Inside the quixotic team trying to build an entire world in a 20-year old game
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Good read, thanks for the article. Morrowind was always my favorite elder scrolls game and while I doubt I will ever play this project it was still informative.
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I only just learned about the word quixotic from an episode of Castle last night. What are the odds I'd see it for the second time ever just the day after that?
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It's worth it to the people doing it. I'm not sure anything else matters, since you can start going pretty fast down the slippery slope of asking whether any given game is "worth it."
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Mostly Ignorant
Ars Centurion
Bethesda games have one of the largest and most dedicated modding scenes in all of gaming (as an aside, it may be a bit of a double-edged sword as they continue to stick with Creation Engine, but that's for another time). I really have no interest in spending any more time in the Morrowind era TES at this point, but I love that there are people passionate enough to drive their vision forward.
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This post reminded me that Skyrim is now close to 15 years old with the next game not expected to arrive before 2030. An entire generation of kids are not going to have an Elder Scrolls release at any point in their childhood, not counting remasters and ports of course.
Were it not for the active modding community the game might be effectively lost and forgotten.
Were it not for the active modding community the game might be effectively lost and forgotten.
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Wouldn't this need to account for how many words the person encounters in a given day? I'm sure that value varies a lot, but I'm guessing it's in easily in excess of 10,000, which would make the odds 0.4% if my math is right. So unlikely, but definitely possible.
This is actually common enough to have a name, frequency illusion (Wikipedia link). Basically, once you actively notice something for the first time, you start to see it all over the place. It was always there but you're more primed to notice it, so it seems suddenly more prevalent.
Back on topic, I really need to give Morrowind another shot. I played it at one point, but had so little experience with RPGs at the time that I really struggled to understand how to play it well. I think I'll stick with the base experience though, the scope of these mods sounds frankly overwhelming!
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Now another that I happen to read your message. Remote odds do occur. Pity it is never the lottery but never say never
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Seems to me elements of mankind put a lot of effort into many, many things that others look at and wonder why they do it in the first place.
It may not have meaning to you, and you may not see that worth.
But it had both meaning and worth to those doing it.
And for most people, that's enough.
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That type of phenomenon happens often enough to have a name: Baader-Meinhof
aka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
edit: @DocRampancy was way ahead of me!
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araczynski
Ars Scholae Palatinae
Funny, I found Morrowind to be the worst of all the elder scrolls. Couldn't stand the drab look/feel of everything in the game. Remember thinking everyone looked like they were ready for death, and I couldn't blame them.
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I recall that until a certain shipping event, no one had thought nitro glycerine had a crystalized form. After that event confirmed it, they started finding it everywhere. Some magical thinking invented this notion that the very laws of physics changed that stormy night and all the glycerine in the world changed, but much more realistically, no one knew what to look for until that point, and once it was seen, they now recognized it for what it was. The glycerine didn't change, we did.
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You could ask that same question about anything, including living. To them, it is, and so too to those who download it. That's enough. Dreams are eternal, after all.
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I don't get it, but it's pretty awesome that so many people have found something worth their interest for so long.
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There's a lot to be said for the Morrowind-style gaming ethos. Quest design was often very good and used the world well. Having worked professionally in game design in the education world, I can well understand the ease of quest design compared to more recent games given the vocal requirements.
I can live without voiced dialogue. Without voicing, dialogue and quest options can be richer for far less cost. I prefer my own character to not be voiced (the voice is in my head, thanks). Don't get me started on voiced PC in the Fallout 4 dialogue style, where I don't even know exactly what my character is going to say. Bah.
I can live without voiced dialogue. Without voicing, dialogue and quest options can be richer for far less cost. I prefer my own character to not be voiced (the voice is in my head, thanks). Don't get me started on voiced PC in the Fallout 4 dialogue style, where I don't even know exactly what my character is going to say. Bah.
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PSA for those who are considering jumping back or trying out Morrowind, be sure to check out OpenMW, an open source engine compatible with Morrowind, with bug fixes, modern HW compatibility, controller support, other enhancements, etc https://openmw.org/
Another labor of love. And yes, compatible with these mods https://modding-openmw.com/mods/tamriel-rebuilt/
Another labor of love. And yes, compatible with these mods https://modding-openmw.com/mods/tamriel-rebuilt/
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I put so very many hours into Morrowind and it's expansions back in college. It was a sad day when my hard drive died and my save file was lost... Hope I have the opportunity to check out the completed project once my kids are grown and I have spare time again.
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I tend to agree; gameplay-wise and story-wise it was pretty interesting, but from the time it came out I thought the graphics were extremely off-putting and never really got into it because it was just so painfully ugly to look at.
Though I also think that overall the voiced characters in Oblivion and Skyrim were the wrong direction to go, and took away a huge amount of freedom that hurt the games both in their development and in their later lives being carried by mods. Great for adding a cinematic feel to a tight storyline, but just too limiting for an open-world RPG (though it's becoming less and less of an issue the last ~5-10 years).
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After viewing the sites for both Tamriel Rebuilt and Project Tamriel, one aspect I found thinly represented was character models. Lots of concept art in galleries, but not much showing in-game character models.
The world environment work is truly wonderful, but I would struggle with immersion if I found characters were largely still based on cobbling together simple 3D objects into a roughly humanoid shape and hoping that texturing can do the rest. Years ago I had to develop character models in that technique for a project using Active Worlds and found it greatly limiting.
There are indications that these Morrowind projects may be moving to skeletal animation methods, but it's unclear to me where things stand or what the engine can support.
The world environment work is truly wonderful, but I would struggle with immersion if I found characters were largely still based on cobbling together simple 3D objects into a roughly humanoid shape and hoping that texturing can do the rest. Years ago I had to develop character models in that technique for a project using Active Worlds and found it greatly limiting.
There are indications that these Morrowind projects may be moving to skeletal animation methods, but it's unclear to me where things stand or what the engine can support.
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"Never say never" is one of my favorite pieces of quixotic advice.
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This is funny to me. I was a huge fan of Oblivion and I remember the Morrowind players being disappointed in Oblivion for the same reason. And you know what, I became that same guy when Skyrim came out. I felt it didnt have the same magic as Oblivion to me. It was more likely that I'd simply gotten older and my tastes changed. What was, will be.
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I joined Tamriel Rebuilt in late 2002 and was one of its leaders for several years in the late aughts. I couldn't be more proud of that team for continuing on with new blood and efforts. I rarely play Morrowind anymore but I regularly check up on their progress (or drop by for a chat in their Discord server), and I look forward to breaking out my discs again in the future once they've gotten closer to completion!
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The game relies on .NIFs as I recall which is a limited and proprietary model, although there are tools to convert .obj or .3ds files, etc. into .NIFs. I recall we relied heavily on bridge utilities like Nifskope to check or work with models after converting them from .obj or .3ds.
Finding skilled 3d modelers and artists was and is the hardest part of 'make new stuff'. The Construction Set included everything you need to make new interiors, exteriors, NPCs, dialogue, and even quests with the game's scripting logic. But 3d artistry is not only a challenging art, it is completely/wholly separate from having the game or the CS to work with.
In later years, options like the game engine rewrite project OpenMW, and the MWSE (Morrowind Script Extender) have allowed for more scripting/logic options, but the game still uses the same 3d modeling and texture formats it always has.
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N.B.: It's Silgrad, not Silgrid.
This accounting is a little inaccurate. The major split between TR and ST was over the concern for adherence to lore. TR always wanted to be lore-friendly (a tagline for the project used to be "building Tamriel the way Bethesda would have"... and Silgrad Tower was decidely not lore-friendly. It gave little to no care to mixing civilizations/architectural styles, to game balance, or frankly to quality (at the time of the split, anyway--I can't speak for its later iterations). Silgrad Tower also did not exist as a place in the game maps or history available from Morrowind, Daggerfall, or Arena, as I recall. So sure, some of it was "you can't put it here", but it wasn't because TR just didn't like the particular location for it, it was that TR didn't like Silgrad Tower existing inside of TR at all.
Not just ragtag, but young, too! I don't know the demographics these days, but from the beginning through at least the first half of the 2010s, the vast majority of people who joined Tamriel Rebuilt were kids... I mean teenagers in high school, with college students coming in a distant second. Actual adults were always few and far between. From the days of tamriel-rebuilt.org and on, the project enforced a rule about users being 13+ for content and legal reasons (American COPPA rules (13+ age requirement) were built into the registration process of the phpBB2 forums used by the project for over a decade...). Today the average age is probably at least college-aged, if not older, given that Morrowind itself is a nearly 24-year-old game.
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A map the size of Malta?! Does this mean the solution to the many recent massive but empty feeling Ubisoft maps is crowdsourcing their development? Or even closer to home, Starfield?
I love seeing community projects of this scale, a labour of love for a shared passion. I think it would be interesting to see a game that actively relies on modders and the technically savvy in its user base to flesh it out (entire community generated maps and quests get loaded into the main game). Bethesda could probably pull that off.
edit: added "recent"
I love seeing community projects of this scale, a labour of love for a shared passion. I think it would be interesting to see a game that actively relies on modders and the technically savvy in its user base to flesh it out (entire community generated maps and quests get loaded into the main game). Bethesda could probably pull that off.
edit: added "recent"
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I have to say I am curious about the new content, and possibility for new & different quests in new & different areas.
I teethed my gaming on early text-based games like those made by Sierra in the 90s, then advanced to action shooters (Doom, Quake, etc.). When Morrowind came out, I loved the melding of the genres, it was like it was designed for me. I moved on and Skyrim became my all-time favorite, spent a few thousand hours in it (yeah, obsessive). But now, remembering that Skyrim was just recycling the old quest stories of Oblivion & Morrowind with scant new stories, especially many of the larger ones with many steps, and so I have to wonder if there is any really different stories in the new content.
I teethed my gaming on early text-based games like those made by Sierra in the 90s, then advanced to action shooters (Doom, Quake, etc.). When Morrowind came out, I loved the melding of the genres, it was like it was designed for me. I moved on and Skyrim became my all-time favorite, spent a few thousand hours in it (yeah, obsessive). But now, remembering that Skyrim was just recycling the old quest stories of Oblivion & Morrowind with scant new stories, especially many of the larger ones with many steps, and so I have to wonder if there is any really different stories in the new content.
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gargantuan projects like this can only exist in the realm of hobbyists for obvious reasons, yet i can't help but wonder how cool it would be for a big studio with an equally big budget to attempt the same, and how many would actually wanna play it. i kinda would love it, a game so big that i could play for years and years and still not explore everything; terribly unsatisfying for the average gamer, but still...
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IMO Far Cry 3 or greater, Wildlands, and Breakpoint maps were epic and never felt empty at all to me. You may be thinking of others? I even thought that 'wow, they haven't left room to insert DLC content here.' But yeah, I agree on your main points.
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I never do this but to help with the frequency, I'll incorporate the word into all my Ars comments for the rest of today.
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I’ve never played this, but if the original game already had the entire large island shown in the middle of the map, this mod doesn’t seem like it has actually added a huge amount. (Considering it has taken thousands of people 20 years already and is nowhere near finished.)
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Well there is one famous (or infamous) company doing that right now: Cloud Imperium Games' Star Citizen.
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You can see the current progress on their (although that does look a bit out of date--shows February 2025 at the top) progress report page here: https://www.tamriel-rebuilt.org/content/progress-report and as the article mentions, the bottom section of one of the maps shown in that link, "Grasping Fortune" was released last year.
In other words, Tamriel Rebuilt's currently-released content more than doubles what the original game contains... almost triple. Although the releases since 2013 have come in smaller chunks, they're generally done to a much higher level of detail and planning than the one that came before. There was a pretty long lull in noticeable progress (read: releases) post 2013/2014 because of what the article talks about re: "the great self-decapitation", which resulted in a few years of effort 'wasted', and then several more years of trying to shift gears and get back to a regular release cadence.
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