As a long-time Stardew Valley fan, I never thought I'd find a game that could capture my heart quite the same way. Fields of Mistria has done just that. I'm honestly blown away by how good this game is
note: just a random fan, have nothing to do with this game at all. It kinda saddens me that it hasn't gotten as much attention though, there are so many mediocre games with soooo many reviews.. this game is legit insane. it's gorgeous!!
Edit: Concerned Ape must've seen my post, and now Stardew Valley has a midweek deal for -50% off LMFAO you cannot make this up
Just open sourcing the actual engine wouldn't do much. At best, you'd be able to make it work on newer hardware if problems arise, or port it to other OSs. Great stuff, but not enough when it comes to improving the game, preserving multiplayer, and so on.
There's a great amount of scaffolding on top of the base engine that any moderately sized game implements, be it through scripting or native code. That's what I meant by the line between the engine and the game being blurry. If you want to make meaningful changes to the game, you need access to that framework portion, but releasing it would allow for easy reverse engineering of everything else. It's a difficult balance to achieve.
I am thinking of OpenMW for instance. Through reverse engineering, they where able to create an open source engine that runs the game with modern features. You still have to own those games in order to play the original levels/content.
Sure for games, which are game mechanic driven there is difficulty in separating if from the content, but in many content heavy games, it is more about the world, explorations, the story, characters etc, than the just the runtime, rendering, physics etc.
In many games the big chunks of the engine is sort of source available already, because they are written in a scripting or managed language (.Net or Java).
Making the stuff that isn't written in such a language available to the player as well, would be great. Because that would lessen the reverse engineering burden of modders. And the next step would be to open source parts of it.
The reasons for this are the same for many commercial products to use open source lower levels of their software stack and open source their common code as well. Improving your own product by cooperating with others would be great in gaming as well.