Morrowind Announced For Xbox

Here’s an official press release from Bethesda about the upcoming third edition to the Elder Scrolls games, Morrowind:

May 5, 2001 (Rockville, MD) — Bethesda Softworks Inc., a ZeniMax Media company, today announced that it is developing The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind™ for the Xbox™ video game system from Microsoft. Morrowind is the next title in Bethesda’s epic, award-winning RPG series and a game destined to redefine the genre by presenting one of the most detailed virtual worlds ever created. Morrowind is being created to utilize the awesome graphics capabilities of the Xbox and is scheduled to be among the first wave of launch titles on the system.

Morrowind is an epic, open-ended single-player game where you create and play any kind of character you can imagine. Your actions define your character, and your gameplay changes and evolves in response to your actions. Confront the assassins’ guild, and they take out a contract on you. Impress them, and they try to recruit you instead. No two sagas are the same in the world of Morrowind. The end result is the most open-ended RPG possible – one with an infinite number of possible paths through the game.

“We’ve been working with Microsoft since we first heard about Xbox,” said Todd Howard, project leader for Morrowind. “They’ve done a great job on Xbox. It’s the fastest system we’ve seen and it’s easy to develop for. Morrowind is going to be something really unique, and we finally have a system that can do it justice.”

With Morrowind, the unparalleled Elder Scrolls character system is coupled with an exponential increase in the world’s richness of detail and level of visual splendor. Utilizing the graphic power of Xbox, Morrowind will feature hyper-realistic textures and polygon counts, real-time shadows, vast landscapes, skeletal based animation, and a dynamic weather system.

“When Bethesda showed us Morrowind last year, we were tremendously impressed,” said J Allard, General Manager, Xbox Platform. “We believe this will be the only RPG of its kind on any future-generation video game systems.”