At time of writing, the Oblivion remaster has generated enough money to buy France. Across the world, the gears of business churn inevitably: someone at Microsoft emails someone at Bethesda to ask, a little forcefully, which classic game they’ll be making a quadrillion dollars on next.
The answer is almost certainly Fallout 3, and who knows how distant that could be. But once we’ve found Liam Neeson in Unreal Engine 5, what’s next? New Vegas? Skyrim? Or dare we hope for a remaster of the best game Bethesda’s ever made (and one of the best games of all time): Morrowind?
Some people dare hope. You don’t have to look far to find eager Morroboomers and younger fans who never get a chance to touch the OG excited by the notion of a UE5-ified re-do of the classic, and I can’t blame them. Liking Morrowind is fully 75% of my unforgivable personality, and I share this general enthusiasm for, well, anything at all happening with it. Bethesda seems to have largely left behind the philosophy that made that game so gloriously strange, rich, and deep—it’d be nice to see it come home.
But no! Resist this nostalgic sentiment, hypothetical reader. The Oblivion remaster is great, sterling work by Virtuos and co, but Oblivion (and Fallout 3, and the games that came after them) exist on the right side of a generational divide for the approach that studio took to make sense. You can wrap Oblivion in UE5 and fix the terrible levelling system and be most of the way there. What you get as a result isn’t wildly out of sync technically, mechanically, or philosophically with the games Bethesda has made most recently, people just have more discussions about mudcrabs in the middle of the Market District.
Morrowind is a different beast, stranger and more complex, still heaving with the mucky ’90s DNA of its sprite-based ancestors like Arena and Daggerfall. And just like no one would expect Bethesda to put out an otherwise untouched Daggerfall in UE5 (though, god, imagine it), I simply don’t believe the studio would be content to plonk Morrowind in a new graphics engine and tinker with its edges like it did with Oblivion. Honestly? It’d be right not to. I love Morrowind, but while you can release what is—in essence—a prettier version of Oblivion in 2025 and have people go nuts for it, Morrowind is far too mechanically bizarre to win over today’s audience.
So instead, I think Bethesda should just legitimise one of its many bastard offspring: the OpenMW open-source reimplementation of Morrowind’s engine. Or in fewer words I actually understand: the mod project that lets you run vanilla Morrowind on anything from a Windows desktop to your telephone with a minimum of fuss. It’d be cheaper, preserve all of Morrowind’s esoteric parts, and perhaps even speed up the proper completion of OpenMW (the project is 16 years old and is on its 0.48 release, though to be clear you can easily get through the whole game on that). At least in the fantasy realm I have mentally constructed where Bethesda would be willing to bring a fan-project in-house but leave it untouched, and where the fans themselves would be open to the prospect.
Because we’re in the second quarter of the 21st century and I don’t think Bethesda would release—and I don’t think players would accept—a game where you can literally, visually hit an enemy with your sword and still miss because you failed a dice roll, where moving at any pace above a walk drains stamina, where quest directions mostly consist of a stoned powerlifter telling you “it’s by a tree or something, hell man I dunno.”
Does that make those players wrong, and bad people? Yes. But that’s by the by.
Morrowind is a different beast, stranger and more complex, still heaving with the mucky ’90s DNA of its sprite-based ancestors
But as a licensed grognard and man chronically incapable of letting go of the past, I don’t think Morrowind is Morrowind without those things. What defines the game, to me, is a feeling of earned greatness, of succeeding in a world that truly doesn’t care about you. The arc of your character—from a puny scrub on the Seyda Neen dock who can’t even hit a mudcrab to an all-destroying god who can cross continents in a single bound—is your arc, you hewed it yourself from the unforgiving rock of Morrowind’s often baffling mechanics and implacably hostile world, where later games held your hand as you grew inexorably more powerful.
These are the things that would be lost in an Oblivion-style remaster but that are painstakingly preserved by fans like the ones behind OpenMW, which is why I would like to kindly request that whoever’s signing the cheques over at Bethesda gives those guys several million dollars and lets me just install the damn thing from Steam. It’s also the reason why—though I have intense admiration for the people making it—I’m less personally excited about Skywind than I am about new releases of OpenMW or Tamriel Rebuilt. Trying to modernise Morrowind invariably sacrifices a bit of that original soul.
That original soul’s not very marketable, though. I struggle to imagine Todd Howard looking into a camera and informing fans he’d like 50 American dollars for a game that will kind of suck to play at first and that you’ll have to restart at least four times before you get the hang of it. But while it’s not great advertising fodder, it is Morrowind. It’s Morrowind’s heart. Not in some annoyingly macho ultra-hardcore MLG gamer way, but in a way that’s more philosophical—Morrowind is about making your own importance in a world that doesn’t care about you. Bethesda games today are worlds that care about you from the start.
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