We've republished this feature in celebration of Morrowind's 15th birthday.

Vvardenfell is about half the size of Manhattan. You do laps around the island for hours, picking up incidental sidequests from the flawed populace holding on to their lives in musty townships like Balmora and Vivec City. This was a big deal in 2002. The Elder Scrolls toyed with open worlds before in the roughly 62,000 square mile procedural generation of 1996’s Daggerfall, but this was the first time Bethesda packed 100 hours worth of handmade design onto a beaming landmass and set the player free as soon as they stepped through the harbor. It might look quaint from the vast Imperial drama of Oblivion, or the treacherous hikes and dense hamlets of Skyrim, or, hell, the fully realized continent from The Elder Scrolls Online, but it was Morrowind where a generation first got their taste for the studio’s distinct, freewheeling fantasy.

It has been said that everyone’s favorite Bethesda game is the first one they play, as if stepping into that freedom for the first time is far more powerful and resonant than any prospective gameplay upgrades or graphical bumps. There’s probably no better proof than the community at Tamriel Rebuilt—a mod that’s been in development since Morrowind’s original release date. 

According to legend, The Elder Scrolls III originally intended to include the complete Morrowind province, similar to Oblivion’s Cyrodiil and Fallout 3’s D.C. metro area. Limitations of processing power (and a desire to not rely on randomly-generated content) forced Bethesda to limit their scope to the gloomy island of Vvardenfell. Those scrapped plans were an enormous tease for players who fell in love with the island, so a fraction of the community took it upon themselves to complete that original, ambitious vision. 15 years later, it’s still not finished, and a group of amateur developers are still cooking up textures, models, and characters, stretching out the country a little bit further.

Joachim Haimburger started on Tamriel Rebuilt in 2005 at the tender age of 15. Today he heads the mod as a lead designer while studying to be a construction draftsman. This project has been a major part of his life for over a decade.

"I must admit I don't know the exact date [when Tamriel Rebuilt started]; I don't think anyone active in the project now does," he says. "None of the project's original members are still active, and quite a few of the current active members joined within the last two or three years. I think the main reasons people work on Tamriel Rebuilt are due to being inspired by the impressive work done by those who came before them and simply enjoying the process of working on the project."

That’s a sentiment echoed by a lot of people involved with Tamriel Rebuilt. The mod has taken on a mythic quality. When you step through the community’s incarnation of Morrowind, you’re traversing ground that was implemented by a legion of forerunners who were just as obsessed with this game as you.

"It's pretty cool to see where we came from. I do remember following the various releases of Tamriel Rebuilt and being interested in the project years ago, but naturally to me a lot of the stuff made before 2014 or so is "the old part of the mod" and the newer stuff is more personal because I actually worked on it," says Lauren, a modder who’s been actively working on Tamriel Rebuilt since the spring of 2015. "People usually ask, ‘when will you be done?’ and we don't have an answer for it, but we already made and released—in a completely playable state—so much. Our released content is the same size as Vvardenfell! That's nuts."

Work is usually assigned in a weekly meeting on Discord. The community settles on a major implementation project—like the overall look and aesthetic of a new area—and the diligent workforce stakes their claim of what they’d like to work on in the forums. If you page through Tamriel Rebuilt’s massive, sprawling "Asset Browser" subforum, you’ll find reams of doodads, NPCs, sound effects, and prospective quests authored by specific members of the labor pool. Lauren tells me that the assignment process is straightforward, because most people attach themselves to something that stokes their passion.

My favorite example might be the fan-penned literature for the incidental books you find stashed across a Bethesda continent. Tamriel Rebuilt intends to fill in the blanks of Morrowind as honorably and dutifully as they can, so of course there will be the Mysteries of the Worm.

Obviously generating a ton of original assets for a constantly-expanding universe like Tamriel Rebuilt isn’t easy, but everyone I spoke to involved with the project maintained that they don’t borrow content from other games—though they do share work with other The Elder Scrolls expansion mods. Part of that comes down to copyright claims. 

"Bethesda historically has really frowned even on using assets developed for one of their games in another," says Atrayonis, a lead developer who’s been around the mod since 2005. 

But you also get the sense that a blatant, easy plundering would double-cross this project’s soul. Why take a shortcut when it’s been in the oven for over a decade? Nobody involved with Tamriel Rebuilt is thinking about a release date.  This project is a religion, and the rapture is far away.

"Tamriel Rebuilt is a volunteer project and work progresses only as fast as the available hands can do it. It takes a while for things to get made simply because there aren't so many of us actively working," says Lauren. "As well, technology marches on, and so many of the things that were done back in 2004 and such will at some point in the distant future get some more polish, once we're finished making the rest of the mainland, of course. So long as there's some of us around, we'll try to keep updating and polishing things."

The 'real' Morrowind

For a long time a major part of Tamriel Rebuilt’s appeal rested in the fact that it was the only way you could experience the Morrowind mainland in a game. That started to change in 2014, with the release of The Elder Scrolls Online and its patchwork implementation of some of the province’s more notable locales. On June 6th, Zenimax Online will release The Elder Scrolls Online: Morrowind, an expansion that will introduce the island of Vvardenfell to the world—unleashing a hungry playerbase into a 1080p incarnation of the redwood-tall mushroom stalks and fire plumes they first explored 15 years ago.

It seems strange to commit so much effort on a mod when Bethesda themselves are doing the work. Is there really so much to gain in building Morrowind when Skyrim, Cyrodiil, and whatever’s next is waiting? The members of Tamriel Rebuilt have never pondered that question, because to them, that 2002 version of Vvardenfell represents a Bethesda that doesn’t exist anymore.

"I played and enjoyed Oblivion and occasionally still play Skyrim, but basically neither game had the same depth of culture and environment. Not once did I feel like I was exploring an alien world in either game," says Lauren. "Naturally, those two games run better because the engine's been updated, and naturally they come with gameplay improvements too. But that feeling of exploring an unknown world was gone."

She’s not wrong. It’s funny how a generation recognizes The Elder Scrolls by its subdued European fantasy. Tall, gleaming castles, regal elven ruins, a player-character with the power to speak dragon. In Morrowind, a meteor called the "Ministry of Truth" hangs over Vivec City, which the populace repurposed as a jail for dangerous criminals. Bethesda still occasionally touches on that strangeness—the Shivering Isles and the twisted Daedra keeps come to mind—but generally, that side of The Elder Scrolls is treated like apocrypha, the part of the universe reserved for DLC. 

"Personally I don't really consider our version of Morrowind more authentic than Elder Scrolls Online, just more authentic to the version of Morrowind Bethesda was trying to portray in The Elder Scrolls III," says Haimburger. "Bethesda has made significant changes in how it has presented Tamriel and its denizens between all of its games, and I don't really see that as a bad thing. I liked The Elder Scrolls III’s Morrowind the most, but Bethesda's concept of what 'Morrowind' is changed during the course of that game's production, and was different before then, and changed afterwards. Putting it optimistically, Bethesda's approach lets people pick what interpretation they like best, and I hope Bethesda comes up with an ever better interpretation later down the line."

On the Tamriel Rebuilt website, you can find an entire section dedicated to how their interpretation of Elder Scrolls lore has diverged from the mainline games. It’s winding and pious, but also kind of beautiful. "The Elder Scrolls games, and with them the lore have moved on, in multiple directions, and Tamriel Rebuilt moved in their own unique direction as well," it reads. "Charitably, the projects are building on what we think made Morrowind great. Uncharitably, we are isolationist grognards stuck in their outdated playground."

They are holding onto their canon, their themes, and their tone. They are holding onto the moment they first fell in love with The Elder Scrolls. And they aren’t ever leaving.

It's no secret that Morrowind is my favorite Elder Scrolls game of all time, and so I very much hope that this Reddit thread, which claims to have datamined a map of Vvardenfell in The Elder Scrolls Online, isn't some sort of hoax. What it teases isn't exactly the land of Dunmer and the Tribunal as it was—there are no Imperial outposts, for one thing, because the island isn't an Imperial colony during the time of TESO—but it comes awfully close. 

The poster claims to have found "a ton of new tilesets" for Redoran, Telvanni, and Hlaalu towns, Vivec (the city, not the God-King), Dunmer strongholds, and Dwemer ruins. Seyda Neen, the town where Morrowind begins, is also in there, and apparently uses custom assets that make it look exactly as it did in 2002. Red Mountain appears to be inaccessible, and the foreign quarter in Vivec, the largest city on the island, isn't there either. (Which, like the absence of Imperial castles, makes sense: The Elder Scrolls Online predates Morrowind by roughly 1000 years.)   

But there will also be new places to explore, including Redoran and Hlaalu towns, one near the Andasreth stronghold and the other close to Caldera, that weren't present in Morrowind. Based on the development maps, it will also be the largest PvE zone in the game, even with Red Mountain cordoned off—possibly close to twice the size of the Wrothgar zone. 

It's all unverified, but as VG247 points out, it's awfully detailed for a hoax. Also relevant is that May 1 will mark Morrowind's 15th anniversary, and given that it's the game that really pushed The Elder Scrolls series into the gaming mainstream, I'd be truly surprised if Bethesda didn't do something to celebrate. Giving players a chance to return to return to Vvardenfell, even centuries prior to the Septim Dynasty, would serve the purpose nicely. 

Skywind and Skyblivion are fan-made projects that aim to rebuild the Elder Scrolls RPGs Morrowind and Oblivion within the confines of the more modern (and, let's face it, much prettier) Skyrim. Both have been in the works for quite some time: We got our first taste of Skyblivion in mid-2014, while Skywind dates all the way back to 2012. Rebuilding these sprawling worlds is obviously a slow, painstaking process, but the work continues, and the people behind each of them have recently released new trailers showing off their progress.

First up is Skyblivion, with the "Familiar Faces" trailer, the title of which will make obvious sense very quickly. Patrick Stewart, Sean Bean, and Sheogorath all put in appearances, but for my money it's the Adoring Fan who's the real star of the show. And he's come a long way from his original Oblivion look, hasn't he?

And then we have Skywind, which focuses more on the game world than its inhabitants, and for my money that makes it the better of the two. I think the Elder Scrolls peaked with Morrowind so there's obviously some bias at work here, but to me Skywind looks better developed, too. That may also be a result of the much greater leap forward that Skywind represents: Both games are well-aged, but Oblivion was a significant technological advancement over Morrowind, so the differences resulting from the move to Skyrim are less pronounced.

Skywind and Skyblivion are both part of the overarching Elder Scrolls Renewal Project, and you can follow along with their progress at tesrenewal.com.

Thanks, Eurogamer.

Did you wear the Colovian Fur Helm? If you played Morrowind you probably did. The Colovian Fur Helm is a piece of armor you can easily get at the start of the game it literally falls out of the sky for you, being worn by a wizard whose spell doesn't work as intended and you'll probably keep it for a while. At the start of Morrowind decent helmets are hard to come by, especially if you're cheap. The downside is that the Colovian Fur Helm looks like a big hairy nipple. No matter how badass the rest of your armor is, topping it off with a hat that makes you look like one of the Coneheads will ruin your ensemble.

I thought about that hat recently when I was watching Hearthstone designer Ben Brode answer criticisms about the recently added Purify spell, which players have called a bad card. Actually they've called it worse things than that, but let's stick with bad. Some players actually like winning with bad cards, Brode explained, before going on to discuss its potential for use in a non-competitive fun deck . Long past the point where it was a liability, I wore that silly Colovian Fur Helm because I'd started thinking it was funny defeating ghosts and monsters while wearing a conical nipplehat. It was bad, but that's what made it perfect for me.

Plenty of games have items in them that prove unpopular with players. Maybe they're equipment in an RPG, cards in a digital card game, guns in a first-person shooter, or power-ups in an arcade game. They could be ugly. Their stats could be terrible. Most players may shun them, but they still serve a purpose.

Guns & ammo 

James Lopez, producer on the Borderlands series, provides me with the excellent names of several guns from Borderlands 2 that players considered bad: Flakker, Bane, Fibber, and Crit. They all had their moments to shine, however, as there was an ebb and flow to the popularity of guns in the games some were popular right off the bat but some were 'undiscovered' for a while until the community found things that made them special , he says.

The Flakker for instance is a shotgun that shoots multiple explosive projectiles. They detonate at medium range, making it almost worthless against distant or nearby enemies. Plus, it fires very slowly. While the Flakker seems underwhelming for a weapon of 'legendary' rarity, it does have its uses. The sniper character Zer0 can combine it effectively with his Rising Sh0t ability, which lets him earn bonus damage for a short duration after every successful attack. The amount of bonus damage increases every time you hurt an enemy, so a single good shot with the Flakker can max out that bonus, after which you switch to a better gun to make use of it.

The Bane on the other hand is a submachine gun that drops your movement to a crawl and constantly shouts at you. When you shoot it screeches like Jim Carrey in Dumb & Dumber making the most annoying sound in the world, and it announces every reload by bellowing Reloading! Even taking it out it will make it announce Swapping weapons! Dropping the in-game volume to zero won't prevent it from ruining your eardrums, either. And yet there are people on YouTube using The Bane to defeat Borderlands 2's endgame raid boss Terramorphous the Invincible.

Borderlands is an unusual case in that most of its guns aren't unique like the Flakker and Bane, but procedurally generated. They combine effects in randomized ways so you might end up with a sniper rifle that reloads almost instantly or a pistol that shoots burning bullets. It creates variety and depth, Lopez explains, as well as the possibility of the user getting a one of a kind gun that nobody else will have. You might pick up two Maliwan fire SMGs of the same level but they re not going to be the same. And it might turn out that one is more your play style than the other, and the one you don t like might be perfect for someone else in your party.

When you do find a unique gun in a Borderlands game, something with a name like Good Touch or Teapot, you know it's special. That inspires players to figure out why a seemingly bad gun exists instead of chucking it aside like the disposable randomized weapons Borderlands games are full of. As Lopez puts it, Giving them names creates a theme about the gun, a connection to how you got it, and can also inspire the community to learn more about it through forums, videos, wikis, etc.

The drone & the skullcap 

At the other end of the spectrum from Borderlands and its millions of guns is Assault Android Cactus, a twin-stick shooter in which each of its playable android characters only has two weapons. Some are regular fare like a flamethrower or a beam laser, but the android named Aubergine wields something different: an indestructible drone called Helo that causes damage in a circle and controls like a fishing rod. Hold down fire and the drone moves further away from her; release and it's reeled back in.

Aubergine is the most divisive character in the game, says developer Tim Dawson, some people dig her, but a lot of players couldn't get their head around controlling her Helo drone while moving. She was meant to be an out-there character and push the envelope in terms of twin-stick shooter mechanics, but because she takes so much more work to get good at, plenty of people never did.

The drone has advantages, like being able to cause damage to enemies while you hide behind a wall, but it's tricky to get used to compared to more straightforward tools like the shotgun or the drill. Not many players bother getting to grips with Aubergine and her drone.

Even so, I'm glad she's in the game, Dawson says, she came about from realising our weapon designs were stagnating mid-development and sitting down to brainstorm something off the map. She's not only a good character for players who stick with her, but her existence in the game challenged us to make later weapons like the Railgun and Giga Drill more distinctive.

Assault Android Cactus also has power-ups that appear regularly throughout each level. Each power-up initially appears as a red Firepower boost (adding hovering guns to your arsenal), but if it's not picked up immediately will transform into a yellow Accelerate boost (adding movement speed as well as slurping pick-ups toward you), and finally a blue Shutdown (sending enemies to sleep). The fact that players can choose which of the three power-ups to collect by timing it right inspired a vigorous debate on the game's forum over which was best.

Accelerate came off worst of the three by a fair margin. Despite boosting speed, decreasing damage taken and pulling battery and weapon orbs in, some players began actively avoiding Accelerate, says Dawson, seeing it as a wasted opportunity to grab one of the other two power-ups, both of which had more overt offensive potential.

In the choose-your-own-adventure card game Hand of Fate, each of the player's items is represented by a card that becomes that piece of equipment and appears on your avatar when combat begins. They fall down on you like rain, if rain was made of helmets and axes. Though Hand of Fate is a very different game, just like Assault Android Cactus and its Accelerate power-up, players prefer equipment that has overt offensive potential .

According to its creative director Morgan Jaffit, Something we notice a lot is that people generally prefer items with direct effects, rather than those that act on another system. A good example there is Skullcap of Prophecy, which reduces your cooldowns if you kill an enemy with a weapon ability. There's a lot going on there for a player to think about how often do they kill enemies, how often do they get to use weapon abilities, how does reducing cooldowns help them, etc.

The Skullcap of Prophecy can be part of a powerful combo when used with weapon abilities capable of finishing enemies off, reducing the cooldown on the ability that triggered the Skullcap in the first place in a repeatable loop. Most players don't bother with it, however, preferring to use gear that increases damage directly or doesn't require a decent weapon to synergize with.

Likewise, gear that has negatives as well as positives generally gets picked less than items that are a straight benefit, says Jaffit. Forbidden Armor give you bonus damage resistance, but stops you being able to heal. People tended to just wear slower, less effective armour instead of dealing with the downside.

And that's up to you. Choosing not to use items that handicap you whether they provide some balancing advantage or exist simply to let you challenge yourself or fit a specific theme you're roleplaying is a choice that's yours to make. But even if you do make that choice, the bad items you avoid still serve a purpose. As Jaffit says, you always need contrast. No single item is 'good' in the abstract, you need other items to compare them to.

If every card in Hand of Fate or Hearthstone was perfectly balanced for use with every playstyle, there would be no thrill to finding ones that suit you. If the power-ups in Assault Android Cactus were the same you'd never race dramatically across the level to grab the one you like, and if every gun in Borderlands was useful at every range and in every situation you'd never switch between them and find the perfect moment to bombard some bad guys with a shotgun that shoots exploding swords.

Even beyond stats, items with no value can be imbued with purpose by passionate fans. In Dark Souls, one of the starting gifts, a pendant, does absolutely nothing. Why would anyone pick it over a key that unlocks doors throughout the game? Fans of Dark Souls labyrinthine lore speculated on how the pendant might fit into the mythos until director Hidetaki Miyazaki revealed that it was basically a prank. But by then it had served its purpose, making Dark Souls just a little bit more mysterious.

That Colovian Fur Helm served a purpose too. When I finally sold it in favor of wearing something made of enchanted green glass, I felt like a proper hero for the first time, not that joker straight off the boat with the pointy head.

I would have missed the Colovian Fur Helm, but fortunately the shopkeeper I sold it to was so impressed he put it on immediately and continued wearing it for the rest of the game. Everybody's bad item is valuable to someone.