Why Modders Won’t Let Morrowind Slide Into Oblivion

In an interesting and lengthy editorial, PC Gamer is offering up a detailed analysis of – and more than a few nods to – Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, along with a specific focus on the blood, sweat, and tears that modders have put into recreating the RPG within its more modern counterparts. As Morroblivion and Skywind are some of the most notable mods (but certainly not the only ones), the article spends quite a bit of time with them, and incorporates a fair share of commentary from the creators:

Coordinating voice actors is a big job, since Morrowind was very heavy on the text and only a handful of NPC greetings (and one god) were voiced. (Early on it entailed acquiring all the text data for the scripts and coming up with a method of identifying appropriate lines by NPC and creating scripts,) says Iredale. (Now I’m doing implementation of the voicetypes/voicefiles which entails working in the Creation Kit along with third-party supporting applications.)

Jordan actually started as one of the actors, inspired by the performer whose greeting is the first you hear in the game. (Jeff Baker came up with a very unique voice for the male Dunmer which few people on the team could match. I learned rudimentary sound editing and recording techniques to improve my audio quality, and began coaching others on how to improve their own sound quality and acting forming ideas on how each race should sound for some internal consistency.)

Michael Pewtress, aka SFX team lead Corpus X, is a more recent addition to the team. He’s been part of what he calls (the Skywind universe) for just over seven months, though he’d been following the project for a couple of years before that. (When I came in for a visit last September it felt like nothing was happening and I thought I could offer my help to get it going,) he said. (When I joined I was just an SFX contributor, but the team lead at the time left the project about a month or two into my tenure so we ran team leadless until I took over in December. It’s a lot of work for volunteer pay, but I really enjoy the community and almost everyone laughs or plays along with my jokes so I think I’ll be staying.)

Very few of Skywind’s modders worked on Morroblivion and some of them, like Pewtress, have never worked on a game before at all. (This has been a fun learning experience,) he says. Iredale, on the other hand, worked on personal mods before stepping up to join Skywind. Given how long it’s been and the still unfinished state of Skywind though some of the screenshots they’ve shown and the videos on their YouTube channel make their achievements so far look very impressive I ask if there’s some worry that a new Elder Scrolls game will come out before Skywind does.

Iredale isn’t bothered, saying, (There is a good chance we’ll release before the next Elder Scrolls game if they keep to their typical timetable. Even if we released shortly afterward, I think people would still want to play it, as the graphics and gameplay are still faring decently with the assets we’ve been creating.)