The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind® Game of the Year Edition
The Elder Scrolls is one of the most illustrious sagas in video game history, which is perhaps why Skyrim has been ported to everything short of a calculator over the last eight years. However, although Skyrim and its predecessor Oblivion are vast oceans containing a wealth of wonderfully intricate curios, their oft-overlooked older sibling Morrowind is a bottomless lake, its boundless depths plummeting into the territories of magic, secrecy, and the unknown.
Since Morrowind launched in 2002, players have been exploring its every nook and cranny, desperately seeking to unravel its most intimately hidden secrets. Perhaps the most accomplished of these Morrowind mystery hunters is Redditor OccupyTamriel, who has discovered countless hidden treasures buried in Morrowind's deepest recesses.
"I started playing Elder Scrolls when a very dear friend of mine told me about the series," OccupyTamriel tells me. "I needed a lot of time to get used to Morrowind - the sheer complexity of the world and the mechanics, the invisible per-attack dice roll, and just being lost and making no progress were extremely off-putting."
To mark the end of the 2010s, we're celebrating 30 games that defined the last 10 years. You can find all the articles as they're published in the Games of the Decade archive, and read about our thinking about it in an editor's blog.
It's hard to think of a game that's been subject to just as much revisionism as Skyrim. Maybe that's to be expected, given its dizzying success. The game is everywhere and its cultural reach is almost insurmountable - so much so that the jokes about climbing mountains, taking arrows and porting to toasters have all been unfashionably irksome for much longer than they were ever funny in the first place. And with all that success comes the inevitable and insufferable "not that good actually" crowd.
But they are wrong! Skyrim is good, actually. Exactly as good as everyone says it is. And it is good for a lot of reasons but none of them as truly special, I think, as its world - or rather, more specifically, the ineffable rules that bind it. There is an intangible realism to Skyrim's world that I haven't really felt in a game of its budget and scope since. It's in the mechanics of it - the literal mechanics; the basic billiard balls of the physics - and the best example I can think of, for some reason, is pushing people off a ledge.
Total War: MEDIEVAL II – Definitive Edition - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Natalie Clayton)
Like any big daft fantasy blockbuster, The Elder Scrolls needs war. Unfortunately, Bethesda’s open-world games have never been too great at the whole mass battle thing. Even Skyrim’s nation-rending civil war never amounted to much more than a gathering of drunk LARPers waving sharp sticks at each other in the snow. The Elder Scrolls: Total War – a complete overhaul to Medieval 2: Total War – launched this week, bringing some proper bombast to battlefields across Tamriel.
Five of the Best is a weekly series celebrating the poor old parts of games we tend to overlook. Not the glitzy bits but the supporting cast. Things like crowds - whoever stops to think about a crowd? And how do you think that makes the crowd feel? But the games they're in wouldn't be the same without them, so let's big them up a bit, shall we?
Also, I want your ideas! I want to know what you remember when you read the title of this week's piece, the things that spring to mind. Don't worry about what I think, no one ever does, but do jump in the comments below. We've had some lovely discussions and you've remembered loads of great details about games.You can find all the previous Five of the Bests in a handy archive.
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion® Game of the Year Edition (2009) - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Graham Smith)
Allegations of abuse have been made against multiple games industry figures in the past 24 hours. On Monday afternoon Nathalie Lawhead, developer of the IGF-winning Tetrageddon Games, wrote a post on her website alleging that Jeremy Soule, the composer of Skyrim, raped her while she was working for an unnamed Vancouver-based games studio. Seven hours later, comics writer and indie developer Zo Quinn posted tweets alleging that Alec Holowka, co-creator of Aquaria and Night In The Woods, sexually assaulted them. Later that same night, Adelaide Gardner posted a series of tweets alleging that Splash Damage tools programmer Luc Shelton sexually assaulted and gaslit her.
(CW: rape, sexual assault, gaslighting, emotional abuse)>
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind® Game of the Year Edition
The people behind Skywind have released a gameplay demo of the mod - and it's pretty impressive.
The gameplay video, below, shows off how the modders have recreated Morrowind in the Skyrim engine. We see the player pick up a bounty in town, head off out into the wild and into a dungeon to kill the target before returning for a reward.
This is classic The Elder Scrolls stuff and on the face of it not particularly groundbreaking, but there's a level of polish here we don't often see from mods. The music, voice acting and town AI is all present and correct, and we even get to see some spear combat.
In a proper answer to last week's new cinematic trailer for Skyblivion (the big modding project porting Oblivion to Skyrim's engine), we've now got a full 11 minute gameplay video for sibling mod project Skywind, which is, yes, Morrowind recreated in Skyrim. The video shows off a few key features that Morrowind fans have asked the TESRenewal team about in the past.
The video begins in Balmora where the Nerevarine, Morrowind's protagonist, accepts a writ for the assassination of a Dunmer named Sarayn Sadus. Like almost every other part of Skywind will be, it's a recreation of an actual quest from Morrowind.
The upgrade to Skyrim's engine does the riverside Dunmer town plenty of favors, updating it from its sparse Morrowind look to a golden, hazy hub closer resembling its appearance in The Elder Scrolls: Online. It feels like a realization of an imperfect, rosy memory of a place—that is, it looks like what I might think Balmora looked like in Morrowind if I were reminiscing, which isn't what I'd see if I booted up the original game from 2002.
Even the dialogue system, formatted like Skyrim's instead of the oppressively large text boxes from Morrowind, keeps a touch of 2002 with its blue and gold color scheme.
One big takeaway is how the video shows off using the map during the quest to kill Sarayn Sadus. Morrowind, unlike later Elder Scrolls games, had no fast travel and no quest markers. Instead, quest givers verbally give directions to important locations. In the FAQ section of Skywind's website, it does address its plans for both, saying:
"You will be able to use fast-travel and quest markers because they come with the Skyrim engine. However it will still be quite possible to play through the entire game without them."
As it also points out, Skywind's quests are built with this in mind, providing the same context in dialogue that the original Morrowind did.
Instead of fast traveling, the video shows a player mousing over locations mentioned by the quest giver before setting a custom marker on the map to navigate by. Skywind's site also mentions that it plans for this aspect to be configurable, so perhaps it's already possible to play without quest markers appearing uninvited.
Poking enemies with a two-handed polearm is another feature that differentiates Morrowind from its younger siblings. Here, the player goes through the entire quest jabbing enemies to death, only briefly swapping to a bow to shoot at a their sleeping assassination target from above.
There's just one major discrepancy in the gameplay we've seen so far for Skywind. If this were truly a Morrowind recreation, the player should have bunny-hopped the entire way to and from Balmora to increase their acrobatics skill. Perhaps we'll see that fundamental Morrowind feature in Skywind's next video.
Skyrim Special Edition's Creation Club is having a sale, and as part of that sale you can get your own pet Nix-Hound for free. It'll cost your in-game character 400 gold and a trip to Solstheim, but you the player won't need to spend any real money on Creation Club points to get it.
The Nix-Hound is a bug-eyed dog creature you might remember from Morrowind. This add-on not only lets you pick up one of the wall-eyed beasts as a pet (with its own inventory to carry your burdens), but also adds them as roaming monsters across the isle of Solstheim, which could use the variety.
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion® Game of the Year Edition (2009) - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Jay Castello)
Fan project Skyblivion has been rumbling along under the radar for a while, and now it’s resurfaced with a new trailer to show off its voice acting and a slew of other changes. The ambitious mod that aims to recreate Oblivion entirely within its successor Skyrim is finally shaping up to what we can call a proper video game, say its creators. You can see it for yourself below.
If you have fond memories of the intro cinematic for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, the new trailer for fan-made Skyblivion will probably give you goose bumps. The project to recreate Oblivion (yes, the whole game) as a Skyrim: Special Edition mod has been ongoing for years and every new look at it is more impressive than the last.
This new trailer, featuring voice acting by Daniel Hodge, is a whole proper game trailer of its own, teasing Oblivion's plot while showing off its enemies and scenery. I can't help but recall the fly-by shot of the Imperial City in Oblivion's opening moments set to horns and strings. It was an impressive shot of a massive city and Skyblivion's new trailer captures that feeling without attempting to go shot-for-shot or word-for-word with the original.
Previously, the Skyblivion modding team released a video showing off some of its environments, giving a look at a number of cities and locales faithfully recreated from Oblivion.
Skyblivion doesn't have a confirmed release date yet, a statement that reminds me yet again how professional a project it looks to be despite being created by modders and not a fully-funded studio. We do know that Skyblivion will be free, provided you own Skyrim and Oblivion including the DLCs, which Skyblivion's installer will check for.
While we wait for this impressive recreation, you can still install some pretty great Oblivion mods to update the game's visuals and gameplay.
Fan project