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.
* 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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
> 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.
> 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.
I think backwards compatibility is desirable, but really the bigger problem is the way that stores like steam essentially force auto updates.
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.
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.
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.
Again: that’s contrary to how our laws and regulations work.
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”.
> Why shouldn't society do things that are good for society, even if they increase a burden on a profit making company?
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
My opinion is that while assets could be licensed differently, proprietary licenses for code should be illegal and only code released under an osi approved open source license should be published, commercially or not.
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.
Still my all time favourite game, and the work the OpenMW team are continuing to do is incredible. Really breathing new life into an old game while remaining faithful to the original vision. I didn't even realise they are aiming to support later game engines, that is very exciting.
I recently completed a playthrough on 0.49, with the Total Overhaul pack.
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.
Thanks to OpenMW, my SteamDeck has become a "Morrowind machine" -- it runs so well and it's so convenient to have all that world with me on the go. You can use https://luxtorpeda.gitlab.io which registers as one of the runtimes Steam uses to launch games -- Proton being one of them -- and behind the scenes Luxtorpeda will download and run OpenMW instead of Morrowind.exe.
question, do you use the Linux native version of OpenMW or the Windows native version via Proton?
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.
Wow, congrats on the significant release, OpenMW team!
> 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.
"I've heard someone saved king kassimir"
"Really? Any idea who it was? I want to buy this person an ale"
"DRAGONS? in our own homeland?"
"Come on help us out here! We can't stand here all day!"
The Lua integration has grown massively over the last couple of years. Can really get up to some very cool stuff now. Its been fun to see how it contributes to a lot of the dehardcoding in the C++ codebase too.
I wish there were one click or download large mod packs to modernize the game. I find for this, new vegas, oblivion I spend two evenings getting everything to play nice/give up then run out of steam and don't actually plan anything.
There are. These days there are OpenMW-specific mod packs. You run one command to download everything, another command to install and configure it. The instructions are really good, it's hard to mess up.
So it's interesting that I never hear much about the Morrowind modding community.
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?
Morrowind has zillions, largely because the original CD version (the one with the big colour map) came with its own mod editor, used by bethesda to develop the game. I remember using it to cut down on the cliff-racer count.
Did you play a lot of Morrowind? I am shocked you haven't heard of Morrowind mods. The biggest most popular mods are Tamrield Rebuilt, which builds the mainland. There are also mods for graphics and drawing distance, new houses, a lot of mods around balmora, new guilds, new armors, ones that change how unarmored and unarmed work, how enchanting work, etc. I think Morrowind Vanilla is fine, but there are a few I like, personally I like mods that make enchanting your own items worthwhile, unarmed and unarmored are broken vanilla, and a few bug fixes mods, but I prefer a vanilla like experience.
No, I didn't! That's part of what informs my question.
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.
I would suggest playing with a modlist like Path of the Incarnate [0] - it'll give you QoL improvements, graphics improvements, quest and landmass mods all integrated into one tested setup.
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.
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.
There's a "signpost fast travel" mod that lets you teleport to any town mentioned on signposts as long as you have visited it before, while paying a small fee for an imaginary guide. That's a decent compromise, given how tricky actual real-time pathfinding can be in Morrowind.
(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.)
I started using mods in Morrowind from basically my second play-through, way back around the time it was released.
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.
Morrowind had (and still has) a huge modding scene. Especially because it's even more mod friendly as its successor.
A big plus back in the day was that the Construction Kit came with the original game disks. So you had direct access to the real dev tools. Like Unreal came with UnrealEd but with access to an Open World RPG instead of "just" a shooter.
On a related note, there's a fork of OpenMW that lets you play the game multiplayer with your friends: https://tes3mp.com/
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.
Nit/Correction; Tamriel Rebuilt is not about adding all the Tamriel but only Morrowind mainland. What you might be thinking about is Project Tamriel [0] which tries to add Cyrodill, Skyrim, High Rock and Hammerfell. They're working in collaboration with Tamriel Rebuilt so they are all compatible and share many resources.
I enjoyed openmw in 2020 with many settings and mods for super far rendering and other better graphics. I can't imagine how many improvements it must have had in those 5 years, it was already perfect then :)
It also crashes a hell of a lot less than the official binary. I did a play through a couple years ago, with plenty of mods, and saw zero crashes in tens of hours of play, which is practically unachievable with the official .exe.
It'd be a must-have for that quality alone, even if it improved nothing else.
I love this kind of free software (or open source) project.
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.
OpenRA (Command & Conquer), CorsixTH (Theme Hospital), ET: Legacy (Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory) and FreeCiv (Civilization) are the examples I have spent the most time playing. I know there are others targeting games like Age of Empires and Heroes of Might and Magic but I haven't played them and I'm not sure if they are as mature.
Oh hell no, I need those guys to give me free, good early-to-mid-game light armor. Saves me from having to think about armor at all until I can get ahold of some glass (except subbing in the odd enchanted piece).
Don't follow closely but immediately looked for and was happy to find:
> 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.
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
https://youtube.com/watch?v=9Hv-46CCd9I
https://modding-openmw.com/
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.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enderal
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?
They moved devlopment to Unreal 5
Much better
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
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:
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-p3zj0YKKYE
2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeRUHzYJwNE
> 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.
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).
I think backwards compatibility is desirable, but really the bigger problem is the way that stores like steam essentially force auto updates.
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.
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.
Again: that’s contrary to how our laws and regulations work.
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”.
> Why shouldn't society do things that are good for society, even if they increase a burden on a profit making company?
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.
> 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?
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.
Ohh, these are excellent questions!
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.
WoW classic is a really odd example, because the developer chose to ship it and made many changes to the underlying game when they did so.
My opinion is that while assets could be licensed differently, proprietary licenses for code should be illegal and only code released under an osi approved open source license should be published, commercially or not.
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.
Oh. Well that’s certainly an opinion.
Still my all time favourite game, and the work the OpenMW team are continuing to do is incredible. Really breathing new life into an old game while remaining faithful to the original vision. I didn't even realise they are aiming to support later game engines, that is very exciting.
I recently completed a playthrough on 0.49, with the Total Overhaul pack.
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.
Thanks to OpenMW, my SteamDeck has become a "Morrowind machine" -- it runs so well and it's so convenient to have all that world with me on the go. You can use https://luxtorpeda.gitlab.io which registers as one of the runtimes Steam uses to launch games -- Proton being one of them -- and behind the scenes Luxtorpeda will download and run OpenMW instead of Morrowind.exe.
question, do you use the Linux native version of OpenMW or the Windows native version via Proton?
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.
Wow, congrats on the significant release, OpenMW team!
> 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.
"I've heard someone saved king kassimir" "Really? Any idea who it was? I want to buy this person an ale" "DRAGONS? in our own homeland?" "Come on help us out here! We can't stand here all day!"
The Lua integration has grown massively over the last couple of years. Can really get up to some very cool stuff now. Its been fun to see how it contributes to a lot of the dehardcoding in the C++ codebase too.
If you have some spare time, please consider contributing! The community is really nice, I have sent a few PRs myself :)
I wish there were one click or download large mod packs to modernize the game. I find for this, new vegas, oblivion I spend two evenings getting everything to play nice/give up then run out of steam and don't actually plan anything.
There are. These days there are OpenMW-specific mod packs. You run one command to download everything, another command to install and configure it. The instructions are really good, it's hard to mess up.
See here: https://modding-openmw.com/lists/
That's helpful. I'll take a look. Thank you!
best mod: "All Khajiit are Garfield" https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/50731
So it's interesting that I never hear much about the Morrowind modding community.
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?
Morrowind has zillions, largely because the original CD version (the one with the big colour map) came with its own mod editor, used by bethesda to develop the game. I remember using it to cut down on the cliff-racer count.
Ah, so the StarCraft Map Editor approach.
Did you play a lot of Morrowind? I am shocked you haven't heard of Morrowind mods. The biggest most popular mods are Tamrield Rebuilt, which builds the mainland. There are also mods for graphics and drawing distance, new houses, a lot of mods around balmora, new guilds, new armors, ones that change how unarmored and unarmed work, how enchanting work, etc. I think Morrowind Vanilla is fine, but there are a few I like, personally I like mods that make enchanting your own items worthwhile, unarmed and unarmored are broken vanilla, and a few bug fixes mods, but I prefer a vanilla like experience.
No, I didn't! That's part of what informs my question.
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.
I would suggest playing with a modlist like Path of the Incarnate [0] - it'll give you QoL improvements, graphics improvements, quest and landmass mods all integrated into one tested setup.
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.
[0] https://www.modlists.net/docs/6poti/Home
Some nice resources here: https://modding-openmw.com/
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.
Teleportation? That would kill the hiking simulator vibe!
There's a "signpost fast travel" mod that lets you teleport to any town mentioned on signposts as long as you have visited it before, while paying a small fee for an imaginary guide. That's a decent compromise, given how tricky actual real-time pathfinding can be in Morrowind.
(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.)
I started using mods in Morrowind from basically my second play-through, way back around the time it was released.
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.
Morrowind had (and still has) a huge modding scene. Especially because it's even more mod friendly as its successor. A big plus back in the day was that the Construction Kit came with the original game disks. So you had direct access to the real dev tools. Like Unreal came with UnrealEd but with access to an Open World RPG instead of "just" a shooter.
Nexus Mods started as portal for Morrowind mods.
On a related note, there's a fork of OpenMW that lets you play the game multiplayer with your friends: https://tes3mp.com/
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...
Nit/Correction; Tamriel Rebuilt is not about adding all the Tamriel but only Morrowind mainland. What you might be thinking about is Project Tamriel [0] which tries to add Cyrodill, Skyrim, High Rock and Hammerfell. They're working in collaboration with Tamriel Rebuilt so they are all compatible and share many resources.
[0] https://www.project-tamriel.com/welcome
Why not rebuild whole morrowind and Skyrim i. daggerfall unity? Map is already there hehe
You're welcome to start your own multi-decade project heh. Seriously tho, TR is amazing.
I enjoyed openmw in 2020 with many settings and mods for super far rendering and other better graphics. I can't imagine how many improvements it must have had in those 5 years, it was already perfect then :)
It also crashes a hell of a lot less than the official binary. I did a play through a couple years ago, with plenty of mods, and saw zero crashes in tens of hours of play, which is practically unachievable with the official .exe.
It'd be a must-have for that quality alone, even if it improved nothing else.
I love this kind of free software (or open source) project.
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?
I've been enjoying and contributing patches to Beyond All Reason, which traces its inspiration back to the Total Annihilation real time strategy game.
It's truly incredible what a community can achieve over the course of ~20 years of open-source contributions.
BAR is a surprisingly good game
OpenRA (Command & Conquer), CorsixTH (Theme Hospital), ET: Legacy (Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory) and FreeCiv (Civilization) are the examples I have spent the most time playing. I know there are others targeting games like Age of Empires and Heroes of Might and Magic but I haven't played them and I'm not sure if they are as mature.
VCMI (the Heroes of Might and Magic 3 one) is amazing!
https://osgameclones.com
Also: https://freegamer.blogspot.com/
Widelands is based on/inspired by Settlers II.
There's a whole lot! Here's a list I found: https://github.com/radek-sprta/awesome-game-remakes
I want to play again so long as there's a mod to reduce the cliff racers.
I used to hear that screeching in my dreams...
There is. As well as a mod to turn off the assassins that try to kill you when you rest.
Oh hell no, I need those guys to give me free, good early-to-mid-game light armor. Saves me from having to think about armor at all until I can get ahold of some glass (except subbing in the odd enchanted piece).
farm vivec guards and sell to crab dude
OpenMW my beloved.
Don't follow closely but immediately looked for and was happy to find:
> 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 :).