If you scroll to the bottom of the announcement, you'll see maps from Skyrim, Fallout: New Vegas, and Oblivion loaded into OpenMW.
Games people spend 1000 hours playing earn a level of cultural significance that deserves protection from rent-seeking publishers. Each time Bethesda announces an update to Skyrim or Fallout 4, I cringe, because what the updates do above all else is break the existing mods. OpenMW is solving this problem for older Bethesda titiles, but I am pessimistic about Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5. Those two are years away and already lost causes IMHO.
The Tamriel Rebuilt mod opens up much of mainland Morrowind for exploration (the official game covers only the island of Vvardenfell) and it is huge. It's as if they had released a Morrowind 2 but made it twice as big and still in the exact same style as the original.
* Graphics updates with shaders for improved water and fog (which you can combine with much higher view distance), godrays, HDR, etc, improved meshes, improved grass, high resolution textures with normal maps and PBR.
* Modernized UIs
* Multi-mark (extra marks as you level mysticism)
* Turn the books into audiobooks and add full voice acting if you're a mild heathen.
* Combat and leveling system overhauls if you're a full heathen.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=iFZm4VZnHy0
I had the same with Gothic, where my more powerfull computer could render Xardas' tower when standing in the old camp.
Both games partially depend on limited render distance to provide an illusion of vastness.
Morrowind can indeed be small to look at, but big to play in <3
I'd also argue that works eligible for copyright must submit a modifiable edition (eg: source code or a DRM-free copy) that is made available to archivists immediately and the general public once the copyright term expires.
The way the copyright is structured right now is the result of regulatory capture. The cost of these long terms of copyright is the loss of books, movies, music, games, etc. Millions upon millions of hours of creative labor have been lost. These costs are born by everybody that will never have to chance to have access to that media. The benefits of these long copyright terms are only the publishers. Having an annual renewal fee for copyrighted works published 30 or more years ago would be something that would be a visible cost in the books of large publishers. As it is it is too easy for them to ignore the downsides of long terms of copyright. I am not claiming that no media would be lost if we had no copyright, but the efforts of archivists are difficult enough as it is. Media that is no longer being copied is destroyed eventually. Obviously making it a felony to copy something will reduce the number of people making copies of it. That's the whole point after all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claw_(video_game)
I mean it's 2D platformer, you should be able to reverse engineer the engine and reuse the assets. I mean the have bit perfect decompiles of N64 games to C now. It's doable.
The ip itself should be 10 years after the last release before its pretty much a non-commercial free for all...with a more complex requirement for third party commercial products.
Skyrim is one of the most overrated video games ever. The combat and exploration from a 2005 game, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic was infinitely better. Skyrim was "big" and had a good soundtrack and that's about it.
If you don't believe me, see some gameplay:
Agreed. Most of the systems do not work as intended, the amount of content is very low compared to previous entries. There is no excuse for it to be released in such poor state, since Bethesda had already released two games for the same generation prior to that. And they did what they always do - ship a couple of updates and then just drop the game until the DLC is release and then promptly drop all the support. Even though there are still many bugs left in the game. They've been doing that for years, yet people still praise them for some reason. A very irresponsible developer.
Because of the lore, setting, and the openness of both (and the engine).
For a lot of ES fans (myself included), we aren't expecting an engaging game as much as a fun world sandbox set in the ES universe, with the ability to extend/mod it into whatever we want. The games are less about defined goals and more about roleplaying, exploration and world-building.
And Skyrim lacks in each aspect, especially compared to previous Elder Scrolls games. You have even less skills than in Oblivion (which in turn had even less skills than Morrowind). The dungeons (caves, forts etc.) do not offer any meaningful rewards, so there is little incentive to just randomly explore the world. The guild questlines are much shorter which doesn't help roleplaying when you can become a grandmaster in one evening of playtime. Moreover, there are randomly generated quests thrown in to pad the time, which is even worse.
But still, even with all that, their primary focus was to make a game, not a modding framework, and they miserably failed, even though by that point that had enough experience to do so.
Skyrim was good in that it felt "epic", you could put so many quality hours into it.
It's not clear to me what you're suggesting here?
1. Are you saying that the developer shouldn't be able to ship updates to their game if those upgrades break 3rd party mods?
2. Why would a game's developer's rights be restricted after they ship something based on how many people use it or how much society likes it?
Reading between the lines I think OP is suggesting backwards compatibility is retained when publishing updates.
> Why would a game's developer's rights be restricted after they ship something based on how many people use it or how much society likes it?
I'm assuming OP's answer is something along the lines of "because it's good for society". Why shouldn't society do things that are good for society, even if they increase a burden on a profit making company? Obviously every case is different but the principle is sound, IMO. Like copyright expiry. At the very least it's an interesting thought exercise.
1: For those who don't know, this is a kids book series with a single pen-name, but with each book written for-hire. Nancy Drew and Tom Swift were created by the same publisher in a similar manner.
https://www.npr.org/2009/07/24/106989048/amazons-1984-deleti...
If I ship a game and my obligations about updates change depending on how popular the game gets, that limits what games I’m willing to release.
Sorry, No Man’s Sky sold too many copies on day 1, so now we can’t ship any fixes that break backwards compatibility.
I'm struggling to understand what you mean. Almost all of our rules depend on "how the universe reacts to your actions".
To pick one of my own: defamation is something that is determined based on your actions and the state at the moment they happen. If I say something potentially defamatory about you, it’s judged based on what I knew at the time, what I said, and how it would be understood by a reasonable person at that time.
You can’t rock up later and say “well looking back at this thing you said 10 years ago, we now know it was false” or that a reasonable person today would think differently about it.
By contrast, if we made a rule saying that culturally significant games are due some set of societal protections, a game dev has no way to know if their game would meet that threshold when they release the game.
Applying different rules based on how many of a physical object a manufacturer produces is 100% something the manufacturer knows at the time they take the action.
If the regulation says "manufacturers have a higher standard for logging safety data for cars where more than 10,000 were produced", the manufacturer knows the new rule applies to them when they choose to build the 10,000th car. They can opt to do or not do that.
The equivalent here would be if we said something like: there are different regulations that apply to car manufacturers if somebody drives one of their cars for more than 10,000 miles. Because in this case, the person making the car has absolutely no clue if or when that will happen.
>Games people spend 1000 hours playing earn a level of cultural significance that deserves protection from rent-seeking publishers.
I just take this to mean that exceptionally popular things should be subject to some protections and not necessarily grant the original creators unlimited control over them. One way of doing this would be to have some regulation which forces companies to make their products accessible to modders or open source projects like OpenMW after they've reached a certain level of popularity. Using copies sold as a proxy for popularity seems reasonable to me.
Having a rule that applies to game developers after they’ve done something, entirely unrelated to anything in their control, is frankly horrifying. “Sorry, you can’t ship any more breaking changes, your game hit a popularity threshold yesterday”.
If you could pick the time to update, after you've read the patch notes and/or waited for your favourite mods to confirm compatibility/update that would solve most problems regarding updates.
I agree. Look at how many times since 2011 Bethesda has put some "new" version of Skyrim up for sale. I myself probably bought the game at least 3 separate times.
At this point, Bethesda has made their money off of it and then some, what's the harm at this point in opening it up? Give it to the community under some form of no-commercial use/sale license, as an act of public good. Outside of excess profit, there's little reason to continue to hoard IP after a certain time.
Would be nice if all offline games followed something like that, although I fear if such copyright expiry was the law we'd never see fully offline games again.
I understand OPs sentiment fully - and the response is probably "it depends" :D
Culture and Art is a volatile thing and let's assume a game and it's mods are a piece of culture and art. Then an update of the original that interrupts the original aspects is basically the destruction of art.
In olden times, in those 90s, when games were offline, you could mod to your hearts desire and nobody could take it away. And by now it's recognized as cultural heritage - even though those old games become less and less appealing to the audience that is used to better game ux (This is a bold statement by me. My generation grew up with those graphics and love them - our grandchildren will ask us why we did that like they will never understand why people used those loud noisy typewriters when you can tell your phone to write the text up)
Still - typewriters are still usable. But copyright law and online only games and forced updates really destroy that game you played 10 years ago as you cannot (legally) access it anymore. Mods can be updated but that requires recreating that art - if still possible with changed APIs.
But then game developers need to life off something and updating and improving games should always be in their right, see no mans sky and how it changed over the years to be a completely different game in a way that would not have been possible otherwise.
IMHO it would be simple to keep significant old versions available for the general public like WoW did with their Classic rollback (not sure if this is the best example) - or like system shock, there's the rewrite and there's the original and everyone can use that version they prefer without preventing the original developer from publishing and improving.
IMHO this should mostly kick in after the original developer has stopped supporting the game. E.g. what's commonly known as abandonware, such abandoned games should automatically go into the public domain, so that copyright or IP disputes can't hinder fans who want to preserve the game. The abandonware deadline needs to be much shorter than copyright deadlines. Something like 5 years after the publisher stopped 'exploiting' the IP would make sense.
Of course especially Bethesda is infamous for milking their IPs until the sun goes supernova.
This should apply to all softwares not only games. That would make portability accross operating systems easier, and allow consumers to enjoy and maintain the products they buy forever, even if the original developers do not want to support and provide updates anymore.
Unfortunately, it's a bit outdated (based on 0.47), but OpenMW devs have announced their intention to add multiplayer to upstream as well.
Additionally, one can't talk about Morrowind fan projects without mentioning Tamriel Rebuilt, a 24-year-and-counting effort to build all of Tamriel within Morrowind. It's not done yet, but it already has twice as many quests as the base game [0], massive landmasses, joinable factions and a city that's way bigger than anything the base game has to offer, all while staying lore-friendly and neatly integrated.
Times are good for Morrowind fans.
[0] https://www.tamriel-rebuilt.org/about/frequently-asked-quest...
It's remarkable what modders have done. They've breathed a lot of life into such an old game.
Don't be fooled though, even with OpenMW it still runs quite poorly at times. Any water reflections cause effectively the whole scene to be rendered twice, and it just kills the framerate. Many of the shaders like volumetric clouds can kill it too.
And if you have one of those mods that messes with waterfalls, that'll do it as well. Or if you allow the sun to get really close to the horizon all the sudden the shadows are super long causing a bunch of extra stuff to be rendered.
It needs a lot of technical work like proper occlusion culling, draw call batching, LOD, shadow culling, etc.
I'm hopeful though, it's an amazing project!
EDIT: Also dear god give me a proper UI for filtering and sorting in things like shops and (mainly) containers. It's so painful right now.
> As you may have heard, the headline feature of this release is, undeniably, the improved gamepad support introduced by our talented new contributor enoznal. By enabling the Controller Menus option in the launcher, you will be able to use the controller action buttons to navigate more conveniently through the slightly altered in-game UI. You are no longer limited to the combination of emulated mouse and A button use available previously. For example, you can brew potions and enchant items entirely without using the emulated mouse. While the alternative UI is not at all reminiscent of Morrowind’s famous official Xbox port, it should be intuitive enough for those familiar with it.
I read: I can play on my steam deck now :).
> In out-of-combat situations, Morrowind updates awareness only every so often, and characters don't have superhuman (or superelvish) reaction time while observing your… exploits
I laughed. This reminded me of playing Oblivion, carefully stealthing my way through an NPC's belongings, only to pick up 1 gold and hear "STOP! You've violated the law!".
> As the 0.49.0 release announcement boasted, running Oblivion and later Bethesda open-world engine games is in the engine’s eventual scope.
So cool! I see the demo Oblivion screenshot. I would adore playing Oblivion on a Morrowind-like engine. Both games have their merits but I always liked the more retro/polygonal charm of Morrowind.
Anecdotally i've heard some of the windows/proton versions of games have better performance than linux natives of the same game?
So theres this weird situation now where some windows native versions of games run better on linux than on windows and also run better than the linux native versions lol.
See here: https://modding-openmw.com/lists/
Daggerfall has a huge one because of how archaic it is by modern standards. Oblivion and Skyrim had mods since day 1 (in fact I think some of my favorite New Vegas mods were Oblivion mods first).
But I rarely hear about Morrowind mods. Is the consensus just that it doesn't need them?
I had the original Morrowind on Xbox and never got anywhere with it (I think I spent like 30 minutes creating my character, opened a chest in the first room in the game because apparently I wasn't supposed to do that, got beaten/arrested, and then I put the game down).
I did buy the PC version specifically for OpenMW use--because until Proton that was the only way to play it on Linux, but I've not gotten around to doing a full playthrough. I wanted to know about mods because those usually can help provide some QoL adjustments that can ease the learning curve if you didn't grow up with the game.
OpenMW is definitely the way to go for a fresh game.
There’s a lot of random advice I could give but here’s my important ones:
- Replace the vanilla leveling system.
- If you are playing a modpack with relatively vanilla mechanics, you want a magic-based character. Being bad at magic is a huge disadvantage in the vanilla game, it’s heavily biased toward glass cannons.
- Make sure you have a teleportation (mark/recall) mod. Many of them are balanced so that they don’t feel like cheating, but the vanilla game makes fast travel and traversal too tedious.
(Otherwise my favourite system comes from Daggerfall Unity, where there is a mod that lets your character automatically, in real time, follow roads until the next fork/intersection. With an option for time compression that really hits the sweet spot of being explicit travel without being tedious.)
The mods I’ve seen add a selectable list and scale out how many locations you’re allowed to save based on your associated magic skill.
So it’s both a boon to quality of life and still relatively balanced and not too overpowered.
The Morrowind modding scene is huge and was a big part of my teenage years. It's nice to see it's still going strong.
Mods to make plants either vanish or (even better) switch to a different model when they're "harvested" instead of acting like static containers is a must. And I think most consider some kind of mod to at least chill out the cliff racers a little bit to be a must-have.
My usual mod set back in the day also included some light improvements to graphics (some of the later, heavier fixes involving wrapper-binaries and such didn't exist yet, or weren't stable), NPC schedules, and an Imperial Library just outside Vivec that would pay a little gold to be allowed to copy any books you provide that it doesn't already have (it starts empty) which would then spawn neatly organized on its shelves, mostly to give me a low-effort outlet for my book hoarding tendency in those games.
Nexus Mods started as portal for Morrowind mods.
It'd be a must-have for that quality alone, even if it improved nothing else.
It is a hard work for several years.
I think that the goal or finish of this work is the engine and a new (similar to old close game) set free assets (sprites, 3D models, maps, music...). And I know few projects in this point, OpenTTD and FreeDoom.
Are there more projects in this point?
It's truly incredible what a community can achieve over the course of ~20 years of open-source contributions.