OpenMW 0.50.0 Released – open-source Morrowind reimplementation
openmw.org303 points by agluszak 4 days ago
303 points by agluszak 4 days ago
This project never fails to impress me.
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.
Not to mention the immense effort from the modding community.
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.
Also:
* 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 played it a year ago. To my surprise, in some ways, the advanced graphics broke my immersion. Standing in Vivec and expanding the render distance to Seyda Neen takes away part of the mystery.
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.
IIRC, you can adjust the fog to still be there and get the best of both worlds.
Morrowind can indeed be small to look at, but big to play in <3
one of my favorite games i've ever played is Enderal: Forgotten Stories[0], total conversion mod for Skyrim. liked it way more than Skyrim, includes some new gameplay elements and the story is absolutely phenomenal. while playing it i was constantly in awe of the fact that this was a free conversion made by a low amount of people. played it for about 90 hours over a couple of weeks.
I found Enderal so compelling that I watched a full playthrough, it's the only game I've ever done that with. I wanted to play it all the way through myself, but my PC at the time had very strange audio cracking issues with Skyrim so I wasn't able to get far.
I've felt that properties that earn a certain threshold should become public domain. You've made enough money, and now you are part of the culture. The heft of having created a cultural landmark or cornerstone ought to be enough weight to ensure their other projects get enough of a boost.
My thought has been a 20- or 30-year term, with one or two renewals at a nominal fee, would work wonders. Orphaned works basically disappear overnight, and the vast majority of works will have exhausted their useful commercial life within those 20-30 years.
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.
20 to 30 years would ensure that abandoned media that was formative to a person growing up will enter the public domain within their lifetimes which would be a nice thing to have in my opinion. It would also ensure that any work done by an artist during the early phase of their career (the phase where artists are most likely to agree to lopsided contract terms) would stand a chance of reverting back to the public domain before the end of that artist's career. Very very few works are making any significant revenue after 30 years. I think a system where initial copyright is free for 20 years, with the option of renewing for an additional 10 years for some fee, and then the option to renew annually after that would be fair. For the very small number of works that are still commercially viable after 30 years, the publishers can figure out how long it makes sense to keep renewing the copyright. Otherwise it really is in the public's best interest to have a robust public domain. Many fewer works would go missing that way.
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.
I keep hoping they'll release Cyberpunk 2077 for open development. They abandoned the RedEngine and the city is really well built.
Did they really abandon it after all that work? The engine itself was basically the only interesting part of that game! (ignoring gameplay-oriented engine stuff).
Given how lackluster most everything was (beyond the visual design of the city) — e.g. physics, crowd interaction, scripted events — maybe the engine was what held their creative vision back?
It took them nearly 2 years, but the game has advanced a lot since it's launch. The Phantom Liberty DLC plus the 2.0 update/rebalancing made it more fun (even if it made it more 'console' and less PC)
I don't agree with respect to games that are still being worked on by the dev studio, but I would like this for abandoned games, where the studio no longer exists.
Absolutely. I was just reminiscing about a '97 game called "Claw". The studio that made it shut down earlier this year and I wish I could make a sort-of remake of it, but you legally can't. It's not even clear who owns the rights to it anymore.
This Claw?
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.
I feel it should be twofold. The release itself should be 20 years, after which non-commercial things can legally happen - mods, remakes, etc
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.
The real reason to be pessimistic about elder scrolls 6 is that Bethesda has tried multiple times already to get paid modding where they take a huge chuck of the profits to stick. They will stop taking no for an answer at some point
Yep, paid modding is Bethesda cooking and eating the golden goose. As soon as it happens it kills what makes their games special.
The real red pill is to realize that everything Bethesda made starting with fallout 3 is pretty bad.
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:
> Skyrim is one of the most overrated video games ever
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.
> They've been doing that for years, yet people still praise them for some reason.
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.
> 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.
I agree with Skyrim, but at least the bones are there for the modding community which ended up doing Bethesda's work and turning it into a decent game. I didn't mind the paring down of skills as much as I hated that they butchered the magic system. But modded, it's still one of my favorite games even if doesn't beat out Morrowind as my all time favorite from the series.
Even as a framework for mods it just mostly reuses previous tools. At least Bethesda themselves could have made the script extender rather than waiting for the community to develop. It tells us that they are willing to give modders the bare minimum and expect them to make additional tools themselves, which would be fine if the base game had well functioning mechanics. But it doesn't, and some things you cannot change via modding, so we are stuck with them unless an entirely new engine is developed. But Bethesda doesn't want to do any of this, nor does it want to help the community.
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.
Or was it that Dark Messiah of Might and Magic was criminally underrated?
Skyrim was good in that it felt "epic", you could put so many quality hours into it.
> Games people spend 1000 hours playing earn a level of cultural significance that deserves protection from rent-seeking publishers.
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?
> Are you saying that the developer shouldn't be able to ship updates to their game if those upgrades break 3rd party mods?
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.
Consider books in the vein of Hardy Boys[1]. Many of these books get revised over the years by the publisher. Imagine if the book on your shelf changed and when you went to read it again, the prose differed from how you remembered. People can disagree as to the extent to which the changes are good or bad (some are clearly fixes for "whoa, that was racist even for the year it was published" others are claimed by the original authors to have stamped out the small bit of originality they were able to slip past the editors), but something is lost when you lose things the way they were originally experienced.
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.
Nobody is coming into your house to change the bits on your hard drive.
In a famous incident many years ago, Amazon "memory hole'd" a copy of 1984 from people's personal Kindles when they lost the license to sell it.
https://www.npr.org/2009/07/24/106989048/amazons-1984-deleti...
It's been a while since I gamed, but auto-update on launch was a thing even a decade ago.
But publishers can restrict your access to the game if you decline the latest update.
They can restrict your access to the server-side infrastructure that they run, yes.
Which is often required for the simple act of starting a game, even if the game runs offline.
Which in turn makes some games unable to run anything (even single-player modes).
My pitch is that it’s generally bad and dangerous for society to make rules that retroactively apply based on how the universe reacts to your action.
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.
>make rules that retroactively apply based on how the universe reacts to your action.
I'm struggling to understand what you mean. Almost all of our rules depend on "how the universe reacts to your actions".
Can you give an example?
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.
I'm not the OP nor am I advocating for their point, but I believe there are some cases, e.g. with car manufacturers, where different regulations apply depending on how many you produce. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine something similar applying to how many copies of a video game you sell.
Your example seems to agree with me?
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.
Yeah it's true that basing a regulation off of how much any one customer uses the product seems impractical, but I don't think that's necessarily what was being suggested.
>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.