Kotz
Published
Installation gets stuck
It perpetually loads on "Running Install script ()".
The audio was completely absent for the Native version.
The Proton version did not have that issue.
The Native version had no audio for me. Multiplayer was also removed by the developers due to reasons outside their power.
The Proton version has none of these issues, so I recommend playing on this version instead.
- Right-click the game > Properties > Compatibility > Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool
- I picked Proton Experimental, but it should work on stable releases as well.
Works out of the box
The game works as intended. I didn't encounter any issues during gameplay.
PROTON_USE_WINED3D=1 gamemoderun %command%
- Install the game on Steam
- Install Protontricks
- Run Protontricks, select Catherine Classic
- Select the default wineprefix
- Install a Windows DLL or component
- Select a package named
mf(MS Media Foundation), press Ok, wait for it to install
- Download the Winetricks verb file from here: https://gist.github.com/Neodamode/22871fae8020a87a6cd816ccac405358/raw/83f1c56add0adbcff9d116b2a51a157da7bcc954/mf_catherine.verb
- In your terminal, execute the following command in the same folder as the verb file:
protontricks --no-bwrap 893180 mf_catherine.verb
- The game should now be functional
- If you don't execute the game with the launch options specified on this review, the anime cutscenes are going to stutter in a way you would never imagine was possible.
- The in-game cutscenes sometimes have a blur effect that is not removed at the moment they are supposed to and will last for the duration of the entire cutscene. Disabling blur in the settings does not fix this issue.
- Sometimes, during in-game cutscenes, character meshes will slightly break, leading to a massive polygon that protudes from their face.
If you try to play the game without any thinkering, you'll get stuck after attempting to start a new game. Apparently, the game requires Microsoft Media Foundation to play the anime cutscenes. If it's not present, the game simply softlocks while attempting to play the cutscene.
You can completely resolve the issue by doing the Protontricks workaround described in this review. After that, the game should work as intended and the cutscenes should not be stuttery. You may still see some graphical glitches here and there, but nothing that hinders gameplay.
Works as expected
The game works perfectly out of the box. There is no graphical degradation, performance is great, online multiplayer works, and there is no input lag. The content from Steam Workshop also works flawlessly.
By default, the game runs at 20 FPS. However, if you configure the following in-game settings, the issue should go away:
- In Display, set Vertical Sync to Disabled.
- In Graphics, set:
- Texture Size to Half.
- Shadow Resolution to Medium.
- In Advanced Graphics, set Max Render Queue Frames to the maximum value possible.
This should be enough to get the game to a playable FPS rate. Custom launch options should not be necessary.
You should also consider disabling Motion Blur Amount in Display entirely. While I'm not the kind of person who tends to have an issue with motion blur, the way and intensity they have implemented it in this game have made it into an incredibly dizzying effect. I don't know who thought that applying intense motion blur everytime the player moves the camera was a good idea, but I'm glad this feature can be completely removed from the game.
Multiplayer works just as well as on Windows.
The game will leak memory and eventually fail to load textures and crash if you're using Steam's default version of Proton. You can avoid this issue by using Proton-GE instead. I've used version 7-36, but any version past 7-32 should theoretically work.
If you don't know how to do that, the easiest way is through ProtonUp-Qt. Install it and use it to download Proton-GE for you. Then go to your Steam library, right-click GTA V and go into Properties > Compatibility, tick the box to force a specific version of Proton and pick the Proton-GE you downloaded in the drop-down list. If Proton-GE is not showing up, restart Steam and it should be there.
Requires an Xbox account, but the game works fine
The game requires an Xbox account, which is unfortunate. But once you get that setup, everything should work as expected. I played both the campaign and the Daybreak modes on singleplayer and multiplayer and had no issues.
Crashes before reaching the main menu
The game starts up and shows the publisher, developer, and advertisers logo, but crashes once it starts loading the main menu.
Single-player works fine
Ubisoft overlay can be enabled with Shift + F2, but will sometimes lock up when you try to close it, occupying half of your screen while the game is interactable in the background.
The game works as expected when playing in single-player against bots. I tried playing multi-player, but there wasn't a single soul online. I was able to create a lobby without any issues, however.
