I'm attempting to play Mabinogi by Nexon on Linux Mint 20 (Ulyana) using Lutris. I've previously used Lutris to play Heroes of the Storm but otherwise don't have much experience with it (or with gaming on Linux, in general). There's no installer on the Lutris website for Mabinogi like there was for Heroes of the Storm, so I was on my own to try and figure everything out.
I started by downloading the Nexon Launcher Installer from their website. I configured Lutris to launch this executable using Wine within a simulated Windows environment. When it first launched I noticed several files were created ("drive_c", "Program Files", "Users", etc -- mimicking a Windows file system). The launcher installer ran without issue and I installed the launcher to "C:\Program Files (x86)\Nexon"
I then re-configured Lutris to try and launch the Nexon Launcher instead of the Nexon Launcher Installer. When I hit "Play" in Lutris, nothing happened. Running ps -ax | grep "Nexon" showed that it was theoretically running, but there was no window or visible UI even after several minutes of waiting. I checked the Lutris logs and noticed a message about a file missing (something like "10000.manifest.hash"). I Google'd this error and found plenty of people in Windows who had trouble running the Nexon Launcher with the same error, and the solution was to just install Mabinogi through Steam.
So next I downloaded the "Wine Steam" runner in Lutris and set this as the runner for Mabinogi, plugging in the app ID (212200). After Steam installed, launched, logged in, and downloaded Mabinogi I tried to launch the game. This time I saw a window pop up saying "Mabinogi is launching" and in the bottom-right the Nexon Game Security icon popped up, but then everything closed and the game never started.
Finally out of desperation I tried setting up a virtual computer using VirtualBox to play the game in its native Windows environment. I installed Windows 7 (the minimum required version according to the Nexon website). I downloaded Mabinogi through Steam on the virtual box. Upon trying to launch Mabinogi, I received the error error: "api-ms-win-crt-runtime-l1-1-0.dll is missing". I'm curious if this error is related to why I couldn't get Mabinogi working in Lutris.
Looking at a game that I had previously played in Lutris (Heroes of the Storm), I noticed a very similar DLL was listed in the "DLL overrides" section: "api-ms-win-crt-private-l1-1-0.dll". So I tried adding the runtime DLL to the overrides in Mabinogi with the same value ("n,b") - but this didn't work.
Looking at the Lutris logs when I try to launch Mabinogi through Wine Steam, there are several errors from \main\game-launch.js:109. I'm not sure if this JS script is part of Lutris of part of the Nexon Launcher, but it could provide some hints. Among the logs the following lines stand out as potentially meaningful:
...
ERROR: ld.so: object '/usr/$LIB/libgamemodeauto.so.0' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded (cannot open shared object file): ignored.
...
fixme:d3d12_get_vk_physical_device: Could not find Vulkan physical device for DXGI adapter.
fixme:d3d12_device_caps_init_feature_options1: TotalLaneCount = 2560, may be inaccurate.
...
warn: OpenVR: Failed to locate module
...
I'm not familiar with using Wine and I've never written a Lutris installer. Up until now I've only ever run Linux binaries on Linux and Windows binaries on Windows. So there's a lot I don't understand, like: What's Vulkan? What's DXVK? How do "override DLLs" work? Do I need to provide alternative DLLs for anything I want to override? What does the value "n,b" mean in the DLL override?
I'm welcome to any help
After a lot of work and research, I've gotten as far as I can and figured out where the major road block lies. The simple answer is: You cannot run Mabinogi in Lutris
Mabinogi uses an anti-cheat system that runs in kernel mode (ring 0). Wine runs in user mode (ring 3) and therefore cannot run this anti-cheat program.
The only solution is to play Mabinogi within a virtual machine (e.g. VirtualBox), since VMs run on a hypervisor (which from my understanding is kind of like a "negative" ring number, but effectively ring 0)
If you want to try some other Nexon games, I got the Nexon Launcher working in Lutris / Wine fairly easily. The trick was to download the latest Nexon Launcher since the older one (linked on the Mabinogi website) isn't sending a valid request to download the manifest file so it gets a 403. The latest launcher can be downloaded here: https://games.nexon.net/nexonlauncher