shmerl: Well, I once tried to conduct a community Q&A about engine work of TW3, and collected quite a lot of questions from different people. We presented it to CDPR, and even some people inside there tried to connect me with Balázs Török. At first it went well, but then got halted, and they said they can't help with that. In the end I wasn't able to even reach him at all, let alone get any answers about engine and such.
And it looks like
Tomasz Jonarski has left CDPR recently. He lists Vulkan as his expertise. No idea if they have any Vulkan developers left in the company. His new company is called "True Rebels". I wonder if it's a hint that CDPR isn't viewed as rebels anymore because of the above drift that I mentioned? Looking forward to more news on that.
That's what I'd like to see as well, and a lot of people communicated this point to CDPR
multiple times. But since their engine developers are impossible to reach, no one knows what views they have on this.
From what I understand Feral does terrible ports. I'd rather personally see it done fully and properly by CDPR themselves directly than a crappy port, or not at all. A crappy port will just result in unsatisfied customers complaining that they should have done XYZ instead and probably low sales and bad reviews. Since the company's internal manifesto is that they want to be "the next Rockstar" so to speak, then they're more likely to make decisions like Rockstar would regarding quality etc. I doubt they'd offload a port to a 3rd party and give up control of their baby, while being seen as responsible and taking the blame for any flaws that might result. I think they're smarter than that and would rather have nothing than something half-assed. That's how I perceive the company anyway. :)
In fact, even if it took them 10 or more years to make a "10 year anniversary edition" or something, I'd rather wait it out and get something awesome than something rushed and lame just to make a buck and satiate the impatient (and fail).
shmerl: It's better to bet on Wine, not on Feral and CDPR at this point. We know Wine developers are working on DX11 support. What can't be said about CDPR being interested in keeping their original plans to release TW3 for Linux.
I agree, Wine is probably the best bet going forward barring some public announcement from CDPR. I think we all ultimately know that any announcement or sudden product offering that is shown to be offloaded to a 3rd party is going to be met with a massive amount of scepticism by gamers and probably fail to deliver what people expect. Furthermore, it would most likely be a one-off and never get many if any bug fix updates, so if anything was broken it would likely remain broken. Then there are things like the Redkit mods et al as well to contend with. When 3rd parties do game ports they're often focused purely on the game, and no port of the game editor, map editor, mod tools or other stuff done, leaving the game only a partial solution.