Without bagels, I’d probably live to be 100 years old. But I have regular access to bagels and sourdough loaves and this sandwich bread always in my house called Birdman that’s covered in seeds and I don’t know why. I eat the stuff so fast I’ll be surprised if I make it to 50. 

In videogames, bread often gives you health instead of slowly seeping it away, a soft beacon of restorative power. It’s been this way since the earliest games, and as technology became more capable of producing detailed environments and uncanny human likenesses, so too advanced the fidelity of the loaf. But the evolution of bread didn’t happen in a straight line. Diverse genres, art styles, and game engines shifted the purpose and priority of bread throughout the ages.

To get a clearer picture of how game bread has or hasn’t evolved, we’ve taken a look back at its implementation in some best games ever made to some of the most obscure.

BurgerTime (1982) 

As one of the earliest depictions of a hamburger bun, BurgerTime did a decent job. And it should have, given the name. Notice the inference of sesame seeds on the top bun and how the light diffuses on the bottom bunk. Early pixel art set a high bar for bunwork. 

Ultima VI: The False Prophet (1992)

A decade later, the burger genre fell out of vogue and fantasy roleplaying games stepped into the limelight. Ultima IV didn’t feature bread in a major way, but was an early example of inventory art, proof that you didn’t need the latest in computer graphics to make a great loaf. 

Jesus Matchup (1993) 

As a preteen, I went to a Catholic church camp even though I’m not and have never been Catholic. I ate the body of Christ even though I wasn’t supposed to and my friend Brian chastised me after the fact. He said I needed to get confirmed first and that I broke some kind of holy rule. The bread was just a thin wafer, like a sugar cone without the sugar, and maybe the aftertaste of it was a taste of hell itself. Jesus Matchup’s brown lump captures my disappointment exactly.

Ultima Online (1997) 

Pixel loaves hadn’t evolved much between Ultima IV and Ultima Online, but for one minor detail that changed the bread game forever for a few months. Ultima Online’s bread features a small blemish, giving the impression of a bite or piece ripped away for light post-adventure munching. The loaf went from inanimate prop to inanimate prop with history. 

Thief: The Dark Project (1998) 

Whether Thief should commended or condemned for its early attempt at modeling a 3D loaf is beyond me. All I know for sure is this: that’s a log. 

Someone’s in the Kitchen! (1999) 

You may know Steven Spielberg for his hit films like E.T. and Jurassic Park, but did you know his name was once mentioned in a trailer for a game he probably had nothing to do with? Someone’s in the Kitchen! isn’t just good reason to call the police, it’s a bad point-and-click edutainment game with one hell of an opening theme song. Also, you make a sandwich in it while a demon toaster—who is going to kill me, I saw it in a dream—judges your creation. The bread looks like my little brother sat on it, and is a shade of yellow I’ve only ever seen in bathrooms built in the 70s. Clearly, the late 90s weren’t great for game bread. 

The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind (2002) 

Even the modern masters of 3D bread had to start somewhere. In Morrowind, Bethesda drew inspiration from something other than felled trees and instead turned their eye to the sky, probably. I’m guessing here. They managed to suggest bread by texturing a footballish shape with what look like photos from the visible surface of Jupiter, a perpetually storming gas giant. 

World of Warcraft (2004) 

Just two years later an MMO, known for prioritizing multiplayer features over looking good, managed to bake bread that an Orc could tolerate. While the left loaf looks like a water chestnut, the precise angles and light divots up top are a convincing enough illusion. The right loaf, except for it’s undercooked coloring, nails the shape. And the inner texture marks a defined border between crust and light, fluffy inside. I’m tempted to throw some mayo, lettuce, tomato, and a bit of thinly sliced night elf meat on there just looking at it.

The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion (2006) 

Maybe Bethesda should’ve prioritized bread resolution DLC over horse armor. At a glance, one out of ten times I’m going to say that’s bread. The other nine times I’m going to say that’s a large misshapen potato. I lived in Idaho for a while. Got invited to a ‘Baked Potato Party' and yeah, they get that big.

Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale (2007) 

While 3D game bread moved into potato territory, Recettear reaffirmed that pixels were still the way to go. Its depiction of Walnut Bread takes a good squint to make out, but when you get up close, the shades of gold and brown and white light diffusing on the outer crust nearly flash the entire baking process on the back of your eyelids. “Walnuts, soft dough and a bit of sugar…” do more than an extra dimension ever could.

Dinner Date (2011) 

I’d flake on a guy who thought it’d be a good idea to dip that twisted loaf in some red shit too. And look at that distribution! I’m not sure what’s being distributed, but half of that isn’t even bread, it’s Dark Brown Stuff. Jesus, man. We should never be able to see inside the bread if the tech isn't ready and can’t simulate a good bake. 

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011) 

Star Baker goes to Todd Howard this decade. Look at the fidelity of this loaf. A nice rise, detailed textures, and I can nearly hear the muffled tip-tap from the even bake. Forget adventure and the snowcapped mountaintops and vampires and dragons—like a toilet in a Tarantino movie, a good loaf is the keystone of any open world. 

Minecraft (2011)

Well regarded for its wild redstone contraptions and horrifying monuments to pop culture, Minecraft’s bread has been largely ignored, and for good reason. You’re one of the most successful games of all time, and a brown lump is the best you can muster? I’ve felt more love radiating from an old hotdog bun.

Scribblenauts Unlimited (2012) 

You can tell this was made in a bread pan, small specks imply the bread is airy and light, you can summon it whenever you like, and nearly every humanoid creature will eat it. It’s a crude child’s drawing, sure, but Scribblenauts built put time into simulating natural, albeit simple, bread world behaviors. Consider it this immersive sim, the System Shock, of bread. Place it in the world, and the world reacts to its presence.

Bioshock Infinite (2013) 

Source: David Miles on YouTube

If one game knows how good its bread is, it’s Bioshock Infinite. If you were to press pause and inspect the 3D baguette, it’d be possible to nitpick small design decisions, like texture resolution, flour distribution, and grain density, but because the bread is sandwiched with context—the dancing bread boy and his believable reaction to owning a baguette inside a big patriotic amusement park city held up by balloons that Ken Levine imagined using his brain, his very own personal brain—it doesn’t feel out of place. Realism is helpful, certainly, but the game world needs to feel alive, like a natural home for bread above all else.  

Team Fortress 2: Love and War update (2014) 

Bread is only monstrous when left to mold, and Team Fortress 2’s Love and War update bottles the essence of in a cute, tragic short film. There’s little purpose to the bread in-game aside from a few dough-themed items. Personally, I interpret it as a commentary on the state of game bread as nothing more than a simple prop and HP potion skin, new ideas and advances left in the pantry to rot. I see you Valve.

I Am Bread (2014) 

As a goofy physics playground, I Am Bread is fine. I do take issue with how controlling a slice feels like maneuvering a heavy sponge. Bread isn’t heavy and sandwich bread isn’t durable. One fall off the table and it’s over, usually. I Am Bread forgoes natural bread behaviors for the sake of a joke, but I’m not sure we’ll be laughing when our kids start to think they can wash the dishes with a sandwich.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015) 

Everything about The Witcher 3’s world feels hand-placed. Small villages, big cities, and even monster-infested caves are brimming with life and purpose, but in order to maintain such a sprawling illusion, nearly all props and people are static. NPCs sit in the same place spouting the same lines and props like bread just sit there, looking delicious, but forever out of reach. What an awful game.

Fallout 4 (2015) 

After setting a new standard for 3D loaf work in Skyrim, Bethesda dropped the atom ball in Fallout 4, spending more time on the bread box than any bread at all. Modders came to the rescue again, modeling slices, sandwiches, and adding recipes any old ghoul could follow.

Dishonored 2 (2016) 

Karnacan bakers know how to bake bread. Lovely rise, nice crust, but a bit low res I’m being honest. Eating it gives you a small dose of HP, but the animation is a simple swipe-and-swallow maneuver. It’s pan for the course, and not much else. In 2016, it’s a good bake, but it’s not a great bake. 

Final Fantasy 15 PC (2018)

Let's take a moment to appreciate the food in Final Fantasy 15. And then let's panic.

Look at this damn toast. That might as well be real toast. If media is an extension of our senses, and videogames are a compilation of all mediums, a co-habitation of a near perfect reality, then this toast is, effectively, real. That's real, actual toast that we will never eat. It is right there and there's nothing you can do about it. This is the singularity, but instead of AI meeting the intellect of humans, it's toast AI meeting the toast-intellect of actual toast. Black Mirror whiffed on this one. I'm already clawing at the computer monitor. Next stop: my belly. Here we go. 

The future of videogame bread

How far have we come, really? From BurgerTime’s advanced bun art to Dishonored 2’s simple dark loaf, videogame bread feels without a sure destination—a lumpy mass that needs more time to prove. Perhaps the future holds loaves we never could have imagined, or abominations, such as virtual reality pumpernickel that virtually tastes like sourdough. 

Will Fortnite, as rumored, introduce the bunned meat of the Durr Burger as a health item? Will Kojima ever comment on the loaf in a world torn asunder by PMCs and omnipresent nuclear threat? Maybe someday we’ll spend as much money on naan as we do on spaceships in Star Citizen. All we know for certain is that bread will be there, a short roll for every dodge roll and an abundance of biscuits to crowd every RPG inventory.

This article was originally published May 2017.

I love to eat. This is hardly a secret. For the better part of a decade someone could have just tossed you my belt, and from that alone you could have deduced that my gut won many heated battles with tightly buttoned shirts. But somehow I got past that. I'm down eighty pounds after but a handful of months and getting thinner every day.

But my general love of food? It's still here. It always will be. My 'big meals' these days consist of little more than grilled, seasoned tilapia and shoots of asparagus, but one of the manifold beauties of videogames is that I can live out my fantasies of cooking and devouring sugar-packed pastries and fat-dripping rare steaks to my increasingly healthy heart's content. I've always had a soft spot for cooking in games, but now that my literal soft spots are melting away, I find that it's turning into a passion. 

In fact, it's become one of the things I look for in roleplaying games above all else. It's common to hear talk about how one of the chief attractions of videogames is that they let us become the things we want to be in life, but most of that talk centers on things like strength, confidence, or physical attraction. In my view, the best games let us excel at and spend time with relatively humble things, like cooking. Some people want to be mages with fireballs shooting from their fingernails. Me? I'd kind of like to be a fat Pandaren cooking chicken fried rice on a wok, all while chatting about nature and philosophy against a backdrop of sun-drenched meadows. World of Warcraft lets me do that, all without the dangers of tubbiness. For me, at least, it's a vicarious pleasure that works. 

It's not as if I spend my hours salivating over Burger Time or Diner Dash. I look for cooking as a complementary activity, much as it is here in the real world. I spent most of my time with Conan Exiles hacking at ungulates with stone blades chiefly for the pleasure of grilling their muscle into steaks over a cozy campfire for my friends. In Skyrim, I've enjoyed tinkering with Kryptopyr's Complete Alchemy and Cooking Overhaul and Corpsehatch's Advanced Cooking, both of which add a more realistic (and worthwhile) cooking experience compared to Bethesda's original vision. I even get a little sad when all these elements are missing. I replayed The Witcher 3 in its entirety recently, and nothing disappointed me about the experience so much as the realization that all this raw meat kept dropping from the endless swarms of wolves and that there was no way to turn it into deliciousness. You'd think a man who lives on the roads and crafts his own potions on the fly would know his way around a skillet. But nope.

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This passion for culinary creativity has its roots in real life. For two years at the turn of the century, I diced onions and guided grease as a chef at the Austin, Texas co-op where I lived, running a kitchen with industrial equipment and feeding dozens of fellow students between courses on astronomy and Latin. It's largely because of this experience that I've come to think of cooking and eating as an inherently social activity, and thus I find my greatest enjoyment of its digital counterpart in MMOs.

Single-player games might have more realistic cooking mechanics, but MMOs let you share your food with other people. Better than that, you can sell that grub. Hell, there's actual prestige. It's one thing to be proud of making a stash of Elsweyr Fondue in Skyrim that no one gets to see besides you and Lydia, but back in the day, it was quite another to be one of the few proud owners of the ridiculously rare recipe for Dirge's Kickin' Chimaerok Chops in World of Warcraft. I also love the apprentice-and-master dynamic surrounding the craft in Final Fantasy XIV. And much of the fun I get out of Elder Scrolls Online these days springs from roleplaying as a chef with all the rare recipes I've amassed over the years I've played, to say nothing I get out of the fun of surreptitiously scrounging around in crates and cupboards for choice ingredients while the guards are turned away. There's thus a sense of danger involved in cooking that Direnni Hundred-Year Rabbit Bisque or that Planked Abecean Longfin. It makes cooking exciting, and I wish more games followed suit.

Weirdly, some games have backed away from rewarding cooking experiences. To see me at my happiest, rewind a few years back to World of Warcraft's Mists of Pandaria expansion, where you'd finally me enthusiastically and dutifully harvesting my own food from my little farm and learning and mastering multiple schools of cooking. (To this day, I play a Pandaren monk named Chaofan, which means "fried rice" in Mandarin.) You'd find me making a fortune selling some of the better stuff on the auction house, and getting a kick out of setting up a noodle cart for my fellow guildies to grab a bowl of soup that boosted their stats for an hour. 

Cooking felt like a real profession for once, and it was arguably more rewarding than some of the more popular ones like blacksmithing or leatherworking. Today, in Legion, cooking mainly consists of waiting for a bumbling Pandaren chef to "research" recipes for you, and more than half the time he usually just comes back with burnt food. He's the one doing the discovery, not me, and it doesn't help that many of the recipes aren't even all that useful. Legion is a great expansion, but it's done much to hurt my love for one of my favorite aspects of the game.

Lately that especially hurts because, as a lover of fantasy, I find that eating and cooking whatever kinds of food suit my whims has became my own personal fantasy. Food isn't evil, of course: it's one of the few pleasures that truly unites us all. But never again can I afford to enjoy it like I used to without swelling out my gut and risking a few years off my life. In moderation, naturally, there's little worry about that in games. And right now, rather than taking memorable cooking experiences away, I'd like to see game developers make better ones. My heart—my stomach—yearns for it.

Poor Eoki just can't catch a break. I first saw the hapless Argonian huddling in a corner of a dirty island hut where we'd been stashed as newly captured slaves, and he followed me when I leapt into the surrounding waters in a daring escape alongside an assassin. And now, here in Sadrith Mora, hugging the eastern rim of the island of Vvardenfell, I find him in chains again. Four times he tried to escape after our escapade, and four times slavers drug him back. Now he's stuck toiling for Telvanni mages who bought him for a discount and don't give a damn for the Ebonheart Pact's ban on slavery.

I offer to free him myself, but he says he's going to be all right. He knows someone, you see—a fellow Argonian slave named Sun-in-Shadow who happens to be pretty handy with magic herself. It's more than mere trust: he's smitten with her. And now Eoki's pleading with me to go help Sun-in-Shadow with whatever she needs to rise through the Telvanni ranks and free them both. 

This is the questline that captured my heart and attention in the closed beta for The Elder Scrolls Online: Morrowind. Others had me chatting with demigods and helping with the construction of the cantons of Vivec City, but it's this one that best shows what to expect from this new expansion. It's this one that shows ZeniMax Online gets Morrowind, while at the same time demonstrating that it's not hobbling itself with nostalgia.

Recapturing that Morrowind magic

The laziest MMORPGs think all you need for a quest is some reason to run out and kill or fetch a few things, but Morrowind shows Elder Scrolls Online in healthy maturity, mixing moving conversations like these with puzzles, pickpocketing, and the occasional pun. Long stretches went by when I didn't even pull out my weapon at all, and I can't say I minded much. Even better, all the tweaks the ZeniMax team has made over the last couple of years have finally left the game feeling about as "Elder Scrollsy" as an MMORPG possibly could.

Yet it'll never fully be able to shake off that disconnect between the expectations of the singleplayer games and an MMO. One of the first things I have to do after chatting up Sun-in-Shadow is steal an awful love poem a drunken dark elf Telvanni sent to a local wood elf—which is bad because dark elves are massive racists, mm-kay?—and now he wants it back lest she blackmail him. (And truly, it's criminal stuff, infected as it is with couplets like "O Ethrandora, I do adore ya" and "Your smile is so sweet like the sweetest guar meat.")So, massive Nord named Isleif the Unwieldy that I am, I venture into her private office to pickpocket her. It's, well, awkward. Ethrandora shows not the slightest apprehension as this tall stranger dawdles in her quarters, inching up and waiting for her to look away before rummaging in her pockets. There's a justice system in Elder Scrolls Online these days, but I can't help but think the guards would have already been on me in Skyrim. Heck, the whole time I kept expecting another player to burst in and shatter the illusion further. Anyway, I get the poem back.

"Hide the ink when next you drink," my character tells the Telvanni. It's not Shakespeare, but there's much more wizardry in that rhyme than in anything the dark elf scribbled.

The pickpocketing weirdness is a trifle. I'm grateful enough that Elder Scrolls Online lets me pickpocket and read bad poetry in the first place rather than just sending me out to kill a bunch of guars for their sweet meat. And anyway, action isn't far behind. Sun-in-Shadow soon sends me to the Daedric dungeon of Zaintirasis, where I have to steal some saint's finger bone before the rival Redoran clan gets it.

Even here Elder Scrolls Online adds variety to the MMO template and captures some of the spirit of the original Morrowind. To even get into the Daedric ruin, I need to solve a puzzle involving bowls and skulls left by followers of the unpredictable trickster Daedric lord Sheogorath. It frankly stumps me for a bit. It apparently stumps me less than other people, though, because a player with the delightfully beta-appropriate name of Nord-Warden-Test starts following me and mimicking my every move. Finally, the riddle clicks in my head and the lock clicks in the door. We're in.

Down into the dungeon we go, Nord-Warden-Test and I, slaying imps, skewering frightening floating eyes wreathed with tentacles, and plucking holy finger bones. I'm playing as a Warden myself, the new druid-meets-ranger class that comes with the expansion. It's what I've always wanted out of ESO, right down to the Aragorn-as-Strider style costume the class comes with. None of ESO's existing four classes ever really appealed to me, but I love the nature focus of the Warden, and the way I can call ghostly versions of Morrowind's famed cliff racers down on foes. I can shield myself in ice, do decent healing, and even summon a bear. There's a lot of outcry in the community right now about how ZeniMax weakened every other class in preparation for the Warden, but right now I'm loving it.

I bring the finger to another mage who's impressed by Sun-in-Shadow's initiative, and they agree to raise the clever Argonian up a rank from slave. But not without some reluctance.

"Lift one of these beasts up and a thousand more will follow," one of the Dark Elves says. Had to sneak some racism in there. Typical Dunmer. Typical Telvanni.And now Sun-in-Shadow wants me to buy some land with all of her gold. Poor Eoki, busting his scales on some construction project in a swamp, laments that she didn't just buy his freedom, but he accepts it. And so I'm off again to Vos, a tiny village nestled in the northern expanses of the vast island.

Ordinarily I'd need a map, but I knew where to go. This, after all, is Vvardenfell, the setting of one of the finest RPGs ever made, and the expansion's aimed largely at us who knew it well. In the early 2000s, beholding Morrowind's mushroom forests and complex social structures felt like a revelation, leading me to wear Morrowind shirts around my graduate school campus in the hopes someone would notice and share my joy. I'd say my awe at the breadth of its imagination largely put me on the career path I'm on today.

I know the poetry of its place names—Balmora, Ald'ruhn, Hla Oad—as well as I know the streets of my own hometown. Ordinarily the early hours of an MMORPG thrive on pure discovery, but riding through Vvardenfell here feels a bit like coming back home after years of absence. My adventures with Eoki and Sun-in-Shadow wisely take me all over it, whether it's in the Telvanni manors built into the hollows of skyscraper-tall mushrooms or the shadows of a volcanic mountain threatening the surroundings. Those surroundings are beautiful, too, even if they're crafted in that spindly, overlong style ESO prefers that I've never grown accustomed to. The play area of Elder Scrolls Online: Morrowind mirrors the exact dimensions of the original Morrowind, but it far exceeds the original in detail, whether it's in the lush trappings scattered about a Telvanni mage's tower or the ornate mosaics lining the walls of the cantons in Vivec City.

With such a strong legacy, Morrowind is the most logical point for a first expansion—there's little doubt about that, and it's stuffed with callbacks like the little registration hut in Seyda Neen where The Elder Scrolls III starts off. My time with Eoki and Sun-in-Shadow shows that this isn't merely an attempt to cash in on nostalgia; the quests I've gone on capture the essence of what made Morrowind great without retracing its steps.

Every book, every conversation, every building reveals a reverence for the lore and a keen desire to show this unique fantasy vision at another point in time. So far, it's an expansion I want to sample to the last drop. Best of all, if you're totally new to Elder Scrolls Online, you can kick off your adventures with a Morrowind-specific tutorial from the very start and jump into its adventures without having to worry about the core game unless you wish.

Hang in there, Eoki, we'll get those chains off you yet. Or so I hope.

The Elder Scrolls Online: Morrowind is out on June 6 for $40.

Everybody remembers the Oblivion Moment, yeah? It's been repeated in so many open-world games that even if you haven't played Oblivion you've had an Oblivion Moment, whether it was a Fallout 3 Moment or an Amalur Moment. It's what happens when you step out of the tutorial zone and get blinded by the dazzling light of the world you're free to explore, like a baby alien emerging from a human chest cavity. In Oblivion you've slogged through a sewer dungeon to get The Moment. You've earned it. You finally kill all the damn goblins and get to stand outdoors, on the shore of a rolling river. Across the water you see crumbling stone ruins, a bandit camp, and endless greenery leading off into the draw distance.

But you probably turn around at this point. You have that urge to go left instead of right at the start of a level, whether it was instilled by Pitfall! or Metroid. That's what I did, and behind me rose the white stone of the Imperial City. Bugger the countryside—that's where I went. For hours I walked the streets, talked to beggars, met the head of its Thieves Guild in a graveyard, and interrogated a suspicious merchant named Thoronir who had a face like a shiny punchable brick. They were good times.

Too soon, I had to leave. Questlines kept sending me to towns with unlovely names like Chorrol and Skingrad. Oblivion and games like it don't want you spending too long in one place, because you'll start looking at it too closely and realize that there aren't that many people for a city of its size and start asking uncomfortable questions. There are 194 citizens and 119 guards in the Imperial City. How much crime do they think people commit? 

Living in the Imperial City's great, though. The shack on the waterfront is the cheapest home in the game and also the best. Sure, it's a fixer-upper, but the fact it's small means everything you need is in a single room and you can swim to it from a nearby fast-travel point even if you're wanted by all 119 of the city's guards.

The big city is the place to be in so many RPGs. Almost all the good bits of Baldur's Gate II happen in the city of Athkatla, a city where almost everything is legal except unlicensed spellcasting, and that’s what all the cool kids are doing. When we reminisce about Planescape: Torment it's Sigil we think of, a city built on the inside of a giant floating doughnut, not Curst, a border town we visit way too late in the game to care about.

In the city there's something to find around every corner, and while in the wilderness there are impressive sights—the cliffs of Skellige, the mountaintop views of Skyrim—there's a lot of trekking to get from one to the next. In Sigil the Smoldering Corpse Bar, Ragpicker's Square, and the Brothel For Slaking Intellectual Lusts are all just a few screens apart. 

Thanks to the unrealistically low population numbers necessitated by processing power, video game cities cram their interesting characters close together. In the shifting tectonic city of Anachronox, from the game of the same name, you're never far from Whackmaster Jack and his brawling lessons or K'Conrad the floating informant. But eventually you have to leave Anachronox and travel to a spaceport full of scientists, then a world where everyone is obsessed with the democratic process. Neither is nearly as interesting. It's like when Final Fantasy VII makes you leave Midgar behind, or Mass Effect boots you off the Citadel—you swap a location that seems full of possibility and bigger than it really is with places that end up shrinking your conception of the game world. 

Novigrad Noire

While RPGs are fixated on their progression from the small tutorial area to the big city to the wide world beyond, open-world games that aren't really RPGs (though they borrow some of their mechanics) have no compunction about putting all their effort into a detailed city you can't leave. Most of the Grand Theft Auto and Saints Row games, Sleeping Dogs, L.A. Noire, and a couple of the more recent Assassin's Creed games have concentrated on making ridiculously detailed cities for crimes to happen in. Now imagine the kind of effort put into those games poured into an RPG which traded detailed vehicle physics and shooting for dialogue choices and branching questlines.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was the closest the GTA series came to being an RPG. CJ could be personalized in more ways than just a new haircut and had stats that controlled how good he was at driving or running, as well as how chubby or muscular he got. My CJ and your CJ might have had different amounts of stomach flab, different girlfriends, different levels of respect with the gangs, and access to different fighting styles. But San Andreas was also the GTA that pushed you out of the city, forcing you to abandon Los Santos and its gang wars for the much less interesting San Fierro and then an airfield where you had to spend hours gaining a pilot's licence. When GTA became an RPG it followed the genre's lead by making you leave the city—and suffered for it.

Of course, there have been attempts at RPGs set in and around a single city before. Dragon Age 2's energetic haters and fans have been furiously skimming over the previous paragraphs waiting for a mention of it. But though Dragon Age 2 limited itself to the city of Kirkwall and its surroundings, it infamously recycled so much that it felt thinner than the previous, larger Dragon Age instead of feeling more compact and detailed. Kirkwall was a city with only one warehouse in it, though it must have been a pretty good warehouse since every other covert meeting and gang war took place there.

Dragon Age 2 wasn't the first fantasy RPG to limit players to one city and cop flak for it. Way back in 1989 the D&D game Hillsfar trapped characters in a city like Athkatla where magic was banned. And apparently so were levelling up and the turn-based combat of the other D&D games. There has been an RPG that made a single-city setting work, however: Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. Its night-time Los Angeles is made up of hubs representing Downtown, Chinatown, Santa Monica and Hollywood, each with a different atmosphere, each a different angle on the city of angels.  

Vampire: the Masquerade – Bloodlines only works the way it does because you're a predator and the city's your feeding ground. It needs to have its dark alley with a guy pissing up against a wall, its multiple nightclubs, its believable parking lots, because those are places you can feed. Because those things make the city a perfect setting for vampires, Bloodlines had to pull off what other RPGs haven't. It was focused, able to evoke one place in a layered and hyper-detailed way. Even an inconsequential security guard had a story. Every hangout felt meaningfully distinct, even though two of them were goth clubs—one a kind of warehouse space, the other a converted church.  

That's what can happen when games stop chasing the goal of bigger meaning better, of trying to give us entire countries or even planets to ramble across and then having to repurpose the same story ingredients like they're stretching out last night's leftovers. In the city small distinctions can matter, even if it's the difference between the cafe you like and the one across the street you don't like. Spending time in one place makes us imbue it with significance if it does even the littlest things to earn it.

Games benefit from significance. A quest to save a place stops being item three in the journal when that place is the bar your favorite busker plays at. Finding out there's a fortune hidden in a building might make you want to steal it, but if the people who own it have a life beyond that you think twice. Characters who aren't just job titles and sleep schedules, shops that aren't just inventories and price lists, and locations that have as much personality as the people in them. How often do video game cities even bother naming their streets?

Now imagine a fantasy RPG with a level of detail equivalent to that of Bloodlines' Los Angeles or GTA's Los Santos. Taverns to hang out in, carriages to catch from place to place, markets to visit, and so many characters to talk to there'd be no reason to leave except for that one quest in the abandoned hotel outside of town. Or a futuristic version in a city with neon signs, hovercar traffic, late-night sushi bars, and sirens always wailing in the distance.

Maybe Cyberpunk 2077 will be that game, but even if it isn't, I've got my fingers crossed there are more people out there willing to overlook the reaction to Dragon Age 2 and try a one-city RPG again. I've had enough Oblivion Moments now.

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.

Valve's plan to allow modders to be paid for their work did not survive contact with the PC gaming community. When the proposal was announced in April 2015 with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim as a pilot game, it was met with a mixture of opposition and praise that Valve called "a dump truck of feedback." The plan was retracted in just four days.

To some, the notion of paying modders was contrary to the spirit of modding. Many suggested a donation scheme for Steam Workshop modders as an alternative to traditional pricing. Others, including prominent modders themselves, made the case that revenue sharing was long overdue for a group of creators that had produced beloved work over so many years.

"We underestimated the differences between our previously successful revenue sharing models, and the addition of paid mods to Skyrim's workshop," Valve's Alden Kroll wrote at the time. "We understand our own game's communities pretty well, but stepping into an established, years old modding community in Skyrim was probably not the right place to start iterating. We think this made us miss the mark pretty badly, even though we believe there's a useful feature somewhere here."

Almost two years later, Valve is speaking again about paying modders for their work. In a roundtable interview at Valve attended by PC Gamer and other press on Thursday, Valve's Gabe Newell expressed the company's intention to take a second crack at paid modding on Steam at some point in the future.Responding a question about the topic from GamesBeat editor Jeff Grubb, Newell talked broadly about the importance of Steam producing useful information for creators about their work.

"In a sense you want to have really good signal to noise ratios in how the gaming community signals to developers 'Yeah, do more of that.' Or, 'No, please, don't release any more of those ever.' And [modders] create a lot of value, and we think that … absolutely they need to be compensated, they're creating value and the degree to which they're not being accurately compensated is a bug in the system, right? It's just inserting noise into it," said Newell. "You want to have efficient ways so that the people who are actually creating value are the people that money is flowing to."

This language is stronger than the mostly apologetic blog post Valve left us with in 2015 ("We think this made us miss the mark pretty badly, even though we believe there's a useful feature somewhere here"), and it makes clear Valve's commitment to bringing back paid mods.

Newell continued to acknowledge that Valve's first attempt at monetizing modding was painful for the company. "The Skyrim situation was a mess. It was not the right place to launch that specific thing and we did some sort of ham-handed, stupid things in terms of how we rolled it out," he said. "EJ [Valve's Erik Johnson] basically said we just need to back off of this for now, but the fundamental concept of 'the gaming community needs to reward the people who are creating value' is pretty important, right? … the degree to which Valve helps contribute to efficiency in the system is one of the ways in which we're adding value to the system as a whole. So, you know, we have to just figure out how to do it in a way that makes customers happy and that they buy into it, it makes creators happy because they feel like the system is rational and is rewarding the right people for the work that they do. Does that make sense?"

It makes sense to us. Valve continues to pay modders, map makers, and modelers whose work is selected for publication in Team Fortress 2, CS:GO, and Dota 2. 

Newell didn't elaborate on what Valve would do differently in the future, but it'd be surprising if this eventual second attempt was tied to a big game with a heavily established modding scene such as Skyrim. "[Skyrim] gave us a ton of information. But there was also a little bit of 'That burner is hot. Maybe we wait awhile before we put our fingers on that burner again.'"

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. 

Bethesda Game Studios executive producer and game director Todd Howard, the driving force behind the mega-popular Elder Scrolls and Fallout franchises, has been announced as the 22nd inductee into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame. Howard "has created some of the industry's most success games by pioneering open-world gameplay," the AIAS said, adding that the games he's headed up "have been recipients of numerous DICE Awards throughout the years." 

Howard has been with Bethesda since the early '90s, beginning as a producer and designer on The Terminator: Future Shock. From there, he did design work on Daggerfall and Skynet in 1996, and then ascended to project leader on The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard in 1998, and Morrowind in 2002. Every major Bethesda RPG since then (which is to say, all of them) bears his name as either executive producer or game director.   

"Todd's impact on his studio, our company, and the gaming industry as a whole has been truly remarkable," Bethesda VP Pete Hines said. "When you look at the very best game developers of all time—the 21 members of the AIAS Hall of Fame—I think Todd deserves to have his name right alongside of them as the best of the best." 

Howard will be joining the likes of Shigeru Miyamoto, Sid Meier, John Carmack, Will Wright, Richard Garriott, Gabe Newell, Hideo Kojima, and numerous other industry luminaries as a member of the HOF. It's an impressive list of names by any measure, and a fitting end to a remarkable year: Howard also earned a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 16th annual GDC, while Fallout 4 claimed the Game of the Year award at the 19th DICE Awards, along with the nod for Outstanding Achievement in Game Direction—another accolade for Howard, who served as game director.   

"Todd is revered by legions of fans not just for his creative leadership over the years but for his humility and humor,” AIAS vice chairman Ted Price said. “Despite the fact that he’s helmed several of the most successful franchises in the history of our industry, he consistently defers praise to others and is the quintessential team player. Yet it’s Todd’s vision and strong direction that has brought Tamriel and the Commonwealth to life for millions around the world."

Howard will be presented with the Hall of Fame Award during a ceremony at the 20th DICE Awards on February 23, 2017, at the Mandalay Convention Center in Las Vegas—ironically, the setting for the one major Bethesda-era Fallout RPG that he didn't work on. 

Oblivion fans, this is sure to tug on your strings. Skyblivion, a modding project aiming to recreate the entirety of Oblivion in Skyrim, has released a new teaser trailer highlighting another year of hard work. Above, feast your eyes on a number of locations from Oblivion (including the entrance to The Shivering Isles). Set to the Oblivion soundtrack, the four-minute teaser provides an enticing look at Cyrodiil through the lens of the more recent Elder Scrolls RPG.

We don't yet have a release date for this expansive mod, but in an email modder Kyle Rebel told me, "Now that the base game is done we can focus on implementing the quests, voice acting and finish all the weapon and armor sets." That's a considerable amount of work still to do, but it's hard not to marvel at the progress that has already been made.

The Skyblivion team is also looking for volunteers to join the effort. If you're interested, you might want to pop them a tweet or join the forums at their website.

Skyrim turns five years old today, and what better way to celebrate its anniversary than by talking about its predecessor, the ten-year-old Oblivion, and why it s a better game. This isn t meant as some big diss on Skyrim, which is a great RPG I ve spent over 200 hours playing. But Oblivion is still better, and here s why:

The guild questlines

The guild storylines in Skyrim had strong stories and enjoyable adventures, but they absolutely pale in comparison to Oblivion s. Oblivion had the Fighter s Guild questline and its gut-wrenching reveal after you wipe out a group of goblins, the Mage s Guild story filled with intrigue, necromancers, and a surprising amount of destruction, and the Thieves Guild quests which culminate in the thrilling theft of an Elder Scroll from deep within the Imperial Palace.

The best, of course, was the Dark Brotherhood questline (spoilers to follow). Taking a nap after killing someone who perhaps didn t deserve it resulted in a recruitment pitch from a member of the Dark Brotherhood, Lucien Lachance. Join the guild and you ll be dispatched to eliminate a series of targets as you work your way up the Brotherhood s ladder.

The story includes an amazing mission to visit a party where you re assigned to kill everyone in attendance, with a bonus goal of making sure no one ever knows you re the killer. You can talk to your targets, discover the best ways to isolate them from the rest of the guests, and bump them off one-by-one, always deflecting the suspicions elsewhere. You can even convince one of the two remaining guests to kill the other, making your job that much easier. Brilliant, bloody fun.

And there s a fantastic twist to the Brotherhood questline. Midway through a series of dead drop assassination missions, Lucien suddenly appears to ask just what the hell you ve been doing. It turns out the dead drops you ve been receiving orders from have been compromised, your instructions have been replaced by an interloper, and you ve actually spent the past few missions murdering members of the Dark Brotherhood s inner circle! Ahh delicious.

Lucius winds up being blamed for the mis-killings, tortured, hung like a side of beef, and even partially eaten. It s a truly shocking and dispiriting moment to see him strung up naked, dead, and mutilated. Lucien was the slickest and coolest dude in the game, someone far too cool to wind up dangling upside down with half his face gone. That kind of thing doesn t happen to cool people, does it? In Oblivion, it does. Man. What a fantastic story.

Spellcrafting

Perhaps as a way to streamline Skyrim a bit to appeal to more players, some of the complexities of Oblivion were left behind. In particular, the ability to craft spells. Using an Altar of Spellmaking opened a pane where you could select the magical effects you had learned and were able to cast, and use them to create custom spells. You could set the range of the spell, the area of effect, and the duration, the parameters of which were determined by the Magicka cost and your skill level. You could mix, match, and combine effects, stack spells, and even name them. It was a fantastic feature, and its absence from Skyrim feels especially odd now, since crafting has become such a big element in games the past few years.

Daedra are better than dragons

I ll admit the main storyline of Oblivion isn t especially great. Closing those damn Oblivion gates, one after another after another, becomes a real slog. But if you ask me, battling the Daedra in Oblivion is still better than battling Skyrim s unending and frankly boring parade of dragons.

The first time you see a dragon in Skyrim, it s very cool. The first time you fight one, it s extremely exciting. Then you fight another. Then another. Eventually it becomes dull, and then simply a nuisance, something that makes you wearily climb off your horse for a minute or two. Now, I just let out a sigh when one appears circling overhead, and many times I ve killed it and stripped it for parts so quickly that I m already selling its bones to an unimpressed shopkeeper before I ve fully finished absorbing its soul.

I prefer the Daedra because they don t swoop down on me when I m hunting deer or walking through town or picking Nirnroot by a riverside. Plus, there s the added bonus of discovering Mythic Dawn agents in Oblivion, townsfolk who secretly worship the cult. In Skyrim, did you ever discover that a dragon was disguised as an average citizen? No. It would have been cool, though.

(Slightly) Better expansions

This is almost a tie, but I give the edge to Oblivion. Skyrim s expansions were a mixed bag: Dawnguard gave you the chance to become a vampire lord, but didn t provide a heck of a lot of adventure, and Hearthfire let you build a house perhaps serving as a precursor to what would eventually become Fallout 4 s settlement building feature but it wasn t much fun. Dragonborn was very good, though the selling point, dragon-riding, was a big disappointment.

Oblivion s expansions were Knights of the Nine, which wasn t exactly sprawling but had a great main quest, and Shivering Isles, which provided a couple dozen hours of exciting and bizarre adventures as you meet the Daedric Prince of Madness, become his champion, and eventually wear his crown. Most of the rest of Oblivion s DLC was forgettable (except for the Horse Armor Pack, which no one will ever forget), giving the player a couple of quests to claim new headquarters, but Mehrune s Razor stood out by providing a surprisingly large underground area to sneak and stab your way through if you happen to be an assassin (which I was at the time). Good stuff.

Enemy scaling

I know a lot of players didn t care for the fact that the enemies in Oblivion scale alongside them as they played, and I can see the downsides of it myself. There s a certain satisfaction in evolving into an immensely powerful being who can easily wipe out scores of enemies, the same enemies that gave them trouble when they were low-level. It s a reward for progress: those skeletons you had trouble fighting as a beginner now shatter with one fearsome swing, and it feels good.

Oblivion didn t work that way, and I admit it was a bit weird. At low levels, you might face a desperate highwayman wearing rags, or be attacked by a couple of wolves. Once you ve gained some levels, you ll notice the highwayman is wearing better gear and the wolves have been replaced by much meaner boars. Gain more levels and the robber will be decked out in expensive glass armor and the boars are now fearsome mountain lions. You never get a chance to mow down those simple skeletons when you come back as a high-level character, because those skeletons are gone, having become high-level wraiths and liches. It doesn t make a whole lot of sense.

There is an upside, though, a big one, and it s found in the immense freedom the game gives you the moment you finish the tutorial. You can wander anywhere on the map, absolutely anywhere, and find an appropriate challenge. You don t have to worry about being gutted in a heartbeat just because you re level 2 and you wandered into an area with level 20 monsters. The world is yours to explore, every inch of it, right from the start. Less realistic? Less immersive? Yeah, I would say so. But you get so much more freedom, and each time you begin a new game you can start anywhere you like.

Bonus sixth reason

The Adoring Fan. You pretend to hate him, but you love him and miss him. Go on back and play Oblivion. He ll be waiting.