With Bethesda making us wait going on 15 long years for the next Elder Scrolls game (I’m not including Oblivion Remastered), we’ve been left to our own devices. A phenomenon I’ve noticed spike as of late is calls for a Morrowind remaster, and a lot of chatter surrounding Bethesda’s seminal 2002 RPG in general, like game devs weighing in on how it would fare if it came out today, and the history behind The Lusty Argonian Maid. We’re all getting cabin fever.
To make up for it not being ported to every platform in existence like its older sibling Skyrim, crafty Reddit user Dumpster Buddy (as spotted by Eurogamer) has somehow managed to get Morrowind running in your browser.
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“I got OpenMW (the open-source Morrowind engine) compiling to WebAssembly,” they explain, “so the whole game runs in a browser tab now. You open a link and you’re standing in Seyda Neen. No install, no launcher.”
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The most baffling detail is that it’s the actual game engine flowing through your browser, “not a stream and not an emulator.” It looks exactly like it would if you booted it up from Steam, you can save your progress, and it has controller and mod support. The developer is even considering adding features like multiplayer and a mod manager to their makeshift browser port.
“Getting it there meant rebuilding the parts of the engine that expect a desktop,” the creator explains in the associated YouTube video’s description. “The renderer (OpenSceneGraph) had to be brought over to WebGL2, and most of the graphics work went into shadows that stop crawling when you move, water reflections done with a custom shader blur, and per-pixel lighting. Hardware anti-aliasing doesn’t survive post-processing on WebGL2, so we supersample instead.”
But there is a big drawback: you need to have the game files installed so that your browser can read them from your disk, in which case you might as well just play it on Steam. Theoretically, though, as one commenter points out, you could chuck these files onto a portable drive and take your browser-based Morrowind with you on the go, say, on your work computer.
However, there is a very bare-bones demo world if you’d just like to see what it would how it works and pootle about the classic UI, no files needed.
Still, it’s very cool and shows the unceasing passion and creativity of Bethesda’s fans all these years later, in spite of the fact that those same people have been living vicariously through these old games and The Elder Scrolls Online for over a decade. Please tell me TES6 is soon, Bethesda.
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