Just curious 🙂
- Super Street Fighter 2
- Street Fighter 3
- Starcraft: Brood War
- Warcraft 3
- Age of Empires 2
- Age of Mythology
- Grand Theft Auto 3/VC/SA
- Sim City 2000
- Counter-Strike 1.6
- Apex Legends
Balatro
AoE2 Expansion.
Woukd really like to see FOSS gaming community around that as well.Factorio
SSBM Melee, straight clone.
Not a player of the SSB games. But I would love a straight clone of Double Dash keeping the specific physics of things and simple kart choices like they had. The love of the way things worked and feel for that are on par with how SSDM fans love that game!
For real, a Double Dash remake would go so hard.
This may be an unpopular opinion, but I’ve been preaching to friends for years that FOSS versions of Starbound and/or Terraria would be a big hit.
I’d love to see a foss terraria.
Why though? It’s $10 and so moddable. The devs are great and so is the community, what’s there to gain by making a ripoff?
I think I misread the post. I would like stardew to become open source so the game can be ported to modern systems in the future if the dev ever stops supporting it.
I’d really love to see a polished version of Quake 3 as open source. I know Nexuiz exists, but it’d be nice to see some work done to make it look nicer and more visually consistent. I find aesthetics tend to be the weak spot for FOSS games in general.
FOSS Quake 3 alternatives are plentiful
Yes… to be honest I feel old-school deathmatch arena shooters is the one genre where the FOSS world has actually already taken over what can be found in the proprietary world.
Most of the industry has moved on to some variation of hero-based abilities and/or some form of “mission” objective to try and add more tactical elements that essentially make it no longer the same play-style. Even the faster paced franchises like the modern Doom Eternal have given up on old-school deathmatch.
As I said, in terms of engine and gameplay they’re fine, but the aesthetic polish is lacking in my opinion.
Shadow President/CyberJudas. I know that it’s an extremely unknown series, but I would kill for a spiritual successor that doesn’t need dosbox. I’d also love to be able to play as other nations.
A president simulator? This sounds great! Never heard about these games, thanks for sharing!
The Sims.
It will never happen but one can dream
Same! There are almost no proprietary alternatives either!
It’s funny that the first comment is about The Sims 😅 My wife and I are working on a life simulation game in Rust using Bevy. I’ve been working on it for almost a year, and feeling a we are feeling a bit demotivated recently. So right now I took a small “break” and focus on improving crates that I used inside the game (input management and networking). I know the project is quite ambitious, but I’ve always wanted to create something like this. Seeing this many upvotes on your comment is quite encouraging 🙂
I post my progress at [email protected] and here is the GitHub page. The project name is a placeholder. I haven’t managed to come up with a nice name yet.
There are actually a few projects doing exactly that, at least for the early entries;
- FreeSO - Open-source version of The Sims: Online but with a bunch of modern improvements, main server shut down at the end of last year
- Simitone - Single-player interface for FreeSO
- FreeSims - Open-source engine for The Sims
- OpenTS2 - Open-source implementation of The Sims 2 engine in Unity
Development pace for them is somewhat slow due apparent lack of interest - and a healthy dose of fear of EA interference - though.
Those are more like engine reimplementations rather than alternatives, which explains the fear of EA interference.
It’s a pity so many open source games go in that direction. I honestly wouldn’t mind even if the graphics were ugly placeholders or it took a minecraft-style pixelated approach.
EA are pretty smart here to kill any community interest in developing a free clone, by letting their end users mod the main game very easily.
Hard to compete with that
Stardew valley and kind of in topic. I’d like to see an mmo that is federated.
A federated MMO would be interesting! But cheating might be a concern. Anyone could create a server with fully-equipped character and just federate.
But maybe servers could whitelist trusted servers? 🤔
If you actually do mean “MMO” and not traditional “MMORPG”, then there are skill-based games that would not necessarily depend on “fully-equipped characters” and could be made to be “Massively Multiplayer Online”.
You could have an MMO puzzle game where each federated server can host puzzles that other players have to solve… and where players can create their own puzzles for others to solve (something in the spirit of “the Castle Doctrine” game, for example, but with fixed gold for everyone).
A federated mmo could only work if there are no significant attributes/stats to keep track of, or if said attributes are only accepted from bubbles/whitelisted servers. In the end, it’d be something like Opensimulator, which is a FOSS Second Life of sorts.
I’m curious what you think making SD FOSS would add. Imo, it’s a standout example of a game that hits way above it’s weight class and price point, and a dev that just won’t stop adding content.
It’s more about longevity. If it’s open source, the game could be ported to modern systems in the future if the dev stopped updating it.
It would also allow for bigger mods, but the dev has really worked with mods already so maybe not too big of a change.
IMO all software would be better if FOSS, regardless of the virtues of the developers. That’s why I would love if the games that I love to play were to be FOSS as that would make them even better in my eyes.
Do you mind elaborating on the benefits of FOSS for games? I see the benefits of FOSS for software, but not so much for games.
For me, this has more to do with public ownership of folklore and cultural goods, and how something being in the public domain gives complete freedom for it to step beyond just being a specific single piece of art, to become a rich ecosystem/universe of ideas.
Let’s say I wanted to make a mario-like platformer / some-other-game in a different engine with characters and creatures from terraria, with a campaign mode, fully happening in a world that’s just terraria’s world and use the same art & characters you’ll find on the original game… well, you can’t straight away rip the assets, or even reference them too much in a way that’s obvious it’s a derived work if you don’t want to step into some legally tricky waters.
Compare this to public domain universes like greek or norse mythology, fantastically idealized historical periods and many fairy tales and legends from around the world, that have been a source for ideas during centuries and even today we make use of that folklore and remix it in new ways to further contribute to our culture.
Videogames are now pieces of culture in a similar way as those old universes are. If they are tied to companies, then this makes the companies own pieces of culture and it stops further developments of the mythology behind the collective stories that could be created.
Even if the company were to be ok with the assets/universe being ripped for other games/ideas, to what extent would they allow it? no serious project would wanna take the risk of possibly having the company one day pull the plug. And if the company doesn’t really have the intention of pulling the plug: why not formalize their good intentions with an open license?
Not op, but:
Many games aren’t profitable to port to older or less relevant hardware and community porting efforts often takes years to properly disassemble and reassemble to work on new platforms. FOSS is easier to access and port to different hardware.
Expanded mod support. Mods are great but they always have limits and there are often certain parts of a game that either cannot (due to tech) or may not (due to developer wishes) be modified. FOSS games wouldn’t have this limitation.
The ability for the community to own FOSS and forks in the event that a company buys the rights to a game and either closes off access or stops supporting certain versions of it.
Likewise your access to a FOSS game cannot be revoked my a marketplace. If a game is for some reason pulled you’re not guaranteed continued unending access to it. The marketplace in question holds all the cards.
FOSS games may also continue to be updated, improved, and worked on after the original dev loses interest or is no longer around. Stardew is well maintained right now, but what about in 15 years when hardware is very different and the dev has stopped updating it?
I can see the upside for some of those. Thanks for expansive response.
I fail to see what makes games any different from other software. The piece of software can be easily studied and tinkered with, users have the power to control what exactly runs on their machine, and the software can organically be improved by people making their changes in their own derivations of that software that they make available for the whole world to use, study, reproduce, and modify.
Furthermore, if the developer dies, the game being FOSS will guarantee that it will live on and continue to benefit future generations.
I see. Thanks for the reponse!
Kerbal Space Program 2
This is my choice as well. After how much of a disaster KSP2 was, it should be turned over to the public for ownership and control.
It can’t be worth very much as IP anymore, as they’ve killed all the goodwill the brand had. So the least they could do is give back to the community.
KSA (kitten space agency) might be the next thing
They ended up selling the KSP brand to some random investment company
Thanks I hate it. Can’t wait for KSP 3 to be any even more of a disaster.
To be fair, it doesn’t have to literally be KSP2. It just needs to be a Kerbal-like space exploration game with an engine not subject to the various problems KSP has.
Agreed.
- KSP like exploration
- No wiggly rockets
- Better scaling
- Performant
That’s all it really needs to be. And that’s a giant oversimplification, and still a massive ask. But if an open source game had those 4 things, it would put KSP2 an additional 6 feet under, putting it at 18.
I’ve had my eye on Juno New Horizons. They’d probably not go open source, but they look like they know what they’re doing. I might be giving that one a try at some point.
Trackmania. It’s one of my favourite games from my childhood but it being Ubisoft destroyed the whole thing for me. First the version I was playing didn’t really work anymore and i got the version after. Then somehow i had license troubles, so switched to trackmania forever which has a horrendous main menu design and now the new cool shit and activity is all on the newest version which has a subscription model and it automatically connects to a Ubisoft Account I don’t have access to. I think because i have Linux it automatically skips their launcher so i can’t switch accounts. Also I dislike Ubisoft in general and the new one is the first time I noticed it even being a Ubisoft Game. Sorry for the rant
Skyrim and the Sims. Both are pretty much mod platforms anyway.
Sims
No promises, but I actually working on one 😅 See this comment.
Something like Tetris Effect: Connected, Breakout: Recharged or Space Invaders Extreme. Oldschool classic games, but made with fancy new bells and whistles.
Phasmophobia & other multiplayer horror games of sorts (eg. ghost watchers, Labyrinthine, Pacify, devour, etc). I don’t think there’s any multiplayer horror game like any of those in the open source world.
I searched and I think there was at least one attempt at the idea (openphobia), but I don’t think it ever had a playable release before it was abandoned.
