Gaming has traditionally been one of Linux's weak points. That has changed somewhat in recent years thanks to Steam, GOG, and other efforts to bring commercial games to multiple operating systems, but those games are often not open source. Sure, the games can be played on an open source operating system, but that is not good enough for an open source purist.
So, can someone who only uses free and open source software find games that are polished enough to present a solid gaming experience without compromising their open source ideals? Absolutely. While open source games are unlikely ever to rival some of the AAA commercial games developed with massive budgets, there are plenty of open source games, in many genres, that are fun to play and can be installed from the repositories of most major Linux distributions. Even if a particular game is not packaged for a particular distribution, it is usually easy to download the game from the project's website in order to install and play it.This article looks at role-playing games. I have already written about arcade-style games[1], board & card games[2], puzzle games[3], and racing & flying games[4]. In the final article in this series, I plan to cover strategy and simulation games.
Endless Sky
Endless Sky[5] is an open source clone of the Escape Velocity[6] series from Ambrosia Software. Players captain a spaceship and travel between worlds delivering trade goods or passengers, taking on other missions along the way, or they can turn to piracy and steal from cargo ships. The game lets the player decide how they want to experience the game, and the extremely large map of solar systems