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New AI tech powers this Morrowind textures mod

A Morrowind mod uses brand-new AI tech to update the entire game's textures

If there’s just one thing the Elder Scrolls series has to offer, it’s longevity. Skyrim’s various mods, ports, and special editions mean it’s still being bought and played in surprising quantities for a game that’s so old, and even Oblivion maintains a reasonable following. Now, thanks to the series’ dedicated modding community, it could soon be Morrowind’s turn to return to the spotlight.

The Morrowind Enhanced Textures mod uses a new method called ESRGAN (Enhanced Super Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks). According to the mod’s entry on NexusMods, ESRGAN “is an upscaling method that take a low-res image and adds realistic details to it.”

Modder DassiD goes on to say that the software creates a more faithful, realistic image than what came before, and that they’ve used it to upscale Morrowind’s textures to four times the resolution that the game originally shipped with. What’s more, the process is relatively automated, driven by an algorithm that applies it to all of the game’s textures without requiring the modders to sift through the entire game.

If you fancy taking a look for yourself, you can check out a series of screenshots of the mod in the gallery below.

You can head to NexusMods if you want to try the mod out for yourself. Once there, you’ll find the main mod, which can be downloaded via Mod Manager. There’s also an optional extra file, which will apply to the textures in the game’s expansions.

Read more: Check out the best RPGs on PC.

The mod’s a perfect fit if you want to bring Morrowind into the modern day, although if it doesn’t take your fancy, there are plenty of other developers working on just that. The most notable among them is the team behind Skywind, a fan-made project porting the entirety of Morrowind into the Skyrim engine. The only catch, however, is that that game is more than six years into its development, and we’ve only just seen its very first story trailer.