Steam

On Steam you can use protontricks to install wine dependencies. Depending on how you install it, it is either called as protontricks or as flatpak run com.github.Matoking.protontricks in the case of a flatpak install. The latter is recommended on Steam Decks. You can, of course, create a shell alias to make typing the command less cumbersome.

Install DLLs

To install a dependency into a specific wine prefix you need the Steam ID of the game. For Gothic this is 65540 for Gothic II it’s 39510. You can now do

  protontricks 39510 directmusic

to, for example, install directmusic to the Gothic II wine prefix.

DLL Overrides

To add DLL overrides the most reliable method I found is to manually edit the user.reg config file sitting in ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata/$STEAM_ID/pfx/user.reg. You look for the section called [Software\Wine\DllOverrides] and edit the following lines according to your needs. To Add a new override you add, e.g.

  "ddraw"="native,builtin"

Of course you need to adapt the values to your needs. To disable an existing override simply delete the corresponding line. Don’t forget to save the file!

Installing Mods

Installing mods is, in principle, quite straightforward. You open up the Steam Workshop page for the relevant game, look for mods you want to install and hit “Subscribe”. Done. The biggest caveat is, in my opinion, that the Steam Workshop does not contain all available mods (not by a long shot) and also not necessarily the most current versions of the ones that do exist there, since it simply is not the source of truth for Gothic mods.

Once you’ve done this you need to go to “Properties” on the game, then “Betas” and then select the Steam Workshop Beta. This will enable a launcher where you can select the order in which mods are loaded, the language of the mod (if applicable) and more.

The biggest issue by far I had with going through Steam is that when I installed mods on top of the vanilla game (especially the D3D11 renderer and conversion mods) I consistently ended up with framerates of 15-20. I have not yet figured out why, if you have an idea, please reach out!

Of course it should be possible to install mods by manually copying the relevant files in place or executing executables in the respective Proton (i.e. Wine) prefixes but this is somewhat more cumbersome.