Well, that depends on the game and how well/poorly it uses OpenGL, or how well/poorly it uses the documented Win32 APIs for 2D and 3D graphics. From what I understand, a lot of old games suffer from wonkiness even on modern versions of Windows, because programmers at the time, for a variety of reasons (e.g. seeking more performance optimizations, poor coding practices, etc.) used the APIs in ways they weren't meant to be used.

In other cases (like UT) the games came with OpenGL support in one form or another. For example, when it was first released UT came with an experimental unsupported OpenGL renderer.

My favorite examples of how WINE compatibility can very greatly are Descent 3, Shogo: MAD and Painkiller. All three were among the earliest batch of games I bought on GOG. Painkiller worked perfectly out of the box with no configuration necessary (and it still does even on the latest staging versions of WINE); Shogo: MAD would simply crash on startup until around the time of the Wine 1.5.x series. To this day, Descent 3 only works for me at glacial frame rates, at 640 x 480 if I use nGlide. Nothing else -- not Direct3D rendering, not OpenGL -- seems to work acceptably.

As far as I know, wine does not support dx 10 and 11 in both osx and linux right now... not because there is any gap but because right now they started to port dx 10 and 11 to wine and they need time to complete the translation.
right now apple added tesselation to metal
http://blogs.unity3d.com/2016/06/17/wwdc-unity-metal-tessellation-demo/
From what I understand before wine has completed the translation metal should be complete.... sure they will need time to translate everything from opengl to metal ... but, for now, they do not say anything on the abandonment of the project.
In any case I am not aware that there are currently 11 dx app running on linux (sure there are some experiments from crossover, but only 1-2 2D games).

it can work or work with glitch or don't work... there is no real answer to that.
for example Alan Wake work with no sound on cinematics, the witcher 3 don't work, batman arkham origins work with some glitches, many games just work.
a games is not one thing, there are many libraries used in games... some of them are 100% compatible with wine, some of them are compatible only with some wine version, some of them require a modified version of wine, some of them do not work.

Yeah, I realize I'm a shitty person to talk to about WINE beyond anything other than "It's good." I realize that my way of wording it wasn't the most accurate (because some limitations in WINE lie in how well it implements some win32 API calls, not necessarily from a lack in features in the host OS). Magmarock, please please, PLEASE talk to the people on the "Judas does this run in Wine?" thread, like Gydion or adamhm. They'll know a lot more about what you want to do with WINE, than I.


Yeah, pretty much this.

I did not mean to be rude, I'm sorry for the misunderstanding.
Anyway, currently I use linux only few times (I used it more 3 years ago), right now I use an ubuntu virtual machine only to keep myself updated with the linux world.
Right now I use Wine on OSX so I contribute more than anything else in that area (I did some port on portingteam and I adjusted the recent port of dragon age for mac steam version for the gog version).
But I know very well POL (which by the way there is an identical version for mac) and Crossover (same thing), and I understand many things about how wine works and since I'm a game developer (still at the university but I made some small games) I understand something about graphics API too... and I love to share my knowledge. Anyway I still need to learn a lots of things, that's why I like to try new thing and read post from people that know something more about a specific topic.

I'm going to answer to the "Wine or Crossover or Playonlinux" question:

I strongly suggest you to use Wine!

First of all the other 2 software are based on Wine but by using Wine you will probably learn how to use all of them, this is not the case if you use Crossover or Playonlinux.

This happens because Wine is a 'terminal only' software while the other 2 have a graphical interface.
It may sound scary but Wine is easier than someone may think.

That said I think you misunderstood a bit how things works in Wine It's very unlikely that you need to install something from your distro's repository for a game not working in Wine, especially when using distros like Linux Mint that comes with a lot of libraries installed by default.

Mind that the first time that you use Wine it creates an empty Window$-like environment (PREFIX), just think about a fresh win7 installation, so it may happen that you won't get a software to work by installing it there.

For example if you install a game that requires Physics but the installer doesn't come with it you may encounter problems unless you install the required software in that Wine prefix, the same case happens in Window$ if Physics isn't installed.

Plus beign offline leaves you without the capability to get that software from the internet or to get useful info on how to tweak your game to solve some issues and get the max out of it (again same story when using Window$).

Steam does a great job on a fresh Wine prefix by installing the missing requirements for the game to launch, but sometimes it's not enough and you may need something else (like Physics i.e.)

To easily solve this issue Winetricks is used, it has a list with fonts and libraries and other stuff, once you select what you need it automatically download form the net and install what selected to the selected WINEPREFIX.
I guess you can locally download the "most requested" libraries (such as direcx9, vcrun, etc) to easily access them offline if a game needs a fix.
An alternative is to manually download and install every single library that you may need, but Winetricks is there to do this for you.

Mind that all this downloading and installing libraries has nothing to do with your distro's repository!

That said I strongly recommend to check the Wine applications database and see what's the dependencies that you may need before going offline.
Would be even better if you install and try the game when online, you can run different installers at the same time, and it's better to have a single WINEPREFIX per game, at least when you try them.

This to prevent that you break a game by installing libraries or tweaking the prefix to get another game on the same prefix to work.

For example, let's suppose that you want to install 3 GOG games, once you downloaded the installers you can launch them at the same time on 3 different prefixes by typing on 3 different terminals (ctrl+alt+t):

WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=~/.game1 wine ~/Downloads/game1installer.exe

WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=~/.game3 wine ~/Downloads/game3installer.exe

WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=~/.game3 wine ~/Downloads/game3installer.exe /nogui

These commands will create 3 different 32bit wineprefixes on your home folder (the . make them hidden) and launch the 3 installers, the /nogui option prevent the GOG installer to crash.

Play on Linux let you do all these operations with a graphical interface, plus it's easier to manage different Wine versions and there are some scripts that install a game and dependencies for you, you just have to point the path to the installer.
Anyway some of these scripts are a bit old and may install and use a very old Wine version, i never used them TBH..

That being said you probably need a newer version of Wine than the one offered by the Ubuntu/Mint repository, they may be a bit old; it's rare that a game that was running on a old Wine doesn't run on a newer version, so you should get the latest version.

I hope this was helpful, if not I or other users are here help out, Wine is one of the best software for Linux and it's getting better and better

You can also check pcgamingwiki.com, there you will find a lot of tips and every game has link to the Wine app database (see the screenshot)

ps. if you have an AMD card you can boost the performances by using a Gallium Nine patched Wine, you can check the performance difference on my blog where sometimes I put some screenshots comparing Wine vs Staging vs Gallium Nine

like I said there are some new testing dx 11 test... but there is not full support right now (like dx 9 games).

the first news that I saw about dx 11 and wine support was here:
https://www.codeweavers.com/about/blogs/caron/2015/12/10/directx-11-really-james-didnt-lie
I think Wine will be at a good point when they manage to run 3D games (both wine and crossover team work on that, that why I'm optimistic) .

Wine is CLI only? Last time I checked it had an interface. When it comes to installing Wine offline or rather getting a protbale version of it. You need to use commands such as "sudo apt-get install wine -d" then "sudo cp -r archives/*.deb /location/here" to get all the files you need for a portable installation. I do wish I didn't have to use commands to do it but that's the only way I know of to make it work.

Oh no, don't worry about it, I didn't take it as rudeness at all. I really am a shitty person to talk about for WINE, because (a) I'm not a developer, and (b) my knowledge about its inner workings is only cursory at best. I did write the "Crossing Over" series for Inside Mac Games, but I've learned a lot more about the inner workings of WINE since then, and I know I still have a lot left to learn.
Well, AFAIK, WINE doesn't have a standard GUI interface out of the box, not if you don't count what are effectively third-party GUIs for WINE, like Wine Bottler, Wineskin or PlayOnMac on OS X, or PlayOnLinux.

If 2D DirectX 11 games have a chance of working, does that mean it might be worth giving Shantae and the Pirate's Curse another try? (Of course, I would have to play Risky's Revenge first.)

https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=33544
I don't know... maybe.

"Wine Version 1.9.6"
"D3D11
by Furude Rika on Monday March 28th 2016, 18:10
D3D11 appears to be the issue. I've attempted to use several different versions of d3d11.dll, but none appear to work."

since right now wine is 1.9.14 you can try.

Yes Wine is CLI only, but it's very easy to use once you understand how it works.
Perhaps you used PlayOnLinux the last time you checked??

Do you have 2 or more computers? of which just one goes online?
if not I see no need to "download only" Wine instead of installing it

If you can explain your situation more and what you specifically need I can help you further