7 ms·

OpenMW – open-source TES3 Morrowind reimplementation

127 points by agluszak 6y ago

gh-throw 6y ago
Late last year, after they restored shadows (I think they'd had to take them out while fixing some stuff, or something) I played most of Morrowind with this. Still intending to go back and finish. Finished the main quest, a huge percentage of the side quests, and Tribunal. Was just getting ready to start Bloodmoon. What works: everything. Everything I tried. What did I try? All the parts of the game listed above, plus 20-30 plugins, including one obscure library plugin that's not on Nexus. Used Mod Organizer2, IIRC. No problems. Worked great. Know what's amazing? No crashes. Not. A. Single. One. Anyone who played Morrowind back in the day remembers all the crashes. So many, even with stability mods and later versions of the game. This? Rock solid. What doesn't: plugins that patch or wrap the Morrowind .exe file. That's about it. Oh well. Bonus round: you can crank up the view distance to fairly high levels on even a medium-good rig, much farther than in the original game. Definitely improves it.
- wtallis 6y ago
  Support for dynamic shadows was dropped years ago when they decided they had to port the game from the Ogre3D rendering engine to OpenSceneGraph in order to eventually reach 1.0 quality: https://openmw.org/2015/announcing-switch-openscenegraph/ https://openmw.org/2015/announcing-switch-openscenegraph/ It's pretty impressive that the project has been so successful with such a major transition, and that things didn't stall and fall apart along the way despite how long it took.
  - girvo 6y ago
    I was always a fan of tinkering with Ogre back in the day. I wonder if there are any other extant projects still using it these days?
- shakna 6y ago
  OpenMW got me and a friend back into Morrowind. It plays really well across most platforms. OpenMW-CS is also really well done, to the point where we ended up maintaining our own collection of plugins in its new format for ourselves. [0] [0] https://morromod.netlify.app/ https://morromod.netlify.app/
- totetsu 6y ago
  cranking up the view distance on morrowind makes you realise that those big cities that are supposed to be miles apart are actually right next to each other
- Athas 6y ago
  I agree with this. I played OpenMW some years ago, and I was stunned at the quality. It's one of those open source projects where the quality is just implausibly good, especially considering how few open source games exist at all. (I am aware that OpenMW is short-circuiting the normal problems by re-implementing an existing design, and re-using existing art, but it's still wildly impressive.)
roenxi 6y ago
OpenMW is impressive, but the modding community around Morrowind was always amazing. A selection of good mods and the original game becomes a minor distraction. Tamriel Rebuilt [0] alone is probably about as many hours of gameplay as the original Morrowind and a much larger area to explore. [0] https://www.tamriel-rebuilt.org/ https://www.tamriel-rebuilt.org/
- breakfastduck 6y ago
  I had the luxury of morrowind coming out at the perfect age for me. Plus dabbling with mods and customizing your games - perfect for someone interested in computers and gaming. Being able to ignore it's in your face faults in a modern world, I honestly dont think any other RPGs will hit me the same way. Okay, there's one. It's Oblivion. As much as Todd Howard has been a weasel, they've created two of the greatest RPG's ever made, imo.
  - totetsu 6y ago
    Oblivion didn't have levitation potions anymore though.
thrower123 6y ago
I guess this is my reminder to check in on the fan Unity port of Daggerfall. https://www.dfworkshop.net/ https://www.dfworkshop.net/ I think it's actually done now? I struggled mightily to get through the tutorial dungeon when the original Daggerfall was made freeware long, long ago, and one of these days, I swear, I'm going to really play it.
- kbenson 6y ago
  Ha, I ended up checking up on that myself for the first time in a couple years a day or two ago. I've always been particularly interested in Daggerfal ports because that's one I never played when it it was first out. Not entirely sure why, I owned and played Arena, and Morrowind is one of my all-time favorites (Possible my absolute favorite game, actually. I played Oblivion last year finally and it was meh, I'll probably start Skyrim finally in a few months and have low expectations, so maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised). I've tried to get into Daggerfall multiple times over the years (before and after the game was made free), but combined with it being testy to get running right in Dosbox, and that even when you get it running some keys seemed to not work quite right, I've never quite gotten a game more than a few hours in. As of January, their roadmap says they are at "All game features now supported", so this seems an opportune time to try again...
  - nix23 6y ago
    Best way to play Daggerfall is with DaggerfallSetup: https://wiwiki.wiwiland.net/index.php?title=Daggerfall_:_DaggerfallSetup_EN https://wiwiki.wiwiland.net/index.php?title=Daggerfall_:_Dag... LOTS of fixes and improvements, it's meant as a ready to play fixed daggerfall-installation.
    - kbenson 6y ago
      I remember seeing this, but I can't remember if I tried it or pegged it for "next time". I also imagine the new engine will have more friendly movement controls. The hardest part of playing good games from the past is when the control scheme hadn't settled in what we now generally consider a superior format, and sometimes the old engines don't take well to those control schemes. IIRC daggerfall was somewhat in this camp (and for some reason I'm remembering it as more painful than arena, possibly because of more vertical space but bad mouse look?)
aasasd 6y ago
See also: a list of open-source game clones https://osgameclones.com https://osgameclones.com
xkeysc0re 6y ago
There's also https://tes3mp.com/ https://tes3mp.com/ which as the name implies, lets you play multiplayer Morrowind. Yes, you read that right.
- wheybags 6y ago
  For clarity, this is a fork of openmw, and is planned to be merged into mainline at some point.
wrongdonf 6y ago
I’ve been playing morrowind on openmw since 2013. It’s such a fantastic project. It’s a stable and clean way to experience morrowind, but half the enjoyment is in the community surrounding it. The video updates have been a cherished ritual for me for many years now. And the website has a very thoughtful atmosphere with the strider lurking overhead. It’s honestly been an important part of my life. And this of course was all preceded by my original fascination with morrowind, which is certainly one of the finest video games ever made despite its user-hostile qualities. The soundtrack has never been equaled. The game was made in a time when video games weren’t a billion dollar industry and where the nature of the game reflected the nature of the people who made it — and morrowind was made by a band of intellectuals, idealists and pioneers. It simply does not happen that way anymore in mainstream games.
totetsu 6y ago
The TES series is the site of a real clear example of the divergent paths that tech had and could have taken since 2000. One way led to a huge modding community, authoring tools bundled with the game, longevity and open implementation. Another led to Horse armour DLC, micro transaction driven mmorpgs, and the same game implemented and charged for over and over again for each system.
- Athas 6y ago
  To be fair, TES has both horse armour DLC and an incredibly huge modding community.
- Agentlien 6y ago
  I don't see a divergent path. Oblivion and Skyrim both come bundled with modding tools and have an enormous community of modders and a wealth of mods. Bethesda themselves have also released a few really good expansions to each of their games (Tribunal, Shivering Isles, Dragonborn to mention one from each game since Morrowind) as well as a few smaller but satisfying DLCs (Hearthfire for instance). That they also misstepped with a few shamefully overpriced minimal mods deserves being called out but does not undo any of the above.
lostmsu 6y ago
I am most excited about VR: https://gitlab.com/OpenMW/openmw/-/merge_requests/251 https://gitlab.com/OpenMW/openmw/-/merge_requests/251 If that works on Oculus Quest 2 with multiplayer mod, that'd be awesome!
yread 6y ago
It also runs on Android under the name Open Microwave https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=is.xyz.omw&hl=en&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=is.xyz.omw&hl=...
edem 6y ago
I've never played any of these games apart from Skyrim. How would you compare the two? I've heard that this game is legendary. For me Skyrim's atmosphere was awesome, but the storyline was a bit meh. Edit: thanks for all the responses they are quite insightful!
- neilshevlin 6y ago
  Morrowind: Dense, lot's of lore and immersion. More open, and less guided. I think at this time the cult of linear narrative was in it's infancy. And so you could kind of do more of what you wanted in Morrowind. Oblivion: Brilliant for it's time in terms of world building, graphics and size. Famous for it's goofy elements, story line and characters. It still kept a lot of that attention to detail, but you could see it was starting to make tradeoffs. IMO, As time has gone on, TES had traded size and grandeur for attention to detail, and Tolkien-esque world building. Skyrim was beautiful and a good continuation of the series. But it successfully struck a great balance between open world role playing, and commercial accessibility for audiences more accustomed to a single player linear narrative experience. I'm too young to have played Daggerfall or Arena, so someone else would have to fill you in.
  - kbenson 6y ago
    Arena took place in all of Tamriel. Cities were procedurally generated from a seed if I recall correctly, so they could have buildings in same locations across games, but cities were huge and filled with random people (like over a hundred buildibgs, some probably had specific structures). You could walk for hours between cities, because the land was also procedurally generated, but mostly flat. This was doable because the game looks like minecraft with a bigger block size. It feels like a cross between a few features of a modern TES game and a rogue-like.
- hutzlibu 6y ago
  I played Morrowind when it came out, but not for long, because the fighting was a bit boring. Something that worked very well in Skyrim. So I am curious, how it works in this version.
alhirzel 6y ago
Anyone else super blown away by that visualization of development activity?
- Rogach 6y ago
  That's done in Gource. Very awesome and easy-to-use tool - takes any VCS as input. https://gource.io/ https://gource.io/
1MachineElf 6y ago
Last year, OpenMW 0.46 also introduced limited support for opening files from Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3, and Fallout New Vegas. See: https://community.pcgamingwiki.com/topic/4715-openmw-046-brings-experimental-support-for-oblivion-fallout-3-new-vegas-and-skyrim/ https://community.pcgamingwiki.com/topic/4715-openmw-046-bri...

127 points by agluszak 6y ago

Late last year, after they restored shadows (I think they'd had to take them out while fixing some stuff, or something) I played most of Morrowind with this. Still intending to go back and finish. Finished the main quest, a huge percentage of the side quests, and Tribunal. Was just getting ready to start Bloodmoon. What works: everything. Everything I tried. What did I try? All the parts of the game listed above, plus 20-30 plugins, including one obscure library plugin that's not on Nexus. Used Mod Organizer2, IIRC. No problems. Worked great. Know what's amazing? No crashes. Not. A. Single. One. Anyone who played Morrowind back in the day remembers all the crashes. So many, even with stability mods and later versions of the game. This? Rock solid. What doesn't: plugins that patch or wrap the Morrowind .exe file. That's about it. Oh well. Bonus round: you can crank up the view distance to fairly high levels on even a medium-good rig, much farther than in the original game. Definitely improves it.

wtallis 6y ago
Support for dynamic shadows was dropped years ago when they decided they had to port the game from the Ogre3D rendering engine to OpenSceneGraph in order to eventually reach 1.0 quality: https://openmw.org/2015/announcing-switch-openscenegraph/ https://openmw.org/2015/announcing-switch-openscenegraph/ It's pretty impressive that the project has been so successful with such a major transition, and that things didn't stall and fall apart along the way despite how long it took.
- girvo 6y ago
  I was always a fan of tinkering with Ogre back in the day. I wonder if there are any other extant projects still using it these days?
shakna 6y ago
OpenMW got me and a friend back into Morrowind. It plays really well across most platforms. OpenMW-CS is also really well done, to the point where we ended up maintaining our own collection of plugins in its new format for ourselves. [0] [0] https://morromod.netlify.app/ https://morromod.netlify.app/
totetsu 6y ago
cranking up the view distance on morrowind makes you realise that those big cities that are supposed to be miles apart are actually right next to each other
Athas 6y ago
I agree with this. I played OpenMW some years ago, and I was stunned at the quality. It's one of those open source projects where the quality is just implausibly good, especially considering how few open source games exist at all. (I am aware that OpenMW is short-circuiting the normal problems by re-implementing an existing design, and re-using existing art, but it's still wildly impressive.)

roenxi 6y ago

OpenMW is impressive, but the modding community around Morrowind was always amazing. A selection of good mods and the original game becomes a minor distraction. Tamriel Rebuilt [0] alone is probably about as many hours of gameplay as the original Morrowind and a much larger area to explore. [0] https://www.tamriel-rebuilt.org/ https://www.tamriel-rebuilt.org/

breakfastduck 6y ago
I had the luxury of morrowind coming out at the perfect age for me. Plus dabbling with mods and customizing your games - perfect for someone interested in computers and gaming. Being able to ignore it's in your face faults in a modern world, I honestly dont think any other RPGs will hit me the same way. Okay, there's one. It's Oblivion. As much as Todd Howard has been a weasel, they've created two of the greatest RPG's ever made, imo.
- totetsu 6y ago
  Oblivion didn't have levitation potions anymore though.

thrower123 6y ago

I guess this is my reminder to check in on the fan Unity port of Daggerfall. https://www.dfworkshop.net/ https://www.dfworkshop.net/ I think it's actually done now? I struggled mightily to get through the tutorial dungeon when the original Daggerfall was made freeware long, long ago, and one of these days, I swear, I'm going to really play it.

kbenson 6y ago
Ha, I ended up checking up on that myself for the first time in a couple years a day or two ago. I've always been particularly interested in Daggerfal ports because that's one I never played when it it was first out. Not entirely sure why, I owned and played Arena, and Morrowind is one of my all-time favorites (Possible my absolute favorite game, actually. I played Oblivion last year finally and it was meh, I'll probably start Skyrim finally in a few months and have low expectations, so maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised). I've tried to get into Daggerfall multiple times over the years (before and after the game was made free), but combined with it being testy to get running right in Dosbox, and that even when you get it running some keys seemed to not work quite right, I've never quite gotten a game more than a few hours in. As of January, their roadmap says they are at "All game features now supported", so this seems an opportune time to try again...
- nix23 6y ago
  Best way to play Daggerfall is with DaggerfallSetup: https://wiwiki.wiwiland.net/index.php?title=Daggerfall_:_DaggerfallSetup_EN https://wiwiki.wiwiland.net/index.php?title=Daggerfall_:_Dag... LOTS of fixes and improvements, it's meant as a ready to play fixed daggerfall-installation.
  - kbenson 6y ago
    I remember seeing this, but I can't remember if I tried it or pegged it for "next time". I also imagine the new engine will have more friendly movement controls. The hardest part of playing good games from the past is when the control scheme hadn't settled in what we now generally consider a superior format, and sometimes the old engines don't take well to those control schemes. IIRC daggerfall was somewhat in this camp (and for some reason I'm remembering it as more painful than arena, possibly because of more vertical space but bad mouse look?)

aasasd 6y ago

See also: a list of open-source game clones https://osgameclones.com https://osgameclones.com

xkeysc0re 6y ago

There's also https://tes3mp.com/ https://tes3mp.com/ which as the name implies, lets you play multiplayer Morrowind. Yes, you read that right.

wheybags 6y ago
For clarity, this is a fork of openmw, and is planned to be merged into mainline at some point.

wrongdonf 6y ago

I’ve been playing morrowind on openmw since 2013. It’s such a fantastic project. It’s a stable and clean way to experience morrowind, but half the enjoyment is in the community surrounding it. The video updates have been a cherished ritual for me for many years now. And the website has a very thoughtful atmosphere with the strider lurking overhead. It’s honestly been an important part of my life. And this of course was all preceded by my original fascination with morrowind, which is certainly one of the finest video games ever made despite its user-hostile qualities. The soundtrack has never been equaled. The game was made in a time when video games weren’t a billion dollar industry and where the nature of the game reflected the nature of the people who made it — and morrowind was made by a band of intellectuals, idealists and pioneers. It simply does not happen that way anymore in mainstream games.

totetsu 6y ago

The TES series is the site of a real clear example of the divergent paths that tech had and could have taken since 2000. One way led to a huge modding community, authoring tools bundled with the game, longevity and open implementation. Another led to Horse armour DLC, micro transaction driven mmorpgs, and the same game implemented and charged for over and over again for each system.

Athas 6y ago
To be fair, TES has both horse armour DLC and an incredibly huge modding community.
Agentlien 6y ago
I don't see a divergent path. Oblivion and Skyrim both come bundled with modding tools and have an enormous community of modders and a wealth of mods. Bethesda themselves have also released a few really good expansions to each of their games (Tribunal, Shivering Isles, Dragonborn to mention one from each game since Morrowind) as well as a few smaller but satisfying DLCs (Hearthfire for instance). That they also misstepped with a few shamefully overpriced minimal mods deserves being called out but does not undo any of the above.

lostmsu 6y ago

I am most excited about VR: https://gitlab.com/OpenMW/openmw/-/merge_requests/251 https://gitlab.com/OpenMW/openmw/-/merge_requests/251 If that works on Oculus Quest 2 with multiplayer mod, that'd be awesome!

yread 6y ago

It also runs on Android under the name Open Microwave https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=is.xyz.omw&hl=en&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=is.xyz.omw&hl=...

edem 6y ago

I've never played any of these games apart from Skyrim. How would you compare the two? I've heard that this game is legendary. For me Skyrim's atmosphere was awesome, but the storyline was a bit meh. Edit: thanks for all the responses they are quite insightful!

neilshevlin 6y ago
Morrowind: Dense, lot's of lore and immersion. More open, and less guided. I think at this time the cult of linear narrative was in it's infancy. And so you could kind of do more of what you wanted in Morrowind. Oblivion: Brilliant for it's time in terms of world building, graphics and size. Famous for it's goofy elements, story line and characters. It still kept a lot of that attention to detail, but you could see it was starting to make tradeoffs. IMO, As time has gone on, TES had traded size and grandeur for attention to detail, and Tolkien-esque world building. Skyrim was beautiful and a good continuation of the series. But it successfully struck a great balance between open world role playing, and commercial accessibility for audiences more accustomed to a single player linear narrative experience. I'm too young to have played Daggerfall or Arena, so someone else would have to fill you in.
- kbenson 6y ago
  Arena took place in all of Tamriel. Cities were procedurally generated from a seed if I recall correctly, so they could have buildings in same locations across games, but cities were huge and filled with random people (like over a hundred buildibgs, some probably had specific structures). You could walk for hours between cities, because the land was also procedurally generated, but mostly flat. This was doable because the game looks like minecraft with a bigger block size. It feels like a cross between a few features of a modern TES game and a rogue-like.
hutzlibu 6y ago
I played Morrowind when it came out, but not for long, because the fighting was a bit boring. Something that worked very well in Skyrim. So I am curious, how it works in this version.

alhirzel 6y ago

Anyone else super blown away by that visualization of development activity?

Rogach 6y ago
That's done in Gource. Very awesome and easy-to-use tool - takes any VCS as input. https://gource.io/ https://gource.io/

1MachineElf 6y ago

Last year, OpenMW 0.46 also introduced limited support for opening files from Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3, and Fallout New Vegas. See: https://community.pcgamingwiki.com/topic/4715-openmw-046-brings-experimental-support-for-oblivion-fallout-3-new-vegas-and-skyrim/ https://community.pcgamingwiki.com/topic/4715-openmw-046-bri...