Elder Scrolls Let's fix Morrowind

[Dexter]

 

[EtcEtcEtc]

That shit is bonkers.

I can't wait to see it applied to other games.

 

[Lemming42]

Yeah that's absolutely mindblowing. Some of the stuff people are going to be able to do with AI-assisted tools in the near future is incredible. The results in those videos kick the shit out of any combination of Morrowind graphics mods I've seen, and result in a much more uniform and consistent look.

 

[MWaser]

Ah yes, I love it when "turning on RTX" suddenly adds in extra objects to the game world and replaces potion bottles with their Skyrim models.
This is still a mod which changed the models (and placed new ones) and the only real new technical feature here is the automatically generated light maps, which frankly look really strange to me and overly reflective.
Besides, even parts which look good here on an environmental demo video will look really strange when you put actual Morrowind characters in, with their simple movement patterns, instant degree turning and standing around barely animated, including your own character and camera movement. Get ready for a massive clash of artstyle / tech as if you've just ported an area from RDR2 directly into Morrowind with kept graphics.

 

[None]

Any lighting improvements are welcomed. That texture work, however, is fucking awful.

Still excited about this software though. Seems like it'll make ReShade and ENB obsolete.

 

[Curious_Tongue]

Fix Morrowind? Make it bigger and with more quests!

 

[MWaser]

Any lighting improvements are welcomed. That texture work, however, is fucking awful.

Still excited about this software though. Seems like it'll make ReShade and ENB obsolete.

The lighting improvements seem nice for the most part however some of them seem incredibly fake. I've seen some current shaders in MGE XE and the newest version of OpenMW that improve upon the effect but without looking so strange and overly reflective and artificial.

As for the textures, they seem like a combination of upscaled original and newly generated ones based on material or ported from something else. They clash a bunch between one another too much.

 

[aweigh]

 

[logrus]

Well, well. RTX Remix looks like a very powerful tool. I'd gladly play Morrowind that just gets AI upscaled original textures + material info added + lightning improvements. I'm generally very conservative with "texture packs" as most of the times you need many partial overhauls to cover all in-game textures and the result is always incoherent, usually the original artstyle is completely lost in the process. If I use some texture packs it's usually only AI enhanced original ones as it makes a game looking a little bit better on hi-res screen while retaining original look.

 

[logrus]

Fix Morrowind? Make it bigger and with more quests!

You are aware that https://www.tamriel-rebuilt.org/ exists, right?

 

[Curious_Tongue]

Fix Morrowind? Make it bigger and with more quests!

You are aware that https://www.tamriel-rebuilt.org/ exists, right?

Yeah, but what good is all that extra area except for larping purposes?

 

[logrus]

Fix Morrowind? Make it bigger and with more quests!

You are aware that https://www.tamriel-rebuilt.org/ exists, right?

Yeah, but what good is all that extra area except for larping purposes?

Well, it's bigger and with more quests?

 

[Tentacle Monster]

My favorite underrated mod for morrowind is unleveled creatures from https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/44097 There are bunch of other plugins there but I don't really care about them. It randomizes chance for monsters to appear instead of player level. It makes game so much better because fuck level scaling in any form. The rest of the mods I use are mostly flavor for roleplaying, atmosphere and other popular mods mentioned here. You don't really need many mods to fix morrowind, you just need right approach to the game.

 

[PulsatingBrain]

I have played with MGSO a few times in the past and liked it quite a lot. The only thing that really bugged me was that it didn't do anything to improve the crafting interfaces, which continued to be annoying as fuck

I'm now considering giving Morrowind Rebirth a try, and I'm wondering if it does anything to improve those interfaces? Or is there a decent mod that does?

 

[potatojohn]

The original pastel textures and colors are way better.

 

[wwsd]

After that, I tried following the One Day Morrowind Modernization guide for OpenMW. First of all, that's a fucking lie, it took me two days to get this bitch installed, and then I found it there is absolutely no quality control on those fucking modlists hosted on openmw. Several missing textures I had to install other mods for, and then there were all sorts of dumb bugs introduced like floating npcs.

In the end, I ended up uninstalling everything, and going with Morrowind Enhanced Textures, Morrowind Rebirth, and the volumetric mists and fog mod thats just come out for openmw. I think I'll use this as a base and add very judiciously from here. The problem with morrowind modding scene is the labyrinthian nature of it all and the extreme specificity of the modding endeavors. I hate that shit, there's no good reason for any thinking human to waste their time like that, purely exercises in autism. There should be more mods like MR with sweeping coverage. I don't care if some g*rman thinks its less than optimal, I'm not digging through 300+ files and compatibility patches and manual edits to get some perfectly jerry-rigged balance when there is a Good Enough option that does everything.

FWIW, the nightly build of OpenMW runs great and looks great with all the various features turned on, shadows, distant terrain, water shader and so on. I can't for the life of me imagine why people want to insist on using MWSE, are the mods for it even that good? (which is putting aside the fact that the latest builds of openMW support lua)

I followed the exact same list (except I excluded some mods) for my current playthrough (and first time trying OpenMW) and honestly I wish I had read this first. Exact same experience really. OpenMW is subject to a kind of Apple level "It just works!" shilling. Which to be fair is true for the game itself, easy distant land generation, and the performance even when you have a whole bunch of mods installed. Frame rate is just very good even with new textures and shit. Whereas in heavily modded vanilla it can drop a little even on modern systems.

What I didn't realise is that the actual process of installing a bunch of mods is, if anything, more cumbersome than in vanilla, and it takes longer. Just to install this list, you have to download and learn how to use a roughly equivalent number of third-party tools as in e.g. Sigourn's list for vanilla. Also, for me the whole vanilla "it's slow and crashes all the time!" prejudice hasn't really been true in the last 5 years or so. In vanilla, as long as you're not a complete moron, you have to try pretty hard to fuck up your install. Although in both vanilla and OpenMW, the same problem occurs when you have these mod lists that promise to bring the game into the current decade relatively painlessly, but then in reality, there is simply too much jury-rigging, too much "Install texture pack X, but then delete these 75 files manually, and get pack Y from Russian website Z to get better Imperial buildings" or whatever the fuck.

Having tried both, I'm now a bit 50-50 on vanilla vs OpenMW, I can see the pros and cons of both. Both of them have some functionalities that I miss in the other. I can't complain about the end result with OpenMW, everything looks and plays great, which is why I will keep playing it and would probably give it the nod in the future, just not with this list. And I learned how to manually add mods to MW in like 2006, so anything compared to that is already huge progress. It will be a great day when you can just make a good enough 2023-proof default installation at the click of a button, but if it never happens, it wouldn't upset me either.

I am now following what many people have started doing before: just delivered the package to Caius Cosades, did some early Seyda Neen and Balmora quests, got to level 2, and then beelined straight for the mainland and just avoided the vanilla game altogether in favour of new TR content, so as not to get burnt out retreading familiar territory. TR at this point is basically a game of its own, just not with all the factions playable yet, so you have to take that into consideration when making a character. Old Ebonheart and surroundings are basically newbie content for a new game entirely, which is great. I also still wish they would bring back the separate "Mainland factions", but that's just my pet peeve.

Also, maybe redundant to say this, but with anything that replaces creatures, NPCs, flora, or anything else appearance-wise, you have to check the screenshots extremely carefully. Because for a lot of these modders, "better" = Oblivion or Skyrim. Can't be helped until we institute a massive eugenics programme.

 

[Dr1f7]

copied the mod list to the op

 

[luj1]

I have played with MGSO a few times in the past and liked it quite a lot. The only thing that really bugged me was that it didn't do anything to improve the crafting interfaces, which continued to be annoying as fuck

I'm now considering giving Morrowind Rebirth a try, and I'm wondering if it does anything to improve those interfaces? Or is there a decent mod that does?

There are probably 20+ various UI improvements, there have been for years

I think most of them are bundled in "UI Expansion"

https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/46071?tab=description

 

[Litmanen]

Step 1.) Fire Todd Howard and Emil Pagliarulo effective immediately
Step 2.) Pay Ted Petersen and Julian LeFay whatever it takes to get them back at Bethesda
Step 3.) Make Daggerfall 2 as initially planned

And make it :

• 2D
• Turn-Based
• Party-based

this is relevant to your interests

What about this Open Nevermind? is there any chance to make Morrowind turn-based?

 

[granit]

To "fix" Morrowind (in my case it is specifically Morrowind GOTY from Steam) I install two mods:
"Patch for Purists" (Bug fixes with conservative view of what is considered a bug)
"Expansion Delay" (Delaying Tribunal expansion events to a more appropriate later stage in certain quests, limiting dialogue options for Bloodmoon so that not every single NPC is talking about it)