Heroic, an unofficial open-source game launcher for Epic Games Store titles, is improving at a very steady clip. And the newest update packs two big features timed perfectly for the upcoming Steam Deck launch in February. But Linux gamers, in general, will find a lot to enjoy in Heroic 2.1.0 “Rayleigh.”
For future Steam Deck users, the headlining feature is the ability to navigate Heroic using a gamepad. For now, it supports Xbox One, DualShock, and “a few generic” controllers. If that doesn’t meet your needs, just fire up the new virtual keyboard. One has to imagine that it will also support native Steam Deck navigation in the near future.
I’m personally appreciating the new Wine Downloader feature. After all, I’m constantly banging the Proton drum, especially the benefits of using Glorious Eggroll’s custom Proton-GE variants. Heroic’s new Wine Downloader makes it simple to download new Wine-GE and Proton-GE versions, and I love tools (such as Protonup-QT and the newly rewritten Gamebuntu) that automate that process for us!
Heroic 2.1.0 has a couple of handfuls of additional changes beyond these, including:
- Remembering window size and position
- Support for Ctrl+F (or CMD+F) shortcuts to focus the search bar
- checking Epic servers status and showing warning messages on install, update, launch, etc
- Various UI fixes and improvements
- Updating Legendary (the CLI backend that makes Heroic possible) to version 0.20.25
Heroic is available to download here, in a variety of package types for Linux, MacOS, and Windows. You can support the developers financially on Patreon or Ko-Fi.
Very Cool!