They're Building a WHAT in This Game?! You Won't Believe It!

Inside the quixotic team trying to build an entire world in a 20-year-old game. You know, sometimes the most impressive feats of creativity come from the most unexpected places. And in the world of gaming, that often means the modding community.

They're Building a WHAT in This Game?! You Won't B...

Stories and lessons learned from an impossibly large community modding project are emerging, and it's a tale worth telling. The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, hailed as one of the greatest RPGs of all time, still left some fans wanting more upon its 2002 release. It just didn't quite capture the truly colossal scale of its predecessor, The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall. But what happened next is truly amazing.

Almost immediately, fans began modding the remaining parts of Tamriel, the continent where the Elder Scrolls games are set, into the game. Fast forward more than 20 years, and thousands of volunteers have collaborated on the mod projects Tamriel Rebuilt and Project Tamriel. They've essentially constructed a space comparable in size to a small country. It's genuinely astonishing. Many ambitious projects fade away. This one has not, and that's in part because of a clever strategy of steady, small updates instead of fewer, larger (and more overwhelming) ones.

Daggerfall, bless its heart, included an entire continent, but a lot of it was procedurally generated and felt…empty. Morrowind, on the other hand, gave us just a single island. But that island was meticulously handcrafted. This is where the story really gets going.

One player, known as "Ender," was a bit disappointed by Morrowind's perceived scope. They took to an Elder Scrolls forum to propose a collaborative effort to mod the rest of Tamriel into the game. And thus, Tamriel Rebuilt was born. At first, the goal was to recreate the entire continent. That quickly proved too ambitious, so they focused on the rest of the Morrowind province alone. Even that scope has expanded.

Turns out, others were working on similar ideas. The team behind "Skyrim: Home of The Nords" was already putting the province of Skyrim into Morrowind *before* it was officially the setting of The Elder Scrolls V. Then there was "Project Cyrodiil," aiming to bring Oblivion's province into the game. In 2015, these projects combined to form Project Tamriel, effectively reigniting the grand dream of adding all the remaining provinces. "The entirety of Tamriel is, in our scale, roughly the size of the real-life country of Malta," explains Tiny Plesiosaur, a senior developer who works on both projects, but focuses mainly on Project Tamriel these days. She added, "It's small in real life, but quite big from a human perspective."

The goal of both projects is to create a cohesive, lore-accurate representation of these realms as they would have looked during the same fictional historical period as Morrowind. And they're making impressive progress. I think it's a testament to the power of community and the enduring appeal of a well-loved game world.

One of the key factors in their success, according to Mort, a 13-year veteran quest-designer of Tamriel Rebuilt, is Morrowind's inherent mod-friendliness. "I’d say the thing that makes Morrowind most conducive to these kinds of projects is no voiced dialogue," Mort said. "The reason that you see so many quest mods for Morrowind as opposed to Oblivion and Skyri..."