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.
On a related note, there's a fork of OpenMW that lets you play the game multiplayer with your friends: 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Unfortunately, it's a bit outdated (based on 0.47), but OpenMW devs have announced their intention to add multiplayer to upstream as well.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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
18 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 46.8 ms ] threadIf 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.
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-quest...
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?
> 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.
> 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 :).
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?
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.