Ive been playing zero-k recently, and wondering what other great open source video games are out there?
Great suggestions in this discussion! Rather than adding my favourites, I will add some resources that list more games.
- Libregamewiki: it is really comprehensive (sometimes too much, including even not-so-good-games). They care about licencing and is is very easy to browse, top-notch for me.
- Open source games: a more relaxed repository, with lots of material.
- bobeff open source list: this is curated, which means that there are not so many games but each and every one is stable, good, maintained.
- Arcane Cache: a fantastic blog with reviews of libre games — or more precisely, underground games, there is a lot of discussion on how gamedevving philosophy too. The reviews are always in-depth and allow you to experience the games on another level, and each game is a small jewel in its category. Strongly recommended!
Looks like some very useful sites there. Thank you
Some of the most polished open source games are: 0 A. D., Xonotic, Beyond All Reason, Battle for Wesnoth, Mindustry, Minetest, Thrive. These are all great games open source or not. I’m sure I’m missing a few, but these stand out to me for their completeness and polish.
I wasn’t expecting to find a new “polished” open source game I’ve never heard of from this thread, but somehow I’ve never heard of Thrive before. It’s even got a steam release!
Battle for Wesnoth is the one that comes to mind first. Turn based strategy game.
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup classical roguelike, as in actually like Rogue/nethack. Can be played with ASCII or graphical tiles, and you can play in a browser window with scoreboards and a spectator mode.
- Xonotic is a great old school, Quake style FPS with an active community
- 0 A.D. is a pretty polished historical RTS
- The Battle for Wesnoth is a classic turn based strategy
- OpenRA is an open implementation of the Red Alert engine that’s got an active community
Similar to OpenRA, OpenMW is also an open recreation of the engine for The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
Nice!
I spent so many hours on wesnoth…
That one is perhaps the most polished open source game out there.
Mindustry is a favorite of mine
I love the game, but absolutely hate the inability to freely save and load in a game where maps can last for hours.
inability to freely save and load in a game
Oof. That’s a really major downside. Bummer.
Edit: just downloaded to see for myself. You seem to be able to save and load, at least in singleplayer on pc.
I suspect I didn’t explain myself well.
If I remember correctly, you can enter and exit the campaign, and doing so saves the game. There is also a single autosave, which you can’t manually select and is there for better or worse.So in practice, one mistake or ruthless surprise can turn into a lot of wasted time. For the sake of my alopecia, I used to make regular backups to the whole folder, convenient enough using btrfs.
+1 for mindustry. Great game and works across all platforms.
Been using the android version, hadn’t updated in a while, excited to see they added another world and a lot more content it seems!
Unciv is a decent Civilization clone
OpenTTD is more a strategic game,but it’s great. OpenRCT sadly requires the graphics of the original RCT2, so it’s not really open source. But also a favorite.
OpenRCT is an incredible achievement. The mods people make add so much more content.
- osu! (The new lazer client, the old one isn’t open source)
- Veloren
Veloren is based on Cube World and it’s an RPG with server builds and everything
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, or if you like something a little less complex, Cataclysm: Bright Nights, are fantastic roguelike games. Proper traditional, turn based, tileset ones.
Imagine a mix of Fallout and The Walking Dead, that’s what it’s like. It’s superb. The possibilities are endless
Gonna try it!
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, has a really strong community behind it. Be warned, it is an intensely deep simulation (as in dwarf fortress), that is often criticized for it’s tediousness. But that gameplay element critique aside, it’s a fantastic example of a community developped game.
Highly recommend. Easier to grasp than dwarf fortress, although finding community can be a bit hard since reddit shutdown
They also took the trouble and respect to make the game multi-language, unlike dwarf fortress.
Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs got open sourced if that counts.
Holy f— really? I used to love Amnesia back in the day. This is such a strange and unexpected, but really cool news!
0AD is great. And whilst not a game really, FlightGear is the best you’ll get for a FOSS flightsim. And really, for the prices that some X-Plane/MSFS planes and other addons go for, it’s actually proper good.
Unciv if you enjoy sacrificing hours of your life :)
Are we talking about serious business civ 2 style, or something more relax like the 5th one ?
I believe it’s based on Civ4 by default but can be modded to be more like 3 or 5
Unciv is great!
Ive been playing a lot of MineClone2 which is a modpack for Minetest!
haven’t used mineclone2, but i do want to echo minetest
