Excerpt from the dev’s website (very bottom of the page):

This game is a work of NON-FICTION. Any similarity to actual agencies, policies or ethnic groups of the PRC in this game is INTENTIONAL.

Oh, TIL - I’ll have to try that, thank you!

Setting a high refresh rate is somewhat of a given, but won’t negate anything which VRR helps with - screen tearing. If you’re always playing with VSync on and getting constant frame rates, that’s not an issue, but that’s also far from the usual experience.

Yes, I’ve been bothered by VRR flicker on my OLED monitor (LG 27GR95QE) since I started actively gaming on it with my Linux build a couple months ago, it was never an issue with consoles for me.
I’m on KDE FWIW, and the flicker is more pronounced during games with mouse cursor on screen afaict. I can’t compare to Windows.
I think VRR flicker is less of an issue when running games within a gamescope session, but it’s not ideal either.

Is it still actively maintained? It’s also not working on Wayland fwiw.

LACT works just fine with my RTX 3080.

You can refer to list of games with HDR support.
As far as HDR in native Linux games, recent changes won’t help, but you should be able to get that working with a couple env vars.

To be fair, Heroic already use their GitHub repo to track issues.
I agree with you that Discord shouldn’t even part of the equation to begin with, but it’s become so prevalent everywhere that I imagine it’s hard for devs to fully bypass.

I found this Proton issue specifically mentioning issues with Death Stranding: Director’s Cut.
FWIW, Death Stranding (non Director’s Cut) doesn’t support the DualSense either way AFAIK.

That sounds encouraging, thanks!
I’m not concerned about coil while, since I’d also be playing with headphones on, but that’s noted.
I read about recent developments wrt FSR4, it sounds like that’s potentially close to functional indeed.
RT performance is a downside, however AFAIK that’s par for the course with AMD on Linux?

I’m somewhat torn between getting a 9070 XT now, or getting a cheaper, used GPU while the experience and/or drivers get ironed out. My only real worry is GPU prices going up as a result of US tariffs, so I’m leaning towards 9070 XT rather than the alternative .

Thanks for your write-up!
About a month later, would you say the experience has gotten better? Did you encounter any issues?
I’m able to get a 9070 XT close to MSRP ($949 CAD + 12% tax), but I’ve seen conflicting reviews regarding current performance (or crashes) on Linux, so I’m not 100% sure this would be an ideal choice.

Rated playable even before any release date was announced, interesting.