Transport Tycoon was fantastic and thanks to OpenTTD I still play it from time to time.
Gothic 2 is by far the best Action RPG of all time. Witcher 3 comes close, but still fails to surpass it in so many places.
Banished always gets me with it’s atmosphere. It feels cozy but at the same time you are close to complete annihilation. Oxygen not included hits the same mark, but also has a distinctive art style and humor to it which I love.
Stanley Parable (and it’s Deluxe edition) never fails to make me laugh. But it can get tedious sometimes…
Just because the source code is available it does not mean it is free to use and do with it what you want. The license explicitly states that you may use it but have to publish it for free and follow the Steam subscriber agreement. Also this is just source code, not the assets (at least as far as I understand it).
According to Steam the top 3 are:
But that of course does not include the games not running from Steam and pre-Steam games. So World of Warcraft is somewhere in there too. And the final Top 1 must be Transport Tycoon Deluxe (even if you don’t include OpenTTD).
That would be a horrible experience: You sign up (even if it’s just for a dollar) and then you would have to wait a month until you can play the new stuff. This way they are still giving away the single player campaign and one month of multiplayer for a fraction of the original price. If you want to buy the game it might even be cheaper to sign up and buy it with the included discount and then cancel again.
What I meant was that it will not be that hard to replicate. It might feel complicated and deep but most likely isn’t that complex. Sure - without analyzing the original source code (which isn’t legally available as far as I know) - it might be impossible to recreate the exact behavior, but it should be possible to mimic the behavior - it might just take a few attempts to fine tune the input parameters.
I started playing it last year because my nephew wanted someone to play (apart from his friends at school). I kept playing it on a regular basis (I had bought the base game years ago, but have not paid anything since). I enjoy the colorful graphics which run fine even on my 10+ old gaming PC. Some rounds are short and you’re dead within minutes but often I reach top ten, but even then the rounds aren’t taking that long (20 to 30 minutes), which is something I like about the game, because I barely take the time to have hour-long gaming sessions any more. Despite its looks skill makes a difference when it comes to aiming and movement (most special weapons are movement skills). I mostly play the no building mode because I can’t manage shooting and building at the same time.
That might be tricky. Imagine there is an absolute amount of requests a single player may be able to send just by paying the base game. And now you times this by six to get your max requests per game. But it might also be enough to let 10 players play a “normal” game. So you either lower your limit further and therefore make the game worse for some player or you leave it up there and may not achieve anything.