For hardcore fans of The Elders Scrolls franchise, it's nigh-impossible to judge the merits of the latest titles without asking a simple question: is it as good as Morrowind? Released in 2001, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind enthralled gamers at the time with innovative open-world gameplay that emphasized exploration through an alien landscape of magic, gods, and prophecy.
The series has built on the ideas that Morrowind established, although arguably not as detailed, making the formula even more popular with Oblivion and Skyrim. Morrowind's graphics and gameplay, however, are very much out of date, making it difficult for new players to appreciate its charm.
To rectify this, a team of Modders from the Elder Scrolls Renewal Project launched Skywind, an ambitious total conversion project that seeks to rebuild The Elder Scrolls III from the ground up in the Skyrim: Special Edition Creation Engine, updating Morrowind for a new generation.
Despite Innovating Morrowind Hasn't Aged Well
As with each Elder Scrolls title, players start The Elder Scrolls III as a prisoner, transported from the Imperial capital to the eastern province of Morrowind, the homeland of the Dunmer elves. Together with your player avatar, you disembark from a sailing ship into an alien world: a land of giant mushrooms, hulking insects, and raging dust storms, ruled by a Tribunal of immortal god-rulers, haunted by the ancient evil stirring at the heart of the Red Mountain. Within this strange new world, players were encouraged to explore their surroundings, master a wide range of skills, create their own spells, scheme with decadent nobles and converse with gods.
Morrowind's unique worldbuilding and open-world gameplay are still praised to this day; other parts of its gameplay have aged less well. The combat system is clunky by modern standards, with stiff attack animations and a probability system that causes weapon swings to miss and spells to misfire with unnerving regularity. The graphics and character models, even with texture updates, are blocky and crude, and a dearth of voice acting forces players to interact with most NPCs using lines of text. Much like its prophesied hero of legend, Morrowind needed to be reborn in order to reach a new generation, and that's where the Elder Scrolls Renewal: Skywind came in.
The Skywind Total Conversion Project: Moon-and-Star Reborn
Skywind began life as a simple porting project in 2012, a collaboration between a group of modders to augment the classic gameplay of Morrowind with the more contemporary graphics of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011). With the 2016 release of Skyrim: Special Edition, the Skywind project's goal grew more ambitious: to create a total conversion that merged the storyline, worldbuilding and player freedom of Morrowind with the modern gameplay, graphics and voice acting seen in Skyrim.
As the scope of the project grew, the Skywind development team swelled with volunteers: programmers to design models and animations, concept artists to create beautiful new illustrations, voice actors to bring the dialogue of NPCs to life, and composers to craft new background music. A large team of coders is also tinkering behind the hood of Skyrim's Creation Engine to rebalance Morrowind's dungeons and reintroduce gameplay features such as flight and custom spell creation. Though the Skywind team is far from completing their mod, their latest gameplay demo, revealed at Gamescom 2019, demonstrated some of their more subtle achievements. A quest with fully-voiced dialogue, an assassin character with bone-mold armor and a chitin spear, a wasteland of molten lava, charred mushrooms and wolf-like insect creatures – the land of Morrowind, more wondrous and uncanny than before.
The Elder Scrolls Renewal: Skywind is still far from completion, with no set deadline for beta-testing or an official release. In the words of the developers, "it'll be done when it's done." Their end goal is to create a polished product, a complete experience that does the original Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind justice while adding innovative new wonders to the saga of the "Neverar Reborn". In the meantime, fans and professionals looking to assist can visit Skywind's Volunteer page to join the development process.