As a Windows user who has played all three games in the Penumbra series a long time ago (well... two years ago), I was kind of expecting more of a reaction to the actual gameplay from the Linux world. Penumbra took a different approach to the traditional style of first person games and decided that giving you a fighting chance was way less fun than just making you wonder if you're alone in the dark or not. Penumbra: Overture allows some meager defensive tactics, such as swinging a hammer or saw in order to... fend off whatever might be interested in you. The second game, Penumbra: Black Plague, is the shining pinnacle of this development. No defense, no weapons, nothing that protects you from the mysteries in the dark. You can run, but you certainly can't hide very well (the panic system ensures this). The puzzles are challenging and require thought, but not in the "adventure-game-click-everywhere-until-you-don't-die-and-then-reload" style ala late 80s/early 90s Sierra games. Most of the puzzles are logical ones - there's a hole in the wall and you're hearing odd noises, and the lights are flickering. It's probably going to be a good idea if you can block whatever is in the hole - look around and find a crate or a box you can push to block it. Unfortunately, Penumbra: Requiem took a step back in storyline and atmosphere and focused almost entirely on physics puzzles, sacrificing what Black Plague had as an excellent compromise for the sake of making something a bit different. I hope more game companies, Linux, Mac, or Windows, adopt newer styles of meeting a genre such as this game.

All of these problems sounds like they fixed the easy issues. They didn't tackle the horrible network code / load distribution that they're using. There's the way WoW does it, which is throw everyone on the big server and have a bunch of child servers to handle PvP combat and things like that based on locality. There's the way WAR does it, which is "oh look funny lag" where you subdivide into lots of little servers (each of which handles a separate area) plus a separate connection for things like chat. Then there's the bloody awful solution that Age of Conan does, which is to just drop people on a given server based on the order in which they logged in. Then have each server handle a subset of the characters running through the world. When a player on Server A wants to interact with a player on Server B in the same zone, you have a problem. If they can't fix that, all of these bandaids and content updates can't solve the fundamental issues.