8 ms·

OpenMW 0.50.0 Released – open-source Morrowind reimplementation

303 points by agluszak 1y ago

evanjrowley 1y ago
This project never fails to impress me. If you scroll to the bottom of the announcement, you'll see maps from Skyrim, Fallout: New Vegas, and Oblivion loaded into OpenMW. Games people spend 1000 hours playing earn a level of cultural significance that deserves protection from rent-seeking publishers. Each time Bethesda announces an update to Skyrim or Fallout 4, I cringe, because what the updates do above all else is break the existing mods. OpenMW is solving this problem for older Bethesda titiles, but I am pessimistic about Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5. Those two are years away and already lost causes IMHO.
- kqr 1y ago
  Not to mention the immense effort from the modding community. The Tamriel Rebuilt mod opens up much of mainland Morrowind for exploration (the official game covers only the island of Vvardenfell) and it is huge. It's as if they had released a Morrowind 2 but made it twice as big and still in the exact same style as the original.
  - ndriscoll 1y ago
    Also: * Graphics updates with shaders for improved water and fog (which you can combine with much higher view distance), godrays, HDR, etc, improved meshes, improved grass, high resolution textures with normal maps and PBR. * Modernized UIs * Multi-mark (extra marks as you level mysticism) * Turn the books into audiobooks and add full voice acting if you're a mild heathen. * Combat and leveling system overhauls if you're a full heathen. https://youtube.com/watch?v=iFZm4VZnHy0 https://youtube.com/watch?v=iFZm4VZnHy0 https://youtube.com/watch?v=9Hv-46CCd9I https://youtube.com/watch?v=9Hv-46CCd9I https://modding-openmw.com/ https://modding-openmw.com/
    - hyperman1 1y ago
      I played it a year ago. To my surprise, in some ways, the advanced graphics broke my immersion. Standing in Vivec and expanding the render distance to Seyda Neen takes away part of the mystery. I had the same with Gothic, where my more powerfull computer could render Xardas' tower when standing in the old camp. Both games partially depend on limited render distance to provide an illusion of vastness.
      - Eupolemos 1y ago
        IIRC, you can adjust the fog to still be there and get the best of both worlds. Morrowind can indeed be small to look at, but big to play in <3
      - kqr 1y ago
        Volumetric fog is the solution. Gives you the best of both worlds: distant peaks over the mist, yet difficulty navigating to the next settlement.
  - 4ggr0 1y ago
    one of my favorite games i've ever played is Enderal: Forgotten Stories[0], total conversion mod for Skyrim. liked it way more than Skyrim, includes some new gameplay elements and the story is absolutely phenomenal. while playing it i was constantly in awe of the fact that this was a free conversion made by a low amount of people. played it for about 90 hours over a couple of weeks. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enderal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enderal
    - notnullorvoid 1y ago
      I found Enderal so compelling that I watched a full playthrough, it's the only game I've ever done that with. I wanted to play it all the way through myself, but my PC at the time had very strange audio cracking issues with Skyrim so I wasn't able to get far.
- akerl_ 1y ago
  > Games people spend 1000 hours playing earn a level of cultural significance that deserves protection from rent-seeking publishers. It's not clear to me what you're suggesting here? 1. Are you saying that the developer shouldn't be able to ship updates to their game if those upgrades break 3rd party mods? 2. Why would a game's developer's rights be restricted after they ship something based on how many people use it or how much society likes it?
  - afavour 1y ago
    > Are you saying that the developer shouldn't be able to ship updates to their game if those upgrades break 3rd party mods? Reading between the lines I think OP is suggesting backwards compatibility is retained when publishing updates. > Why would a game's developer's rights be restricted after they ship something based on how many people use it or how much society likes it? I'm assuming OP's answer is something along the lines of "because it's good for society". Why shouldn't society do things that are good for society, even if they increase a burden on a profit making company? Obviously every case is different but the principle is sound, IMO. Like copyright expiry. At the very least it's an interesting thought exercise.
    - aidenn0 1y ago
      Consider books in the vein of Hardy Boys[1]. Many of these books get revised over the years by the publisher. Imagine if the book on your shelf changed and when you went to read it again, the prose differed from how you remembered. People can disagree as to the extent to which the changes are good or bad (some are clearly fixes for "whoa, that was racist even for the year it was published" others are claimed by the original authors to have stamped out the small bit of originality they were able to slip past the editors), but something is lost when you lose things the way they were originally experienced. 1: For those who don't know, this is a kids book series with a single pen-name, but with each book written for-hire. Nancy Drew and Tom Swift were created by the same publisher in a similar manner.
      - akerl_ 1y ago
- Pet_Ant 1y ago
  I've felt that properties that earn a certain threshold should become public domain. You've made enough money, and now you are part of the culture. The heft of having created a cultural landmark or cornerstone ought to be enough weight to ensure their other projects get enough of a boost.
  - FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
    I keep hoping they'll release Cyberpunk 2077 for open development. They abandoned the RedEngine and the city is really well built.
    - throwaway314155 1y ago
      Did they really abandon it after all that work? The engine itself was basically the only interesting part of that game! (ignoring gameplay-oriented engine stuff).
      - FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
        They moved devlopment to Unreal 5
        unixhero 1y ago
        Much better
      - danso 1y ago
        Given how lackluster most everything was (beyond the visual design of the city) — e.g. physics, crowd interaction, scripted events — maybe the engine was what held their creative vision back?
        FuriouslyAdrift 11mo ago
        It took them nearly 2 years, but the game has advanced a lot since it's launch. The Phantom Liberty DLC plus the 2.0 update/rebalancing made it more fun (even if it made it more 'console' and less PC)
- Der_Einzige 1y ago
  The real red pill is to realize that everything Bethesda made starting with fallout 3 is pretty bad. Skyrim is one of the most overrated video games ever. The combat and exploration from a 2005 game, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic was infinitely better. Skyrim was "big" and had a good soundtrack and that's about it. If you don't believe me, see some gameplay: 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-p3zj0YKKYE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-p3zj0YKKYE 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeRUHzYJwNE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeRUHzYJwNE
  - skotobaza 1y ago
    > Skyrim is one of the most overrated video games ever Agreed. Most of the systems do not work as intended, the amount of content is very low compared to previous entries. There is no excuse for it to be released in such poor state, since Bethesda had already released two games for the same generation prior to that. And they did what they always do - ship a couple of updates and then just drop the game until the DLC is release and then promptly drop all the support. Even though there are still many bugs left in the game. They've been doing that for years, yet people still praise them for some reason. A very irresponsible developer.
    - thewebguyd 1y ago
      > They've been doing that for years, yet people still praise them for some reason. Because of the lore, setting, and the openness of both (and the engine). For a lot of ES fans (myself included), we aren't expecting an engaging game as much as a fun world sandbox set in the ES universe, with the ability to extend/mod it into whatever we want. The games are less about defined goals and more about roleplaying, exploration and world-building.
      - skotobaza 1y ago
        > The games are less about defined goals and more about roleplaying, exploration and world-building. And Skyrim lacks in each aspect, especially compared to previous Elder Scrolls games. You have even less skills than in Oblivion (which in turn had even less skills than Morrowind). The dungeons (caves, forts etc.) do not offer any meaningful rewards, so there is little incentive to just randomly explore the world. The guild questlines are much shorter which doesn't help roleplaying when you can become a grandmaster in one evening of playtime. Moreover, there are randomly generated quests thrown in to pad the time, which is even worse.
- thatguy0900 1y ago
  The real reason to be pessimistic about elder scrolls 6 is that Bethesda has tried multiple times already to get paid modding where they take a huge chuck of the profits to stick. They will stop taking no for an answer at some point
  - ohyes 1y ago
    Yep, paid modding is Bethesda cooking and eating the golden goose. As soon as it happens it kills what makes their games special.
saubeidl 1y ago
On a related note, there's a fork of OpenMW that lets you play the game multiplayer with your friends: https://tes3mp.com/ https://tes3mp.com/ Unfortunately, it's a bit outdated (based on 0.47), but OpenMW devs have announced their intention to add multiplayer to upstream as well. Additionally, one can't talk about Morrowind fan projects without mentioning Tamriel Rebuilt, a 24-year-and-counting effort to build all of Tamriel within Morrowind. It's not done yet, but it already has twice as many quests as the base game [0], massive landmasses, joinable factions and a city that's way bigger than anything the base game has to offer, all while staying lore-friendly and neatly integrated. Times are good for Morrowind fans. [0] https://www.tamriel-rebuilt.org/about/frequently-asked-questions/quests https://www.tamriel-rebuilt.org/about/frequently-asked-quest...
- iberator 1y ago
  Why not rebuild whole morrowind and Skyrim i. daggerfall unity? Map is already there hehe
  - saubeidl 1y ago
    You're welcome to start your own multi-decade project heh. Seriously tho, TR is amazing.
- NeveHanter 1y ago
  Nit/Correction; Tamriel Rebuilt is not about adding all the Tamriel but only Morrowind mainland. What you might be thinking about is Project Tamriel [0] which tries to add Cyrodill, Skyrim, High Rock and Hammerfell. They're working in collaboration with Tamriel Rebuilt so they are all compatible and share many resources. [0] https://www.project-tamriel.com/welcome https://www.project-tamriel.com/welcome
agluszak 1y ago
If you have some spare time, please consider contributing! The community is really nice, I have sent a few PRs myself :)
mdtrooper 1y ago
I love this kind of free software (or open source) project. It is a hard work for several years. I think that the goal or finish of this work is the engine and a new (similar to old close game) set free assets (sprites, 3D models, maps, music...). And I know few projects in this point, OpenTTD and FreeDoom. Are there more projects in this point?
- saubeidl 1y ago
  There's a whole lot! Here's a list I found: https://github.com/radek-sprta/awesome-game-remakes https://github.com/radek-sprta/awesome-game-remakes
- NoboruWataya 1y ago
  OpenRA (Command & Conquer), CorsixTH (Theme Hospital), ET: Legacy (Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory) and FreeCiv (Civilization) are the examples I have spent the most time playing. I know there are others targeting games like Age of Empires and Heroes of Might and Magic but I haven't played them and I'm not sure if they are as mature.
  - saubeidl 1y ago
    VCMI (the Heroes of Might and Magic 3 one) is amazing!
- klaussilveira 1y ago
  https://osgameclones.com https://osgameclones.com Also: https://freegamer.blogspot.com/ https://freegamer.blogspot.com/
- NortySpock 1y ago
  I've been enjoying and contributing patches to Beyond All Reason, which traces its inspiration back to the Total Annihilation real time strategy game. It's truly incredible what a community can achieve over the course of ~20 years of open-source contributions.
  - 1y ago
NoboruWataya 1y ago
Still my all time favourite game, and the work the OpenMW team are continuing to do is incredible. Really breathing new life into an old game while remaining faithful to the original vision. I didn't even realise they are aiming to support later game engines, that is very exciting.
boriskourt 1y ago
The Lua integration has grown massively over the last couple of years. Can really get up to some very cool stuff now. Its been fun to see how it contributes to a lot of the dehardcoding in the C++ codebase too.
Caius-Cosades 1y ago
OpenMW my beloved.
sys32768 1y ago
I want to play again so long as there's a mod to reduce the cliff racers.
- FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
  I used to hear that screeching in my dreams...
- thinkingtoilet 1y ago
  There is. As well as a mod to turn off the assassins that try to kill you when you rest.
  - phantasmish 1y ago
    Oh hell no, I need those guys to give me free, good early-to-mid-game light armor. Saves me from having to think about armor at all until I can get ahold of some glass (except subbing in the odd enchanted piece).
    - Lapsa 1y ago
      farm vivec guards and sell to crab dude
accrual 1y ago
Wow, congrats on the significant release, OpenMW team! > In out-of-combat situations, Morrowind updates awareness only every so often, and characters don't have superhuman (or superelvish) reaction time while observing your… exploits I laughed. This reminded me of playing Oblivion, carefully stealthing my way through an NPC's belongings, only to pick up 1 gold and hear "STOP! You've violated the law!". > As the 0.49.0 release announcement boasted, running Oblivion and later Bethesda open-world engine games is in the engine’s eventual scope. So cool! I see the demo Oblivion screenshot. I would adore playing Oblivion on a Morrowind-like engine. Both games have their merits but I always liked the more retro/polygonal charm of Morrowind.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- yard2010 1y ago
  "I've heard someone saved king kassimir" "Really? Any idea who it was? I want to buy this person an ale" "DRAGONS? in our own homeland?" "Come on help us out here! We can't stand here all day!"
Aardwolf 1y ago
I enjoyed openmw in 2020 with many settings and mods for super far rendering and other better graphics. I can't imagine how many improvements it must have had in those 5 years, it was already perfect then :)
- phantasmish 1y ago
  It also crashes a hell of a lot less than the official binary. I did a play through a couple years ago, with plenty of mods, and saw zero crashes in tens of hours of play, which is practically unachievable with the official .exe. It'd be a must-have for that quality alone, even if it improved nothing else.
beepbooptheory 1y ago
Don't follow closely but immediately looked for and was happy to find: > As you may have heard, the headline feature of this release is, undeniably, the improved gamepad support introduced by our talented new contributor enoznal. By enabling the Controller Menus option in the launcher, you will be able to use the controller action buttons to navigate more conveniently through the slightly altered in-game UI. You are no longer limited to the combination of emulated mouse and A button use available previously. For example, you can brew potions and enchant items entirely without using the emulated mouse. While the alternative UI is not at all reminiscent of Morrowind’s famous official Xbox port, it should be intuitive enough for those familiar with it. I read: I can play on my steam deck now :).
AdmiralAsshat 1y ago
So it's interesting that I never hear much about the Morrowind modding community. Daggerfall has a huge one because of how archaic it is by modern standards. Oblivion and Skyrim had mods since day 1 (in fact I think some of my favorite New Vegas mods were Oblivion mods first). But I rarely hear about Morrowind mods. Is the consensus just that it doesn't need them?
- zabzonk 1y ago
  Morrowind has zillions, largely because the original CD version (the one with the big colour map) came with its own mod editor, used by bethesda to develop the game. I remember using it to cut down on the cliff-racer count.
  - AdmiralAsshat 1y ago
    Ah, so the StarCraft Map Editor approach.
- ecshafer 1y ago
  Did you play a lot of Morrowind? I am shocked you haven't heard of Morrowind mods. The biggest most popular mods are Tamrield Rebuilt, which builds the mainland. There are also mods for graphics and drawing distance, new houses, a lot of mods around balmora, new guilds, new armors, ones that change how unarmored and unarmed work, how enchanting work, etc. I think Morrowind Vanilla is fine, but there are a few I like, personally I like mods that make enchanting your own items worthwhile, unarmed and unarmored are broken vanilla, and a few bug fixes mods, but I prefer a vanilla like experience.
  - AdmiralAsshat 1y ago
    No, I didn't! That's part of what informs my question. I had the original Morrowind on Xbox and never got anywhere with it (I think I spent like 30 minutes creating my character, opened a chest in the first room in the game because apparently I wasn't supposed to do that, got beaten/arrested, and then I put the game down). I did buy the PC version specifically for OpenMW use--because until Proton that was the only way to play it on Linux, but I've not gotten around to doing a full playthrough. I wanted to know about mods because those usually can help provide some QoL adjustments that can ease the learning curve if you didn't grow up with the game.
zeagle 1y ago
I wish there were one click or download large mod packs to modernize the game. I find for this, new vegas, oblivion I spend two evenings getting everything to play nice/give up then run out of steam and don't actually plan anything.
- Night_Thastus 1y ago
  There are. These days there are OpenMW-specific mod packs. You run one command to download everything, another command to install and configure it. The instructions are really good, it's hard to mess up. See here: https://modding-openmw.com/lists/ https://modding-openmw.com/lists/
  - zeagle 1y ago
    That's helpful. I'll take a look. Thank you!
  - zeagle 1y ago
    Thanks again. That is much easier than in the past. Fired it up yesterday, tried downloading 30+ mods manually, got a premium nexusmods account to automate and speed up the downloads and it just works. Damn, there is a lot of content and upgrades from a few hours in it. Wish I could be a teenager spending many hours a week on it again!
    - Night_Thastus 11mo ago
      Yeah. Especially Tamriel Rebuilt adds a boatload of content. They're still working on it, but a good chunk of the mainland is explorable and full of quests. :)
Night_Thastus 1y ago
I recently completed a playthrough on 0.49, with the Total Overhaul pack. It's remarkable what modders have done. They've breathed a lot of life into such an old game. Don't be fooled though, even with OpenMW it still runs quite poorly at times. Any water reflections cause effectively the whole scene to be rendered twice, and it just kills the framerate. Many of the shaders like volumetric clouds can kill it too. And if you have one of those mods that messes with waterfalls, that'll do it as well. Or if you allow the sun to get really close to the horizon all the sudden the shadows are super long causing a bunch of extra stuff to be rendered. It needs a lot of technical work like proper occlusion culling, draw call batching, LOD, shadow culling, etc. I'm hopeful though, it's an amazing project! EDIT: Also dear god give me a proper UI for filtering and sorting in things like shops and (mainly) containers. It's so painful right now.
Lapsa 1y ago
best mod: "All Khajiit are Garfield" https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/50731 https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/50731
stasm 1y ago
Thanks to OpenMW, my SteamDeck has become a "Morrowind machine" -- it runs so well and it's so convenient to have all that world with me on the go. You can use https://luxtorpeda.gitlab.io https://luxtorpeda.gitlab.io which registers as one of the runtimes Steam uses to launch games -- Proton being one of them -- and behind the scenes Luxtorpeda will download and run OpenMW instead of Morrowind.exe.
- lawlessone 1y ago
  question, do you use the Linux native version of OpenMW or the Windows native version via Proton? Anecdotally i've heard some of the windows/proton versions of games have better performance than linux natives of the same game? So theres this weird situation now where some windows native versions of games run better on linux than on windows and also run better than the linux native versions lol.
user____name 1y ago
This is probably a minority opinion, but going of the screenshots and videos, I feel like they're making it too sunny and pretty, I liked the drab English weather in the original, with a lot of soft overcast. The screenshots look very contrasty, like it's falling into the HD texture pack trap. And the skyboxes often seem overly bright compared to the world.
camillamartin 11mo ago
[dead]

303 points by agluszak 1y ago

This project never fails to impress me. If you scroll to the bottom of the announcement, you'll see maps from Skyrim, Fallout: New Vegas, and Oblivion loaded into OpenMW. Games people spend 1000 hours playing earn a level of cultural significance that deserves protection from rent-seeking publishers. Each time Bethesda announces an update to Skyrim or Fallout 4, I cringe, because what the updates do above all else is break the existing mods. OpenMW is solving this problem for older Bethesda titiles, but I am pessimistic about Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5. Those two are years away and already lost causes IMHO.

kqr 1y ago
Not to mention the immense effort from the modding community. The Tamriel Rebuilt mod opens up much of mainland Morrowind for exploration (the official game covers only the island of Vvardenfell) and it is huge. It's as if they had released a Morrowind 2 but made it twice as big and still in the exact same style as the original.
- ndriscoll 1y ago
  Also: * Graphics updates with shaders for improved water and fog (which you can combine with much higher view distance), godrays, HDR, etc, improved meshes, improved grass, high resolution textures with normal maps and PBR. * Modernized UIs * Multi-mark (extra marks as you level mysticism) * Turn the books into audiobooks and add full voice acting if you're a mild heathen. * Combat and leveling system overhauls if you're a full heathen. https://youtube.com/watch?v=iFZm4VZnHy0 https://youtube.com/watch?v=iFZm4VZnHy0 https://youtube.com/watch?v=9Hv-46CCd9I https://youtube.com/watch?v=9Hv-46CCd9I https://modding-openmw.com/ https://modding-openmw.com/
  - hyperman1 1y ago
    I played it a year ago. To my surprise, in some ways, the advanced graphics broke my immersion. Standing in Vivec and expanding the render distance to Seyda Neen takes away part of the mystery. I had the same with Gothic, where my more powerfull computer could render Xardas' tower when standing in the old camp. Both games partially depend on limited render distance to provide an illusion of vastness.
    - Eupolemos 1y ago
      IIRC, you can adjust the fog to still be there and get the best of both worlds. Morrowind can indeed be small to look at, but big to play in <3
    - kqr 1y ago
      Volumetric fog is the solution. Gives you the best of both worlds: distant peaks over the mist, yet difficulty navigating to the next settlement.
- 4ggr0 1y ago
  one of my favorite games i've ever played is Enderal: Forgotten Stories[0], total conversion mod for Skyrim. liked it way more than Skyrim, includes some new gameplay elements and the story is absolutely phenomenal. while playing it i was constantly in awe of the fact that this was a free conversion made by a low amount of people. played it for about 90 hours over a couple of weeks. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enderal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enderal
  - notnullorvoid 1y ago
    I found Enderal so compelling that I watched a full playthrough, it's the only game I've ever done that with. I wanted to play it all the way through myself, but my PC at the time had very strange audio cracking issues with Skyrim so I wasn't able to get far.
akerl_ 1y ago
> Games people spend 1000 hours playing earn a level of cultural significance that deserves protection from rent-seeking publishers. It's not clear to me what you're suggesting here? 1. Are you saying that the developer shouldn't be able to ship updates to their game if those upgrades break 3rd party mods? 2. Why would a game's developer's rights be restricted after they ship something based on how many people use it or how much society likes it?
- afavour 1y ago
  > Are you saying that the developer shouldn't be able to ship updates to their game if those upgrades break 3rd party mods? Reading between the lines I think OP is suggesting backwards compatibility is retained when publishing updates. > Why would a game's developer's rights be restricted after they ship something based on how many people use it or how much society likes it? I'm assuming OP's answer is something along the lines of "because it's good for society". Why shouldn't society do things that are good for society, even if they increase a burden on a profit making company? Obviously every case is different but the principle is sound, IMO. Like copyright expiry. At the very least it's an interesting thought exercise.
  - aidenn0 1y ago
    Consider books in the vein of Hardy Boys[1]. Many of these books get revised over the years by the publisher. Imagine if the book on your shelf changed and when you went to read it again, the prose differed from how you remembered. People can disagree as to the extent to which the changes are good or bad (some are clearly fixes for "whoa, that was racist even for the year it was published" others are claimed by the original authors to have stamped out the small bit of originality they were able to slip past the editors), but something is lost when you lose things the way they were originally experienced. 1: For those who don't know, this is a kids book series with a single pen-name, but with each book written for-hire. Nancy Drew and Tom Swift were created by the same publisher in a similar manner.
    - akerl_ 1y ago
Pet_Ant 1y ago
I've felt that properties that earn a certain threshold should become public domain. You've made enough money, and now you are part of the culture. The heft of having created a cultural landmark or cornerstone ought to be enough weight to ensure their other projects get enough of a boost.
- FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
  I keep hoping they'll release Cyberpunk 2077 for open development. They abandoned the RedEngine and the city is really well built.
  - throwaway314155 1y ago
    Did they really abandon it after all that work? The engine itself was basically the only interesting part of that game! (ignoring gameplay-oriented engine stuff).
    - FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
      They moved devlopment to Unreal 5
      - unixhero 1y ago
        Much better
    - danso 1y ago
      Given how lackluster most everything was (beyond the visual design of the city) — e.g. physics, crowd interaction, scripted events — maybe the engine was what held their creative vision back?
      - FuriouslyAdrift 11mo ago
        It took them nearly 2 years, but the game has advanced a lot since it's launch. The Phantom Liberty DLC plus the 2.0 update/rebalancing made it more fun (even if it made it more 'console' and less PC)
Der_Einzige 1y ago
The real red pill is to realize that everything Bethesda made starting with fallout 3 is pretty bad. Skyrim is one of the most overrated video games ever. The combat and exploration from a 2005 game, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic was infinitely better. Skyrim was "big" and had a good soundtrack and that's about it. If you don't believe me, see some gameplay: 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-p3zj0YKKYE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-p3zj0YKKYE 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeRUHzYJwNE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeRUHzYJwNE
- skotobaza 1y ago
  > Skyrim is one of the most overrated video games ever Agreed. Most of the systems do not work as intended, the amount of content is very low compared to previous entries. There is no excuse for it to be released in such poor state, since Bethesda had already released two games for the same generation prior to that. And they did what they always do - ship a couple of updates and then just drop the game until the DLC is release and then promptly drop all the support. Even though there are still many bugs left in the game. They've been doing that for years, yet people still praise them for some reason. A very irresponsible developer.
  - thewebguyd 1y ago
    > They've been doing that for years, yet people still praise them for some reason. Because of the lore, setting, and the openness of both (and the engine). For a lot of ES fans (myself included), we aren't expecting an engaging game as much as a fun world sandbox set in the ES universe, with the ability to extend/mod it into whatever we want. The games are less about defined goals and more about roleplaying, exploration and world-building.
    - skotobaza 1y ago
      > The games are less about defined goals and more about roleplaying, exploration and world-building. And Skyrim lacks in each aspect, especially compared to previous Elder Scrolls games. You have even less skills than in Oblivion (which in turn had even less skills than Morrowind). The dungeons (caves, forts etc.) do not offer any meaningful rewards, so there is little incentive to just randomly explore the world. The guild questlines are much shorter which doesn't help roleplaying when you can become a grandmaster in one evening of playtime. Moreover, there are randomly generated quests thrown in to pad the time, which is even worse.
thatguy0900 1y ago
The real reason to be pessimistic about elder scrolls 6 is that Bethesda has tried multiple times already to get paid modding where they take a huge chuck of the profits to stick. They will stop taking no for an answer at some point
- ohyes 1y ago
  Yep, paid modding is Bethesda cooking and eating the golden goose. As soon as it happens it kills what makes their games special.

saubeidl 1y ago

On a related note, there's a fork of OpenMW that lets you play the game multiplayer with your friends: https://tes3mp.com/ https://tes3mp.com/ Unfortunately, it's a bit outdated (based on 0.47), but OpenMW devs have announced their intention to add multiplayer to upstream as well. Additionally, one can't talk about Morrowind fan projects without mentioning Tamriel Rebuilt, a 24-year-and-counting effort to build all of Tamriel within Morrowind. It's not done yet, but it already has twice as many quests as the base game [0], massive landmasses, joinable factions and a city that's way bigger than anything the base game has to offer, all while staying lore-friendly and neatly integrated. Times are good for Morrowind fans. [0] https://www.tamriel-rebuilt.org/about/frequently-asked-questions/quests https://www.tamriel-rebuilt.org/about/frequently-asked-quest...

iberator 1y ago
Why not rebuild whole morrowind and Skyrim i. daggerfall unity? Map is already there hehe
- saubeidl 1y ago
  You're welcome to start your own multi-decade project heh. Seriously tho, TR is amazing.
NeveHanter 1y ago
Nit/Correction; Tamriel Rebuilt is not about adding all the Tamriel but only Morrowind mainland. What you might be thinking about is Project Tamriel [0] which tries to add Cyrodill, Skyrim, High Rock and Hammerfell. They're working in collaboration with Tamriel Rebuilt so they are all compatible and share many resources. [0] https://www.project-tamriel.com/welcome https://www.project-tamriel.com/welcome

agluszak 1y ago

If you have some spare time, please consider contributing! The community is really nice, I have sent a few PRs myself :)

mdtrooper 1y ago

I love this kind of free software (or open source) project. It is a hard work for several years. I think that the goal or finish of this work is the engine and a new (similar to old close game) set free assets (sprites, 3D models, maps, music...). And I know few projects in this point, OpenTTD and FreeDoom. Are there more projects in this point?

saubeidl 1y ago
There's a whole lot! Here's a list I found: https://github.com/radek-sprta/awesome-game-remakes https://github.com/radek-sprta/awesome-game-remakes
NoboruWataya 1y ago
OpenRA (Command & Conquer), CorsixTH (Theme Hospital), ET: Legacy (Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory) and FreeCiv (Civilization) are the examples I have spent the most time playing. I know there are others targeting games like Age of Empires and Heroes of Might and Magic but I haven't played them and I'm not sure if they are as mature.
- saubeidl 1y ago
  VCMI (the Heroes of Might and Magic 3 one) is amazing!
klaussilveira 1y ago
https://osgameclones.com https://osgameclones.com Also: https://freegamer.blogspot.com/ https://freegamer.blogspot.com/
NortySpock 1y ago
I've been enjoying and contributing patches to Beyond All Reason, which traces its inspiration back to the Total Annihilation real time strategy game. It's truly incredible what a community can achieve over the course of ~20 years of open-source contributions.
- 1y ago

NoboruWataya 1y ago

Still my all time favourite game, and the work the OpenMW team are continuing to do is incredible. Really breathing new life into an old game while remaining faithful to the original vision. I didn't even realise they are aiming to support later game engines, that is very exciting.

boriskourt 1y ago

The Lua integration has grown massively over the last couple of years. Can really get up to some very cool stuff now. Its been fun to see how it contributes to a lot of the dehardcoding in the C++ codebase too.

Caius-Cosades 1y ago

OpenMW my beloved.

sys32768 1y ago

I want to play again so long as there's a mod to reduce the cliff racers.

FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
I used to hear that screeching in my dreams...
thinkingtoilet 1y ago
There is. As well as a mod to turn off the assassins that try to kill you when you rest.
- phantasmish 1y ago
  Oh hell no, I need those guys to give me free, good early-to-mid-game light armor. Saves me from having to think about armor at all until I can get ahold of some glass (except subbing in the odd enchanted piece).
  - Lapsa 1y ago
    farm vivec guards and sell to crab dude

accrual 1y ago

Wow, congrats on the significant release, OpenMW team! > In out-of-combat situations, Morrowind updates awareness only every so often, and characters don't have superhuman (or superelvish) reaction time while observing your… exploits I laughed. This reminded me of playing Oblivion, carefully stealthing my way through an NPC's belongings, only to pick up 1 gold and hear "STOP! You've violated the law!". > As the 0.49.0 release announcement boasted, running Oblivion and later Bethesda open-world engine games is in the engine’s eventual scope. So cool! I see the demo Oblivion screenshot. I would adore playing Oblivion on a Morrowind-like engine. Both games have their merits but I always liked the more retro/polygonal charm of Morrowind.

deleted 1y ago
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yard2010 1y ago
"I've heard someone saved king kassimir" "Really? Any idea who it was? I want to buy this person an ale" "DRAGONS? in our own homeland?" "Come on help us out here! We can't stand here all day!"

Aardwolf 1y ago

I enjoyed openmw in 2020 with many settings and mods for super far rendering and other better graphics. I can't imagine how many improvements it must have had in those 5 years, it was already perfect then :)

phantasmish 1y ago
It also crashes a hell of a lot less than the official binary. I did a play through a couple years ago, with plenty of mods, and saw zero crashes in tens of hours of play, which is practically unachievable with the official .exe. It'd be a must-have for that quality alone, even if it improved nothing else.

beepbooptheory 1y ago

Don't follow closely but immediately looked for and was happy to find: > As you may have heard, the headline feature of this release is, undeniably, the improved gamepad support introduced by our talented new contributor enoznal. By enabling the Controller Menus option in the launcher, you will be able to use the controller action buttons to navigate more conveniently through the slightly altered in-game UI. You are no longer limited to the combination of emulated mouse and A button use available previously. For example, you can brew potions and enchant items entirely without using the emulated mouse. While the alternative UI is not at all reminiscent of Morrowind’s famous official Xbox port, it should be intuitive enough for those familiar with it. I read: I can play on my steam deck now :).

AdmiralAsshat 1y ago

So it's interesting that I never hear much about the Morrowind modding community. Daggerfall has a huge one because of how archaic it is by modern standards. Oblivion and Skyrim had mods since day 1 (in fact I think some of my favorite New Vegas mods were Oblivion mods first). But I rarely hear about Morrowind mods. Is the consensus just that it doesn't need them?

zabzonk 1y ago
Morrowind has zillions, largely because the original CD version (the one with the big colour map) came with its own mod editor, used by bethesda to develop the game. I remember using it to cut down on the cliff-racer count.
- AdmiralAsshat 1y ago
  Ah, so the StarCraft Map Editor approach.
ecshafer 1y ago
Did you play a lot of Morrowind? I am shocked you haven't heard of Morrowind mods. The biggest most popular mods are Tamrield Rebuilt, which builds the mainland. There are also mods for graphics and drawing distance, new houses, a lot of mods around balmora, new guilds, new armors, ones that change how unarmored and unarmed work, how enchanting work, etc. I think Morrowind Vanilla is fine, but there are a few I like, personally I like mods that make enchanting your own items worthwhile, unarmed and unarmored are broken vanilla, and a few bug fixes mods, but I prefer a vanilla like experience.
- AdmiralAsshat 1y ago
  No, I didn't! That's part of what informs my question. I had the original Morrowind on Xbox and never got anywhere with it (I think I spent like 30 minutes creating my character, opened a chest in the first room in the game because apparently I wasn't supposed to do that, got beaten/arrested, and then I put the game down). I did buy the PC version specifically for OpenMW use--because until Proton that was the only way to play it on Linux, but I've not gotten around to doing a full playthrough. I wanted to know about mods because those usually can help provide some QoL adjustments that can ease the learning curve if you didn't grow up with the game.

zeagle 1y ago

I wish there were one click or download large mod packs to modernize the game. I find for this, new vegas, oblivion I spend two evenings getting everything to play nice/give up then run out of steam and don't actually plan anything.

Night_Thastus 1y ago
There are. These days there are OpenMW-specific mod packs. You run one command to download everything, another command to install and configure it. The instructions are really good, it's hard to mess up. See here: https://modding-openmw.com/lists/ https://modding-openmw.com/lists/
- zeagle 1y ago
  That's helpful. I'll take a look. Thank you!
- zeagle 1y ago
  Thanks again. That is much easier than in the past. Fired it up yesterday, tried downloading 30+ mods manually, got a premium nexusmods account to automate and speed up the downloads and it just works. Damn, there is a lot of content and upgrades from a few hours in it. Wish I could be a teenager spending many hours a week on it again!
  - Night_Thastus 11mo ago
    Yeah. Especially Tamriel Rebuilt adds a boatload of content. They're still working on it, but a good chunk of the mainland is explorable and full of quests. :)

Night_Thastus 1y ago

I recently completed a playthrough on 0.49, with the Total Overhaul pack. It's remarkable what modders have done. They've breathed a lot of life into such an old game. Don't be fooled though, even with OpenMW it still runs quite poorly at times. Any water reflections cause effectively the whole scene to be rendered twice, and it just kills the framerate. Many of the shaders like volumetric clouds can kill it too. And if you have one of those mods that messes with waterfalls, that'll do it as well. Or if you allow the sun to get really close to the horizon all the sudden the shadows are super long causing a bunch of extra stuff to be rendered. It needs a lot of technical work like proper occlusion culling, draw call batching, LOD, shadow culling, etc. I'm hopeful though, it's an amazing project! EDIT: Also dear god give me a proper UI for filtering and sorting in things like shops and (mainly) containers. It's so painful right now.

Lapsa 1y ago

best mod: "All Khajiit are Garfield" https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/50731 https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/50731

stasm 1y ago

Thanks to OpenMW, my SteamDeck has become a "Morrowind machine" -- it runs so well and it's so convenient to have all that world with me on the go. You can use https://luxtorpeda.gitlab.io https://luxtorpeda.gitlab.io which registers as one of the runtimes Steam uses to launch games -- Proton being one of them -- and behind the scenes Luxtorpeda will download and run OpenMW instead of Morrowind.exe.

lawlessone 1y ago
question, do you use the Linux native version of OpenMW or the Windows native version via Proton? Anecdotally i've heard some of the windows/proton versions of games have better performance than linux natives of the same game? So theres this weird situation now where some windows native versions of games run better on linux than on windows and also run better than the linux native versions lol.

user____name 1y ago

This is probably a minority opinion, but going of the screenshots and videos, I feel like they're making it too sunny and pretty, I liked the drab English weather in the original, with a lot of soft overcast. The screenshots look very contrasty, like it's falling into the HD texture pack trap. And the skyboxes often seem overly bright compared to the world.

camillamartin 11mo ago

[dead]