I still remember installing the sims 3 on wine. This was before proton, before the sims 4. I started by looking the game up on winehq - the results were not promising. The rating was not exactly garbage, but still runs with problems. Some brave soul had come up with installation instructions though.

So I try to install the game using those instructions. Took me about 40 minutes of installing things like ms c++ runtimes. Then when I tried to run the game? Crash. Doesn’t work. So I went back to WineHQ and found another instruction (luckily there were multiple ppl that made the game work)

After following it for another hour, the game still didnt work. After googling the error for some time im pretty sure I just downloaded some random dll that was missing from runtimes and put it with the game. Voila, the game ran! Laggy, but playable. Took only about 3 hours of research and tinkering.

Today? I’m pretty sure I can just download the game and it will run, just like that, no config required.