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!
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.
Yep, OpenMW is totally playable. There’s also a multiplayer-enabled version of it around, which works surprisingly well.
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.
There are a few videos on YouTube of people showing heavily modded Daggerfall, and it looks pretty great. It does seem to have been embraced by a dedication 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.