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?
Morrowind has zillions, largely because the original CD version (the one with the big colour map) came with its own mod editor, used by bethesda to develop the game. I remember using it to cut down on the cliff-racer count.
Ah, so the StarCraft Map Editor approach.
Did you play a lot of Morrowind? I am shocked you haven't heard of Morrowind mods. The biggest most popular mods are Tamrield Rebuilt, which builds the mainland. There are also mods for graphics and drawing distance, new houses, a lot of mods around balmora, new guilds, new armors, ones that change how unarmored and unarmed work, how enchanting work, etc. I think Morrowind Vanilla is fine, but there are a few I like, personally I like mods that make enchanting your own items worthwhile, unarmed and unarmored are broken vanilla, and a few bug fixes mods, but I prefer a vanilla like experience.
No, I didn't! That's part of what informs my question.
I had the original Morrowind on Xbox and never got anywhere with it (I think I spent like 30 minutes creating my character, opened a chest in the first room in the game because apparently I wasn't supposed to do that, got beaten/arrested, and then I put the game down).
I did buy the PC version specifically for OpenMW use--because until Proton that was the only way to play it on Linux, but I've not gotten around to doing a full playthrough. I wanted to know about mods because those usually can help provide some QoL adjustments that can ease the learning curve if you didn't grow up with the game.
Some nice resources here: https://modding-openmw.com/
OpenMW is definitely the way to go for a fresh game.
There’s a lot of random advice I could give but here’s my important ones:
- Replace the vanilla leveling system.
- If you are playing a modpack with relatively vanilla mechanics, you want a magic-based character. Being bad at magic is a huge disadvantage in the vanilla game, it’s heavily biased toward glass cannons.
- Make sure you have a teleportation (mark/recall) mod. Many of them are balanced so that they don’t feel like cheating, but the vanilla game makes fast travel and traversal too tedious.
Teleportation? That would kill the hiking simulator vibe!
There's a "signpost fast travel" mod that lets you teleport to any town mentioned on signposts as long as you have visited it before, while paying a small fee for an imaginary guide. That's a decent compromise, given how tricky actual real-time pathfinding can be in Morrowind.
(Otherwise my favourite system comes from Daggerfall Unity, where there is a mod that lets your character automatically, in real time, follow roads until the next fork/intersection. With an option for time compression that really hits the sweet spot of being explicit travel without being tedious.)
Teleportation is actually in the base game, just with only one mark and recall point, as you may know.
The mods I’ve seen add a selectable list and scale out how many locations you’re allowed to save based on your associated magic skill.
So it’s both a boon to quality of life and still relatively balanced and not too overpowered.
I would suggest playing with a modlist like Path of the Incarnate [0] - it'll give you QoL improvements, graphics improvements, quest and landmass mods all integrated into one tested setup.
The Morrowind modding scene is huge and was a big part of my teenage years. It's nice to see it's still going strong.
[0] https://www.modlists.net/docs/6poti/Home
I started using mods in Morrowind from basically my second play-through, way back around the time it was released.
Mods to make plants either vanish or (even better) switch to a different model when they're "harvested" instead of acting like static containers is a must. And I think most consider some kind of mod to at least chill out the cliff racers a little bit to be a must-have.
My usual mod set back in the day also included some light improvements to graphics (some of the later, heavier fixes involving wrapper-binaries and such didn't exist yet, or weren't stable), NPC schedules, and an Imperial Library just outside Vivec that would pay a little gold to be allowed to copy any books you provide that it doesn't already have (it starts empty) which would then spawn neatly organized on its shelves, mostly to give me a low-effort outlet for my book hoarding tendency in those games.
Morrowind had (and still has) a huge modding scene. Especially because it's even more mod friendly as its successor. A big plus back in the day was that the Construction Kit came with the original game disks. So you had direct access to the real dev tools. Like Unreal came with UnrealEd but with access to an Open World RPG instead of "just" a shooter.
Nexus Mods started as portal for Morrowind mods.