Where to get it

2005 · First-person shooter · Shooter

OpenArena

OpenArena is a free, community-developed first-person shooter, similar to Quake III: Arena as it is based on the source code of the game along with the ioquake3 engine, and it is licensed under the GNU GPL version 2.

Released: 19 August 2005
Platforms: Android Linux Ouya Windows macOS
Genres: First-person shooter Shooter
Developers: —
Publishers: —
Modes: Multiplayer Single-player
Perspective: First person
Themes: Action Science fiction
Engine: ioquake3
Country: Samoa

About

OpenArena is a free and open-source video game. It is a first-person shooter, and a fork of ioquake which in itself was a fork of Quake III Arena.

Keywords

pvp
open-source
freeware
arena shooter
capture the flag
death match
team deathmatch
last man standing

Media

The articlegameplay, story, development, reception

Gameplay

OpenArena's gameplay mirrors that of Quake III Arena with some quality of life improvements, such as awarding a character points for pushing another character to their death. The game can be played online (against other human players) or offline (against computer-controlled characters known as bots). "Singleplayer" mode allows players to play a predefined series of deathmatches, unlocking a new "tier" of four maps after completing the previous one, or to create custom matches in any game type through the "skirmish" mode.

OpenArena has the following gamemodes:

Development

The OpenArena project was established on August 19, 2005, one day after the id Tech 3 source code released under GNU GPL-2.0-or-later license.

OpenArena was officially released for Microsoft Windows, Linux and macOS. Third parties have also ported the game to FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Android and iOS. The game was also unofficially ported to the Raspberry Pi.

Reception

The game is one of the most popular open-source first-person shooters, particularly among fans of the original Quake III Arena. However, some others has criticized it as incomplete, saying that this detracts from long term play. The game has been praised for its portability and ability to run on old hardware, as well as creative bot design. OpenArena has been used as a platform for scholarly work in computer science. Some examples include streaming graphics from a central server, and visualizing large amounts of network data.