Morrowind

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind – An Oral History from the Game Developers – YouTube

Watch On

Filmdeg Miniatures is a YouTube channel run by Tom Evans that is full of interviews with gaming luminaries. I know it mainly for unearthing Warhammer history on topics like the early editions of Warhammer Fantasy Battle. Evans also covers videogames, most recently in an eight-hour oral history of Morrowind in which he lets a host of the classic weird-fantasy RPG’s creators meander up and down memory lane as they discuss how it was made.

One enlightening subject is writer and quest designer Mark Nelson, who was responsible for a chunk of Morrowind’s expansions, Tribunal and Bloodmoon, as well as fleshing out the starter village of Seyda Neen. He’s the guy responsible for Tarhiel, the wizard who memorably falls out of the sky in front of you the moment you leave, for instance.

And he’s also the one to blame for The Lusty Argonian Maid, a tiny joke text that’s become a core part of the Elder Scrolls’ identity. In a game full of serious books about history and theology and philosophy, it’s delightful to stumble across one that’s a silly sex comedy. “I don’t even remember why I wrote it,” Nelson admits in the interview. “It may have been after like a happy hour or something, quite honestly.”

It may not even have made it to the finished product if Morrowind’s project leader Todd Howard had noticed. “Because no one was paying attention we could just put anything into the game,” Nelson says. “Todd’s rule was always ‘humor has no place in games.’ That’s Todd’s rule. So of course that became ‘humor has no place in games, if Todd doesn’t catch it…’ And that’s where things like The Lusty Argonian Maid came in. I probably was like, I need a break, I’ve been scripting or creating something kind of boring. I’m gonna write a stupid little story.”

While I don’t expect everyone to have eight hours free to watch the entire video, it’s handily timestamped in the description if you want to skip to a specific interview. The picture that emerges from seeing them all side by side is that Morrowind’s existence is even more miraculous than you might already think, especially given how inexperienced the small team was.

“For probably half the people it was their first game,” as Nelson says. “It was insane. That was a passion project. It shouldn’t have gotten made. Like, it’s stupid. It should never have gotten made, it shouldn’t have been a success, but it was a really amazing combination of having the right people at the right time who were just willing to kill themselves to make this game.”

Source link

Remember when, back in the day, you made the trek through the ashlands to Red Mountain? Within, you encountered an unforgettable foe. “Come, Nerevar. Friend or traitor, come. Come and look upon the Heart, and Akulakhan. And bring Wraithguard… I have need of it”, they said. “Heed my words. I am Malenia. Blade of Miquella. And I have never known defeat.”

Okay, so maybe not, but it’s a nice image with which to open the news that a modder’s managed to port the entirety of Morrowind’s landmass into Elden Ring. It’s still very much a work-in-progress, as you might expect given its version of Vvardenfell’s populated by copies of the same random woman and goats, but it certainly makes for a surreal watch.

“Morrowind is one of my favorite games of all-time, but god damn is it dated,” the modder in question, YouTuber InfernoPlus, explained in video showing off their Elden Scrolls. “So, my goal here is to try and combine the world and lore of Morrowind with the combat of a Souls game. Basically, just taking the best parts of both and slapping them together into a common fruit and scrib jelly sandwich.”

The result so far is a really cool re-creation of all the locations you remember from Morrowind, rendered with the extra fidelity and weather effects possible in the engine of a modern FromSoft game. You can wander through the streets of Balmora, gaze out at the ghost fence from Red Mountain, and even pop by Vivec to dick around on its namesake’s favourite hovering spot.

You won’t find the Warrior-Poet there though, nor any other Dunmer, Argonians or other Elder Scrolls races across the landscape of Dagoth Souls though. As I mentioned, InfernoPlus has stuck clones of a generic Elden Ring lady in as placeholders for humanoid NPCs, with goats serving the same role for every creature. These mysterious women, who one can only assume are evidence of Divayth Fyr getting up to even more daughter-clone-siring than in the base game, do have written dialogue, but only speak the sound of a page turning. They all also assume the player’s already dealt with Dagoth Ur, which is probably why they look to be in happier spirits than the game’s usual insult-spitting blue blokes.

“I’ve done a fair bit of research on what remaining work is left, and from what I can tell, everything I want to do is possible,” the modder explains later on the video. “It really just comes down to the number of hours it’s going to take to build it all out.”

Interestingly, he notes that he tried cramming Morrowind into both the original Dark Souls and Dark Souls 3 before turning to Eddie Rang, because it’d come without the headache of being close to the world-loading restrictions. He’s also not worried about any Lionel Hutzes from Bethesda or FromSoftware potentially seeing one of the couple of videos he’s now posted about the mod, declaring that “this project does not violate any copyright whatsoever”.

If, or when, this mod makes it to release, InfernoPlus adds that it’ll work a bit like the Tale of Two Wastelands mod which merges Fallout 3 and New Vegas into one experience that allows you to travel between the two games’ worlds. As such, you’ll need to own a copy of Morrowind and a copy of Elden Ring to give it a go.

Source link

‘Because no one was paying attention we could just put anything into the game,’ says the writer responsible for sneaking The Lusty Argonian Maid into Morrowind

Morrowind is being ported into Elden Ring by a modder, complete with the vast army of goats and female clones Vvardenfell’s always had