I wish there was a "Vvardenfell Rebuilt" project

[Dyvalas]

Hi everyone, I’m an old Morrowind player from Italy, I started playing in mid 2000, after spending a lot of time also in Daggerfall.

Needless to say, at the time these games felt like something truly unique (because they were). They were some of the first experiments with open worlds and gave the player total freedom, and especially Morrowind had a level of world-building and immersiveness, of making the world feel alive (even with some of its more clunky and outdated mechanics if seen with a current point of view) that I have not found in any other game, except maybe the Witcher series.

I played it multiple times, both by following the main quest and by experiencing more freedom by using an alternate start from Chargen Revamped and going about my business in this exotic land that gave so much in terms of exploration and sense of wonder.

And of course, one of the main staples of this game has always been modding: at the time the go-to place was “Telesphoros’ List of Mods”, and while the whole modding scene was in a sense simpler and naive (not always too concerned with being lore friendly and preserving the unique atmosphere of this game), it provided a wonderful way of keeping the game interesting.

Time-traveling to 2024, it is amazing to see how, after more than 20 years, the love and commitment that this game still manages to gain from its fans. And, luckily enough, a lot of the major modding projects are also putting a to of attention into lore and into keeping a consistent and believable world.

Projects like “Tamriel Rebuilt”, but also “Beautiful Cities of Morrowind” (and all of its suggested complimentary mods), “OAAB”, and a lot more, successfully expands on the established lore and world by respecting it and not twisting it into something else, in a sense making this game what it was intended to be since the beginning.

And OpenMW is another pillar IMHO, providing a modern engine and making it possible to play the game natively also on those running Linux (like myself).

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But this thriving modding scene also has some drawbacks: mainly, from the point of view of an adult who has work and life responsibilities, it is the required time and effort to “update” the basic game to modern standards, both in graphical quality and in content (like the aforementioned BCOM).

Over the last few years, I wanted to start playing MW once again, but even by following the good “OpenMW Modding” guides, it ended very soon in huge frustration by the chaos of that many mods, compatibility patches, pre-requirements, having to read information from many different places and readmes, trying to understand what acronyms mean, using different modding tools to ensure that your installation is solid and that there will be no problems, and so on. The result has always been, regretfully, to abandon the process after a couple of days of this mess, because I simply did not have much time to spend to find a way through this tangle, losing my way and ending in playing something else out of frustration.

And the irony in all of this, is that this is true for the base game only, while “Tamriel Rebuilt”, which is a concerted effort to expand playable land but also to bring more diversity, more distinctiveness and more content without being limited by te constraints of the original game, is basically a matter of 15 minutes at most to install, tweak to your taste and play.

While bringing VVardenfell, the core of the game, to these standards, require the whole process that I described before.

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I know that this is something that is very unlikely to happen, but I wish there was something like a “Vvardenfell Rebuilt” project, with the same centralized direction as TR and with the same core values, concentrating the efforts of the many talented modders into a single project aimed at bringing Vvardenfell to TR standard in terms of content expansion and lore-friendliness, without having to juggle between a lot of fragmented information and requiring too much time to setup.

I know that there are concerns like modders not wanting to merge their effort and preferring to concentrate on their own mods (and maybe don’t even want others to merge them), that there has been an “Overhaul” project that ended badly (but probably because it started with the wrong premises), and that maybe there is simply no will for this.

[Slartibartfast1]

Have you tried Morrowind Rebirth ?

[Dyvalas]

Yes, I'm aware of MR, but as far as I know is not really compatible with anything else

[YoshiSaito]

It's a bit of a work, no matter how you look at it, so I'd recommend just taking it a little bit at a time.

 

I got into Morrowind, and later modding Morrowind, relatively recently (2/1 year(s) ago, basically), and I had a lot of frustration learning even the most basic of basics because just about everything is either made with someone who already knows what's what in mind or the person making it has forgotten what it's like to not have even the barest of foundational understanding.

 

I think if you can download, feed a file path, and enable Tamriel Rebuilt you've already done the hardest part since modding from now on is basically learning how to troubleshoot, how Mesh and Texture replacers work, what takes priority (not just load order but things like "you can change a spell's qualities without it overriding the users"), and ways of doing things more efficiently.  I pretty much learned most of what I know from trial and error plus a Russian guide (with the help of Google Translate) for things like GMSTs. 

I don't recommend doing what I did and spending a weekend mod shopping and doing lots of trial and error though, lol, and instead recommend pacing yourself with relatively simple mods like body/face/hair replacers (like Better Bodies and one of the Westly Head + Hair mods), Darknut's weapons and creatures (two different mods), and something like Weaponry of Resdayn so weapon hitboxes have some degree of correlation with their models. "Better Morrowind Armor" would probably be your first trial, though, because I believe the file path for Orcish Cuirass is wrong on it so you have to use the Construction Set and fix it so people's torsos aren't invisible while they're wearing Orcish cuirasses. Beyond this, I'd recommend only trying out a couple new mods per playthrough until you're so comfortable with it you could effortlessly remodel Morrowind while sleep deprived lol. 

 

EDIT: I forgot to note that if you don't want the whole package of Rebirth, you pretty much know why you can't just get a one-mod overhaul of the whole game and expect it to be as you'd like with no mod-introduced issues--it's just too much impacted by such mods. If you really want a tailored game, you have to do it yourself and I found the best way is to just do it a little bit here and there if and when you feel like it. Don't go crazy; don't spend more time modding than playing; at least do a playthrough (50-100 hours, give or take) between modding sessions to minimize time spent working on the game (and troubleshooting) so it isn't too fatiguing. It only gets easier as you do it and I believe it's very worth it.

Edited November 19 by YoshiSaito
Forgot to mention something

[Dyvalas]

Thanks for the reply and for the insights.

I'm actually going through modding by using Tamriel Rebuilt and BCoM as a base plus some more things, and in the end it is my best option at the moment since I can include what I like and tinker around by tweaking to my own taste.
 

[FollowTheReaperMods]

Well my recent working as intended (!) install was some 27 hours long (several reinstall) to a modern machine 2 weeks ago.

Sadly the old translation makes pretty much everything incompatible (except graphical files without esm/ esp) which not forked specially to the translation to work together. So right now limited to just about 100 mods. 

Vivec mage guild expansion was about 2 hours work so I cannot even estimate BCOM compatibility.

The reverse also true: need to figure out a suitable way to make my mods compatible with the English version as right now it is easier to done again from ground 0.