, if you know how battle.net stores installed games. Battle.net probably looks at the WINE bottles Windows drive to see what’s installed.

The command is something like this:
ln -s /home/[username]/yadiyadiyadi/here_is_my_game_directory/ /home/[username]/yadiyadiyadi/here_is_my_battlenet_centralized/

B.T.W. You are using KDE. KDE’s file manager, Dolphin, has a nice context menu to create a link via the UI. Right click in the location you want to create the link and select Create New -> Basic link to file or directory…

[battle.net bottle]
/battle.net [dir]
   /SC2 [link to SC2 bottle]

[SC2 bottle]
/battle.net [link to battle.net bottle]
/SC2 [dir]

...  

One last disclaimer: Not familiar with Battle.net.

I’m familiar with battle.net and I understand what @tfk is suggesting but I would not follow his advice. He’s right about the reasons for different “bottles”. But battle.net is a finicky thing that tends to break whenever Blizzard is updating something. It is not much overhead. Just leave it as it is, don’t fiddle with symbolic links. Especially if you are new to Linux in general.

You might install battle.net separately as a one-stop-update-shop, use the battle.net setting to locate your games instead of symbolic links, and configure the lutris game starters (right click - configure) to use the individual game executables to start the game. You will sooner or later do this when battle.net breaks (which it regularly does). In that case it’s easy to reinstall just battle.net, point it to the game directories again and update from there. That’s the setup you will most certainly end up with.

But I think the installer in https://lutris.net/games/battlenet/ doesn’t work atm. You might try it and if necessary copy the battle.net installation from one of your game installs. But that’s all bug-circumvention methods for later. For now it’s best to leave stuff as it is.

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Good advice @kaimon!

One quick note (or disclaimer). I never give people advice on what they must do. All I do is give em all information on what could be done. And I inform them of possible side affects.

When you only respond with a Don’t do it a wealth of information is lost because alternatives are not posted and readers miss out on it.

Anyway, this way I stay in line with how in Linux things are done. The Linux way means that you are the admin of your own machine. The choice on what to do is, in this case, the OPs.

And yes, your answer to not to do all of this fits perfectly within all this information because it warns of possible ill effects the previous ones can have.

So @Shihatsu the choice is yours… :+1: