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.