I tried to play GOG's version (2.0.0) of The Bard's Tale with Wine 1.4.1 (using Nvidia card with recent driver). It has the blackness issue mentioned here: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23863 and is very slow in general. Basically almost unplayable until this is fixed or some workaround is found. Did anyone manage to run it normally with Wine?

Well, someone mentioned that the bug is experienced only on nVidia cards but not on, for example, the Intel Graphics ones. Chances are it will work with the open-source drivers - but I suppose the performance will be quite disappointing this way (cannot try this myself however).

Another workaround mentioned in the bug discussion is to use SoftShader from TransGaming - if only this was a free product it would solve the problem.

PS This game is unfortunately a quite rare case of a game from GOG which doesn't run on Linux at all.

Great news! The native Linux version of the Bard's Tale is available now DRM free on the Humble Bundle. This should help avoiding this nasty Wine bug :)

Not sure this is great news since I bought it on GOG just yesterday and they still refuse to include Linux versions. However, I only bought it for the classics and I've got those running using kegs now.

I got it on GOG a while ago, but had no luck to run it on Linux with Wine. On HB it's pay more than average to get it. I don't mind supporting inXile again, because they spent time and effort to port it to Linux. But yeah, it's disappointing that GOG don't offer Linux games still. It takes them really long time to figure out the way to do it.