The public, free, 20 years old game OpenTTD still has an active player and modding community. Should you join in?
Lets get the important things out first; OpenTTD is a business management game where you manage a transport empire moving goods across sometimes large distances at an industrial scale. The game has multiple industries and locations to choose from and is in my opinion a truly timeless source of fun, that is if you enjoy games of this type. The game is free and available for your Mac as the required specs are very low letting it run well on even older devices. With the formalities out of the way, what is this game?
The original game, then called Transport Tycoon Deluxe, was a smashing success for its time and was made by the same man as the also highly successful Rollercoaster Tycoon. This success came with a large following of fans who took it upon themselves to mod the game and improve it, which soon gave rise to a new and free version based on the original’s code. Powered by the thirst for new content and the lackluster release of the games’ spiritual successor, Locomotion the project went through many improvements to all aspects of the game; the UI was simplified, tools were improved, the games pathfinding was reworked and new features were added. The open version’s development is still ongoing with new updates being released, though not exactly too often, and regular patches coming out to improve the game beyond its original scope.
Strengths and weaknesses:
As with any game made before the popularity of 3d graphics the games has a pixel artstyle (whether this is a pro or a con is up to preference), the colours are saturated and give the game its somewhat unique style. Artistic taste aside, what are the main pros of the game?
One of the best things about OpenTTD is the scale, your vehicles can transport cargo vast distances and there can be hundreds of them. A large number of economy games focus on small areas, in OpenTTD There is a choice to be made; your map can go from the tiny 64 by 64 tiles to the extreme size of 4096 by 4096 giving your transport empire plenty of space to expand or creating a challenge to micromanage your vehicles to earn as much from as little as possible.
Next is the amount of content. While OpenTTD does offer infinite replayability due to the creative, sandbox nature of the game, we all know that’s not how it works, however if you feel bored you can download mods in game which I feel is a huge win. There’s no risk of malicious code and the library of mods is expansive ranging from AI opponents to replacements of the entire industries you can work with. Fun mentions include the vactrain set which gives a new form of train able to travel at speeds much higher than any other land vehicle, Firs which replaces the entire industry with a choice of 5 unique economies and SHARK which adds new ships and supplements OpenTTD’s weakest transport type in fun ways.
Some cons:
The game sadly takes a lot of time to play, one run takes 20 hours to complete, though no one is stopping you from just starting a new run. And in my opinion the notable weakness to OpenTTD; the learning curve. The game almost requires you to watch at least one tutorial to even understand how to start your empire and without it you might not understand how the game works. There are other slight issues like the base game ship choice and the unintuitive settings menu, however I find these issues minor.
So should you play this game? If you enjoy business management games I would recommend trying it. Just search up OpenTTD on your browser and download it. Since it is free you won’t lose anything by trying and who knows, maybe you’ll enjoy it. I personally enjoy the game enough to have over 100 hours in it and I still find new ways to challenge myself.
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