Borderlands 3 initially released only on the Epic Store. Later it was released on Steam and of course we wanted to see if Proton could handle it. We prefer a native port like all the other Borderlands, but until then lets play in Proton?



My daughter and I have played through all of the Borderlands games in co-op modes over LAN. They all ran almost flawlessly. In Borderlands 3 they have introduced the ShiFT account which still includes LAN play and online as always. We were not able to play over LAN so I had to purchase two copies of the game. We were able to play in Proton 5 and the game ran decent after the initial stutter of loading shader cache.

As we played there was one serious problem... a video is supposed to play during an early quest with Lilith. The video on the TV never plays and the quest is stuck. After reading several post with Windows and Linux gamers having the same problem, turns out Borderlands is using Media Foundation codecs to play in-game videos. So now we have to figure out how to install Media Foundation or aka: mf-install

How to install MF to play Borderlands 3
Note: Make sure to run Borderlands 3 at least once.... Steps may be different for your distribution...

Step 1
Install Wine Stable in your distro's Software Manager

Step 2 - Download & Run mf-install-master
https://github.com/z0z0z/mf-install

1. Download the ZIP and extract to your Desktop
2. Open Terminal
3. cd to the mf-install-master directory
4. Run the mf-install script in your Proton prefix
5. WINEPREFIX="/home/username/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/397540/pfx" ./mf-install.sh

Note: This command points to the prefix for Borderlands 3 in your home folder. You do not have to CD into this directory.

Step 3 - Download & Run mf-installcab
https://github.com/z0z0z/mf-installcab

1. Save to your Desktop
2. Use Terminal
3. CD to the mf-installcab directory
4. Run the install-mf-64.sh script in your Proton prefix
5. WINEPREFIX="/home/username/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/397540/pfx" ./install-mf-64.sh

Note: This one takes some time because it has to download two Windows updates which is about 1.5GB

Step 4 - Copy & Paste mfplatt.dll into prefix

mfplatt is located in the mf-installcab ZIP you extracted to your Desktop
Copy mfplat.dll to the games directory where the Borderlands game executable is located
/home/username/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Borderlands 3/OakGame/Binaries/Win64

Note: May have to copy mfplat.dll to the C:\Windows\System32 directory as well

Now the intro videos should play and a loading screen of Claptrap dancing. Then start over again and if the TV plays the video and proceeds during the Lilith quest... you are good!

Specs:
Mint 19.3 64-bit
GeForce GTX 1060
Nvidia 440.100
Proton 5.0-9