Morrowind Modding is an Active Rebellion

A brief introduction to one of gaming’s most venerable modding projects

ENGROSS NEGLIGENCE

It’s been quite a trip to witness the unexpected and overwhelming success of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion’s recently shadow-dropped official remaster. Don’t get me wrong, I’m delighted to see people earnestly excited by a triple-A RPG release again. That said, fifty dollars is a pretty steep ask for a twenty-year-old game even with the fresh graphical varnish applied, and the gaming public’s enthusiastic willingness to pay it speaks to a long-unfed hunger for an open-world RPG that competes with 2011’s Skyrim. So too does the comparably unexpected and overwhelming success of genre newcomer Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, which is making huge waves in the sub-triple-A space despite some conspicuous rough edges.

The success of these games is welcome news to me as a longtime fan of the Western Grand RPG, because it’s otherwise been a rough decade for genre titan Bethesda Game Studios (or, to use their full title: “Bethesda Game Studios, proud subsidiary of Bethesda Softworks LLC, a ZeniMax company and proud subsidiary of the Microsoft Corporation”). It’s a strange reality to confront, being a total inversion of what I thought I knew just ten years ago. People forget how ascendant Bethesda seemed in the first half of the 2010s following the one-two punch of Skyrim and Fallout 4, whose record-breaking commercial successes elevated figures like Todd Howard and Emil Pagliarulo to levels of mainstream celebrity unseen among game developers since John Romero challenged our collective sexual autonomy way back in 1997. When my high school teachers started complaining about their spouses’ Skyrim obsessions, I began to think that Bethesda was leading us into a glorious new era of Grand RPG design.

Alas, that isn’t quite where we landed in the 2020s. Say what you want about 2023’s Starfield, which sold well and achieved modest critical acclaim but nevertheless demonstrably failed to meet expectations. If nothing else, it at least evinced a desire to evoke the industry-leading sense of explorative wonder that characterized older titles, if not a particularly stolid commitment to seeing it through. What I’ve always admired about Bethesda’s design culture is its plain ambition for advancing game design by leaps and bounds. Its games have always tried to push the medium forward, regardless of whether or not so doing was realistic under applicable circumstances. From implementing a nation-sized playspace in 1996’s Daggerfall to attempting a galaxy-sized playspace in Starfield, one can never fault them for dreaming big. The problem is that Bethesda’s lofty ambitions tend to be about a decade ahead of their capabilities at any given time, a major reason why BGS developed its reputation for releasing buggy freakshows that overpromise and underdeliver even when they’re good overall.

Above: the in-game map from my most-recent Morrowind playthrough. The big central island of Vvardenfell is where the unmodded game takes place. The entire mainland surrounding it has been implemented piecemeal by the Tamriel Rebuilt team throughout this millennium. The colored-in bits are the parts I explored during my ten-hour campaign.

It’s also why, shortly into the development cycle of The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, it was announced that initial plans to implement the entire province of Morrowind would be dramatically scaled down. The retail version of Morrowind that we got in 2002 therefore includes only the island of Vvardenfell, roughly a third of what was initially teased.

Enter Tamriel Rebuilt, a modding project older than some of you lot. If you thought that Bethesda only developed a critical mass of obsessive fanboys after Oblivion’s success, think again — CRPG stans were conspiring to implement the missing landmass of Morrowind almost as soon as the cutbacks were announced. The key, you see, is that Bethesda promised a revolutionary modding toolset as part of Morrowind’s release, so it was possible for the T:R team to begin planning before the game was even in their hands.

They’ve been working at it more or less continuously ever since. The team’s makeup has changed significantly over the years, as has its overall level of dedication to the project, but recent years have seen an enormous amount of progress toward the grand vision of completing Morrowind. The past three years alone have seen the release of five DLC-sized releases for T:R. The most recent, called Grasping Fortune, came out just this past May and is one of the most mind-blowing mods I’ve ever played. I’d like to tell you a bit about my time with it this week. In so doing, I’ll hopefully be able to communicate how invigorating it is to see such skill and passion on display completely free of charge.

This will probably take a couple of newsletters, so we’d better get started. Come now, and let me regale you with the story of how I violated parole to take a weeklong hike along video gaming’s most scenic riverside. Next week, we’ll dig deep and talk about why Morrowind’s old-school design might just hold the key to creating a true Skyrim-killer for our age.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL CAN GO TO HELL (RIP)

In case you’re not familiar, an unmodded Morrowind campaign begins with an unashamedly formulaic Chosen One setup. Indeed, the very first thing you get after clicking “New Game” is a cinematic dream sequence in which the demigoddess Azura literally tells you the words “you have been chosen.” Chosen for what, exactly? It’s complicated, but the short answer is that you’re the reincarnation of Lord Indoril Nerevar, fated by divine prophecy to defeat Dagoth Ur, the immortal Lord High Councilor of House Dagoth whose fell minions now terrorize the island of Vvardenfell. It all begins when the player character is released from prison and given orders from the Emperor to go visit the imperial agent Caius Cosades at Balmora, where the main quest will kick off in earnest.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with a formulaic story well told, and Morrowind’s main questline is pretty excellent as far as Chosen One tales go. Particularly impressive to this day is its detailed and engrossing representation of the province’s different societies and their complicated politics. The catch is that, in contrast to the majority of modern RPG stories, the story is very linearly told and has essentially just one possible outcome, i.e., the defeat of Dagoth Ur. Accordingly, most don’t consider it particularly worth replaying even though Morrowind itself is endlessly replayable. After finishing the main quest once — if at all — many players will spend subsequent playthroughs getting into unrelated mercenary adventures. The game won’t object or resist in any way if you ignore your orders to visit the first main quest-giver, and you’re generally free to engage with the game world however you choose. Some argue that this is where the game is at its strongest, and I tend to agree.

That’s why, after disembarking from the prisoner ship and signing my release papers, I turned off the road to Balmora and headed toward the coastal fortress of Ebonheart. I threw a handful of coins at a local dockworker for passage to the modded-in mainland, pausing only to cast my orders into the sea before setting off on an adventure of my own design. I decide to roleplay a more believable character than the Morrowind default: I’m a guy who got released from prison and decided to flee his erstwhile captors instead of working for them. Specifically, I am Ghulrikh Ravnedas, Dark Elf battlemage and disobedient recidivist. My first goal: put a few leagues between myself and any man wearing an imperial uniform.

Above: Ghulrikh, fresh off the boat in Old Ebonheart. The grand Ebon Tower is visible on a nearby hilltop. Every one of the city’s dozens of buildings is fully implemented, and I find myself spending ages admiring the sights and wandering the shops just like a real-life tourist.

I disembark onto the docks of Old Ebonheart, a grand urban settlement that a local guard characterizes as a gilded city on a hill. “While the lands outside are riven with ash storms and the machinations of strange gods,” he explains, “within these walls the cosmopolitan and enterprising spirit of the Imperial culture thrives.” My gaze tracks upward to said walls, which are more than tall enough to obscure the majority of the city within. Only the skyscraping Ebon Tower is clearly visible from sea-level, towering as it does over the diverse populace below.

The city isn’t the province’s largest, but it’s extremely dense — the sort of urban layout where it’s often hard to tell where one building ends and the next begins. There are dozens of quests to complete and countless secrets to uncover amongst the city’s narrow passages. I suspect one could easily wrangle fifteen or twenty hours of entertainment from Old Ebonheart without ever leaving its walls.

That sounds like an interesting adventure for the sort of milk-drinking craven who isn’t on the run from his imperial duties, but Ghulrikh is the precise opposite. I wander the expansive row of shops on the city’s east side for a few minutes, spending the stipend I was supposed to use for travel to Balmora on supplies for traveling further inland instead. I outfit myself with a cheap set of armor and a dull sword, then throw my middle fingers up as I waltz out the main gate. Next stop: wherever these menfolk aren’t welcome, for which nearly any direction of travel will suffice. I begin hiking southward, where I understand the newest Tamriel Rebuilt content is to be found.

JOURNEY TO THE SOUTH

To my mind, one of the greatest game-mechanical casualties between Morrowind and Oblivion was the immersive travel. In the latter, the player may teleport at whim to any previously discovered location at no material cost aside from time. This definitely cut down on backtracking and made the game more broadly accessible. But by mid- to late-game, exploration ceases to be necessary and the game takes on a breakneck pacing as you whip from one side of the province to the other and then back again to complete quests.

Not so in Morrowind. Regional transit services or passenger boats can quickly ferry you between large settlements, but the vast majority of interesting locations in both the base game and in Tamriel Rebuilt lack such services. Unless you have some magically assisted means of accelerating your travel, you’ll be hoofing it to and from most places. Personally, I consider this a selling point — the journey is often more interesting than the destination even in fantasy RPGs, and T:R facilitates some of the most absorbing I can remember. For that reason, I made the command decision not to avail myself of any fast-travel services for the entirety of Ghulrikh’s campaign. I’m glad I did.

The “safest” way to walk from Old Ebonheart to the south of Morrowind is along the shoreline of the River Thirr. Naturally, we see a broad slice of the province’s mercantile culture along the way. Locals can tell from a mile away that Ghulrikh isn’t from around here, and I pass no shortage of gawking onlookers as I walk through the many plantations and farming villages of the fertile river basin. It’s definitely for the best that I stuck to the riverside, since the native Dark Elf tribes that populate the more westerly routes are notoriously impatient with foreign interlopers.

Above: The view from atop the tallest building in the city of Narsis. Back in 2002, Morrowind shrouded its environments in fog for performance reasons. This is no longer necessary on modern hardware. Every last feature in the image above is part of the modded playspace, and we can go anywhere we like.

After about a week of hiking, I pass over a tall hill and reveal the ruddy cliffs of the Shipal-Shin region. I make it to the Purple Road by nightfall, the first properly paved surface upon which I’ve stepped since leaving Old Ebonheart. There are no serious threats on the road, so I continue traveling through the night. I make it to the end of the River Thirr as the sun begins to rise, and the great capital metropolis of Narsis comes into view over the cliff-edge before me. When I get there, I spend something like fifteen real-life minutes just wandering through the city with eyes broad and mouth agog, like a medieval serf visiting Times Square. I cast my mind back to 2011 and the first time I played Skyrim, whose capital city is represented by a single low-density neighborhood of about thirty-something inhabitants, and I laugh out loud. If this is the standard that a team of unsalaried volunteer modders are setting for themselves, then I think we might just be okay after all.

OUR CUP RUNNETH OVER

Eventually, my astonishment subsides and I have a moment to take stock. Final playtime after the full journey south: ten hours and forty-one minutes, of which every minute was interesting and worthwhile. While I wasn’t taking in the totally unique realizations of Bethesda’s old lore, I was exploring new dungeons or finding new alchemical ingredients. And I haven’t even told you the craziest part yet: the sum total of every experience I had on Ghulrikh’s long hike to Narsis represents less than one percent of what contemporary Morrowind modding has to offer. I mean, just look at how little of the world map I uncovered in that first image up top.

Even the partially restored province of Morrowind itself is just scratching the surface. Tamriel Rebuilt’s core remit is to implement the entire provincial mainland in-game, as Bethesda initially planned. But the Elder Scrolls is simply too deep, involved, and compelling a base of lore to paint oneself into a corner realizing just one of its provinces.

Enter Project Tamriel, a sister project to T:R that takes on the mammoth task of implementing the entire goddamned continent on which Morrowind sits. Particularly notable within this project at time of writing are Project Cyrodiil and Skyrim: Home of the Nords, which respectively seek to recreate the lands of Oblivion and Skyrim under the constraints of the Morrowind era’s old lore. I still need to block out some time to revisit them both myself. Even though all of these projects are technically incomplete, it seems almost ridiculous to describe them as such, given the level of polish and professionalism on display. It’s often been said that Morrowind modders are now better at working with the game than Bethesda’s developers ever were, and I can tell you with confidence that this is absolutely the case.

I can’t overstate how significant this project feels in the broader context of today’s games industry, where rapid deprofessionalization and genre homogenization have made the industrial production of games like Morrowind effectively impossible. Thank God, then, for the ambitious and passionate fans who not only resurrected Bethesda’s original vision but have undoubtedly exceeded it time and again. The game only costs a few bucks, and all of these mods are 100% free. Not only that, but they exhibit some of the most engrossing and inspiring gameplay I’ve ever seen in an RPG. It begs a fairly uncomfortable question: why on earth would I ever pay $80 for a new RPG that can’t even live up to the standard set by a free mod for a game from 2002?

Morrowind is one of my favorite games of all time, and for many reasons that I just didn’t have time to get into this week. There’s a lot more to be said, so tune in next time for a much more thorough analysis of why this flavor of CRPG design works and what we modern gamers can learn from it.

Til next time <3

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Thanks for reading to the end! Have you given Tamriel Rebuilt a try? Got any other impressive mod projects you want to shout out? Tell me more below!