Battlefield 4™ (1238860)

Compatibility Report

• Name of the game with compatibility issues: Battlefield 4™
• Steam AppID of the game: 1238860

System Information

• GPU: GTX 1070
• Driver/LLVM version: NVIDIA 440.82
• Kernel version: Linux 4.15.0-106-generic x86_64
• Link to full system information report: Gist
• Proton version: 5.0.9

I confirm:

• that I haven't found an existing compatibility report for this game.
• that I have checked whether there are updates for my system available.

Symptoms

This isn't a problem specific to Linux with Proton, but rather, a problem that also exists on Windows. When you first install the game and enter a multiplayer game, after 5 minutes or so you will get kicked from the multiplayer game by PunkBuster, but there is an easy fix available for this. Other than that, the game seems to run quite well for me and I haven't really noticed any other issues.

Solution

The solution to this is fairly simple, it was originally posted by Feline Fowl on ProtonDB. I will crosspost it here so others can easily find it. The solution is as follows:

Battlefield 4 uses "PunkBuster" Anti-Cheat, however the game has an issue (also happens on Windows) where even though during the install it says everything is fine, you'll get kicked from every multiplayer match. To fix this, you'll have to manually download PunkBuster for Windows from the site, and run the EXE via Wine: https://www.evenbalance.com/pbsetup.php

I recommend putting this EXE in its own folder, as it downloads some extra files. Run it with the same prefix that Battlefield 4 uses, so run the game at least one time and then close it. Then run WINEPREFIX="/path/to/library/compatdata/1238860" wine pbsetup.exe. Select "Battlefield 4" from the dropdown, and point it to the game's install folder if it didn't find it automatically. It might take a while to download, but it'll complete and Battlefield 4 multiplayer will work!

The report names no Proton source file or test; begin by reviewing the Battlefield 4 compatibility report and reproducing the PunkBuster kick with Proton 5.0.9. Compare the documented pbsetup.exe workaround with current Proton behavior, and consider the issue complete only when the multiplayer compatibility problem has a verified repository-level resolution or a confirmed limitation.