I just got my newest box up and running and I'm thinking about getting myself an account and trying it out. I just don't want to go through it only to discover it's a hassle to make things work.
I played Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn from GOG on my Arch laptop. It actually isn't ported to Linux, it just runs natively in WINE, which was kind of a bummer to see, but it works fine, so it's no big deal. I'd actually imagine that most of the old isometric cRPGs from GOG run in WINE, but I guess I can't be sure.
Hmm. If that's the case, I might hold off. To be honest, I've never had much success with WINE. I don't know if it's me or the limitations of the boxes I run (which tend to be pretty dated if I'm being honest here). It could really go either way.
Handtuned wine wrappers made a good porting team are a whole different game than trying to get something running in wine on your own. Many mac ports are also wine wrappers or the like. I tfor example tried to get the Witches running in wine without much success on mac but the CD projekt official wrapper worked pretty well for me.
Well, it's not that the game has to be run in WINE, it's just that it installs with a standalone WINE that runs for that game only. Sort of like a wrapper that exists on its own without having to be installed into your system. It works fine for me, though. But I already owned the game on Windows before I tried it out on my laptop, so I didn't have to worry about losing money if it didn't work. If I were you, I'd just search online for a torrent of the Linux version. See if that works. And if it does, go ahead and buy the game in confidence.