What free to play games can run smoothly on my old laptop?

Check !LowSpecGaming@lemmy.zip

Tumbleweed, there are dozens of us!! <3

The trusty twinkpad will play a lot of 'good old games', just to name a few:
Doom(s), Quake(s), Unreal, Deus Ex, Elder Scrolls (Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim), Thief(s), Dungeon Keeper(s), Carmageddon, Fallout(s), Resident Evil(s), Vampire: The Masquerade, Hitman(s), Clive Barker's Undying, Gothic(s), Half-Life, Tomb Raider(s), Myst(s), Monkey Island(s), Baldur's Gate(s), Icewind Dale(s), Diablo(s), GTA(s), KotOR, Outcast, Serious Sam(s), Cave Story, Dark Souls (1 & 2, bcs 30fps, but only barely/unpleasanty?), ...

Maybe some newer retro ones, like Dusk?

Or not that visually important games, like 2D platformers and management games, etx - like Stardew Valley, Terraria, Dead Cells, Disco Elysium, Hollow Knight, Celeste, Momodora(s?), Spelunky(s), ...

All of the mentioned are excellent.

I would take a look at Warframe.

https://www.protondb.com/app/230410?device=steamDeck

I like the gameplay and it ran on every hardware.

Any Gameboy game with an emulator.

Nintendo doesn't care about making their old games, nay, works of art like Golden Sun still playable, so I consider them free to play at this point.

I assembled a rather large list of free Linux games a few years ago, and most of them are low-spec friendly. Hopefully you find something interesting from it :)

https://lemmy.world/post/14336843

OP: Asks what will run well on a 2017 mid-range business laptop.

ITT: Idle games! Text adventures! Literally games from the 1990s that would run fine on a 486.

🤦‍♂️

Nethack

Open Transport Tycoon.

any games made before your laptop should work. any of the Myst games or Ultima games...

Shattered pixel dungeon!

I'm enjoying OpenTTD right now. Free and has native Linux support. Think Sim City 2000 mixed with Factorio.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1536610/OpenTTD/

The original XCOM is good and even palatable for a modern audience with mods.

https://www.gog.com/en/game/xcom_ufo_defense

The original Deus Ex is good and even palatable for a modern audience with mods.

https://www.gog.com/en/game/deus_ex

Space Station 14. Funny online space roleplay game. Also free. Steep learning curve, but not as bad as the original SS13.

https://spacestation14.com/

Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart - A super fun and challenging Mario Kart style game made in the original Doom engine.

CatsEyeXI - An unofficial, custom Final Fantasy XI MMO server with fast leveling, solo play and many quality of life features. (Following guides is still recommended, because it's a complicated and vague game at the best of times!)

ETLegacy - A free to play version of Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, a fun and fast team-based first person shooter.

Emulate GBA and PS1.

Any game is free to play if you're willing to sail the high seas :3

Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead, Dwarf Fortress, Space Station 13 (online), Simutrans, OpenTTD, Battle for Wesnoth

Maybe give https://www.luanti.org/en/ a shot.

The original release of cave story is free.

https://www.cavestory.org/download/cave-story.php

Gog has a small list of free games. Some can even be modded further, like Daggerfall.

Ss14 and cdda

SuperTuxCart

Those specs seems decent at first glance, but my bet is that the bottleneck will be the storage, if you are using a hard drive still. If you use an ssd, or change to one, then your performance may be greatly improved

I think you could run Steam on that build, I used to play Supertux cart, and have not played 0AD in ages

Battle for Wesnoth. Really fun turn based strategy game - https://www.wesnoth.org/

Its free and open source. They have it on steam now as well.

not an online game but Moonring is an amazing and underrated retro RPG that will run on anything! itch page with the Linux executable

do u fw old minecraft? i like the beta version, its free if you use betacraft launcher >:)

Could give Ultima Online Outlands a try? But careful, addicitive but fun!

Xonotic

Cataclysm DDA

Luanti

Empires Mod

Mindustry

OpenHV

Transcendence

Zeus/Poseidon 3

OpenRA

Panzer Marshal/Open General

HOM3 and similar

Rigs Of Rods

FlightGear

Remnants Of The Precursors

Widelands

Battle For Wesnoth

OpenSpades/ZeroSpades

Unturned

Warfork

Unvanquished

0 AD

Warzone 2100

Beyond All Reason

Zero-K

Shattered Pixel Dungeon

Stunt Rally 3

Slayers For Hire

Gene Shift Auto

Cortex Command Community Project

Omega Strikers

Trackmania Nations Forever

If you like, there's a paid version with more enviroments Trackmania United Forever

http://sauerbraten.org/

Even Warframe will run on that puppy (with low settings and without all the particles, other than that they've got the whole efficiency thing down pat)

Super Tux Kart

Xonotic

It's definetly not for everyone but space station 14 can be a lot of fun.

@Grumpy404 I know 3 games that can run smooth on that hardware

1. Taisei Project
2. The Red Robot Radio
3. Midori in the Magic School
   These games are open source and linux native

Do emulated games count? I bet you could run most consoles.

I think these are better specs than my E7440, which will play Minecraft

Old school runescape free to play isnt not worth it. You WILL get addicted and end up paying $100s of dollars a year to waste your life. Try TF2

Should run Wurm online just fine, which isn't that demanding but is still a 3D games. Sandbox MMO that I got back into playing lately, casual game to most people.

2D games are great too like most people are suggesting, got a 2011 Pentium laptop running Drox Operative 2 at a smooth 60FPS.

While I'm not sure how much of a difference the CPU and RAM will cause, my current laptop has the same GPU, so I should have a general idea of what games will work on your laptop.

Since you mentioned RuneScape, I do actually have RuneLite (a third party client for OSRS) on this computer and it does run fine. I haven't tested it yet but I'm pretty RuneScape (RS3) should also work well. The last time I ran RuneScape on Linux was when I had a computer with an Intel HD Graphics 3000 and I was able to get an almost playable frame rate at my usual graphical settings, so I'm curious about how well it'll run on my current computer, but I currently don't have any interest in playing RuneScape at the moment.

As for other games, if you're interested in games similar to quake, I'm not really a fan of these types of games but I know that World of Padman worked pretty well when playing offline, so I don't see why it wouldn't work well on your computer. It might seem like a weird choice at first but the levels are quite large and detailed, and the music is also pretty good as well. It started as a mod for Quake 3 before it became it's own standalone game. This can either be downloaded from their website or from Flathub.

Another game I know of is called Urban Terror. Similar to World of Padman, it also derived from Quake 3 but it looks and plays more like Counter Strike (or at least what I think CS plays like). I personally didn't care for this one as much but some people might like it more than WoP. This can be downloaded from either their website or from Flathub.

-Free Stars on steam, used to be called Star Control 2. Old school space adventure. And it is literally free as well.

-Imperialism 2 on GOG, 4x game set in the age of exploration and industrialization.

-Civilization 4, the best of the series in my opinion, I've played them since the 90s.

-Beyond Good and Evil, comes to mind, don't remember much about it, except that it's good.

-To the Moon, indie adventure / puzzle game. Has great reviews by the developers aunt, among other things.

-Banner Saga 1-3, holy Nordic inspired epic tactical strategy, batman.

-Jagged Alliance 2, another tactical combat game, modern time, funny, realistic and really difficult.

Eh, realized that only the first one is free to play. But the other ones are old (or very old), so you can snatch them on sale on steam, GOG or Epic for less than a chocolate bar and get dozens of hours of enjoyment from them.

If you like FPS

XONOTIC will be great

I think the free Ascii version of Dwarf Fortress should run fine.

I still play Dawn of war and new Vegas on a cheap 2 in 1 tablet with an intel atom

Panel Attack

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-HD-Graphics-520.149940.0.html

The gaming benchmarks show you'll probably be able to play most of the older f2p games at 720p low settings and be =>30fps.

Not smooth but Guild Wars 2 can run on those specs, obviously on very low settings.
Path of Exile should work also. These specs af not that bad. Most 10+ year old games should run easily. I would just check steam for older F2P games, there are a lot more. I think swtor and eso should run also. Those had F2P tiers.

Technically, every game is free as long as you know where to find it.

And any game made before 2010 is likely to run perfectly on these specs.

Get dosbox

Go old school: Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Command and Conquer

Zork is going to be great. Decent should run ok.

Try incremental games like Cookie Clicker.

https://nzp.gay/