Morrowind was beautiful and wonderful for reasons that just couldn’t exist these days, at least coming from Bethesda. It was broken in ways that weren’t just bugs or glitches, but instead ambition and risk taking on the part of design. It was mad, and it was an incredible amount of fun. But it’s threatening to become something you can’t even pop into your CD Drive and experience again, thanks to the unstoppable onslaught of operating system upgrades and various software issues. So the modders are going to fix it.
Open Morrowind is an attempt to make Morrowind something that is both future proofed and more friendly to tinkering. They’re aiming to create a version of Morrowind that has a better engine, a more comprehensive toolkit for making mods, and make it cross platform, which I’d assume to mean Linux and Mac support, which’d be just about brilliant.
This is all engine work, mind, which means that there’ll be no new assets, and it requires a version of Morrowind to even work. That said, you can grab the latest build, and find out about all the actual changes they’re making to the engine, at their website here. (Although it appears to be bombarded by just about enough people to stop it from being even remotely functional right now.)
If you’re a keen modder or even a beginner, you might be interested in our100 best Skyrim mods.
Once again, PC gamers are the archivists for the future. Eventually we’ll all just be monks in giant libraries, idly thumbing worn out Model Ms as we play Skyrim on quantum computers.