Hi everyone! So I just switched to Linux and I am a little unsure of what to play on my laptop.
It’s a presumably decent laptop, 16gb of ram and Iris Xe, but I find that it has battery issues trying to play anything fancy like Skyrim.
I’m looking into things like emulation, finally tackling my Itch.io backlog, and bringing out old classics.
I like RPGs and text-based choose your own adventure games, so if you have any recommendations I’d appreciate it!
I’ve seen OpenMW mentioned (and it’s fantastic), but you might want to check out Daggerfall Unity as well. The game’s available at no cost, and you can find a zip of the necessary game files on the install guide in the dfworkshop forums.
It’s way better than the old DOS version, and it supports mods, too.
Alright so I was a little confused on OpenMW but it appears that it is, in fact, complete enough to play? Nice. I now finally have an excuse to play.
I completely forgot about Daggerfall existing. I’m just reading through the wikipedia article. “Daggerfall consists of 15,000 cities, towns, villages, and dungeons for the character to explore.” I am intimidated, yet intrigued.
There are a few videos on YouTube of people showing heavily modded Daggerfall, and it looks pretty great. It seems to have been embraced by a dedicated community of modders who provide full instructions of how to get it all set up how they have it.
Here’s one sample video of what people have accomplished.
Yep, OpenMW is totally playable. There’s also a multiplayer-enabled version of it around, which works surprisingly well.
Multiplayer OpenMW did everything for me that ESO’s Morrowind Expansion failed to. The dice-roll combat of Morrowind isn’t for everyone, but ESO didn’t even feel like an Elder Scrolls game to me. And with OpenMW, even the combat system is technically optional now.
I’ve completed several playthroughs of Morrowind on OpenMW, and I’ve found it to be superior to the original engine in every way. The only thing that you might have issues with is certain mods may not be compatible with it, but I don’t really use mods.
Daggerfall’s a huge game, but it gives you a ton of freedom in how you play. Once you figure out the basics, it’s a great dungeon diving experience. Although the procedurally generated dungeons aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, since they can get pretty crazy sometimes. I would highly recommend a teleportation spell (mark/recall all-in-one).
There’s a great site for OpenMW Modding here: https://modding-openmw.com/
Highly recommend this “vanilla+” modlist for a first play-through.
And some mods are easily portable to OpenMW, depending on how they’re implemented. I fixed a simple Mana Regen mod just by checking that its scripts were modifying the right variable. The mod editor built into OpenMW is as user friendly as any mod tool I’ve ever used.
I think most mods are reasonably compatible, but I don’t really use a ton. OpenMW even has graphic herbalism built in these days, so the only thing I run now is a mod to delay the Dark Brotherhood attacks. I think the main issue is mods that require the Script Extender (MWSE).
I don’t know where their feature list is anymore, buy I do recall a dev update where they said they had plans to incorporate MWSE or MWSE compatibility into the engine natively. The roadmap had that as a far-future after all native implementations were complete, so time will tell.