I love when fans keep an old game alive. OpenTTD, OpenRA, OpenMoHAA and friends are the obvious ones.
A recent one I came across is OpenZ, a free 3D fan remake of Z, the 1996 Bitmap Brothers RTS with no resources at all, just flags and territory. The Zod Engine did the 2D version years ago, so it’s nice to see that odd little game still has people caring about it.
What other projects like this should more people know about?
(OpenZ is on itch, Game Jolt and GitHub, for anyone curious: https://github.com/playopenz/OpenZ)
Not official clones, and I haven’t tried them but they look good:
BAR is one of the best rts games ever.
I got into BAR for a little bit, and while I think the game itself is fantastic, I stopped because of the game’s community. If you don’t already know the meta, and how to effectively play a multiplayer RTS, you just get harassed out of lobbies that are titled as being for noobs. I’m just waiting for the single-player content they are supposed to be releasing on steam, so I can play that.
Yeah that is fair, I agree the community can be really impatient and toxic, it is a fucking shame.
I’ve played both and they’re both great. BAR is extremely good, and wz2100 preserves a unique entry in the genre
wz2100 is a great example. It still feels like nothing else in the genre.
I used to spend way too much time on Freeciv.
I wish there was some kind of open-source Total War.
Freeciv was a serious time sink. An open-source Total War would be something, though I can’t imagine the amount of work.
Basically age of empires
Panzer General with lots of campaigns and quite deep gameplay, also runs in browser and on mobile
https://rayfowler.itch.io/remnants-of-the-precursors
Master of Orion fan remake
Xonotic doesn’t really count, its mechanics are purposefully unique to itself but it keeps the Darkplaces engine going, you can play lots of wayyyy old quake maps and it is fun as hell.
I love openRA for dune and I love openRTC too.
OpenRA is such a good way back into Dune 2000. Funny how well those old maps still hold up.
I always loved the total annihilation clone made with springrts
Total Annihilation still feels huge when you pull back over a whole map. The Spring games kept that alive really well.