Tamriel Rebuilt Roadmap | Hacker News Reader

Tamriel Rebuilt Roadmap

tamriel-rebuilt.org

159 pointsagluszak54 comments

Morrowind was amazing. Seyda Neen was an absolutely perfect starter town. I still smile thinking of how I used to loot the entire opening building on every single new game of Morrowind. I'm sure I wasn't alone with that strategy.

Oblivion's chaotic intro was such a massive let down for me.

And Skyrim pummeling you with quests without you even realizing where they come from made it a slog. It having outdated technology - even if it was an improvement over Oblivion -, only a handful of voice actors, and awkward animations and mechanics just made me... not hate it, but definitely not love it as much as I once did Morrowind.

Caveat: Rose tinted glasses, hindsight, Morrowind came out when I was at That Special Age, etc. I mean Morrowind's character models and faces look like ass.

Morrowind was creative and dream-like in a way Oblivion, and certainly Skyrim, are not.

I'd say it's because Morrowind was a first (previous TES games were 2D), and the company went all out in terms of creativity. It was a massive success.

This is exactly why they next games had to be less creative: the company was afraid to step away from the recipe of success, and also tried to make the game appealing and accessible to a much wider audience. This was optimal from the money-making perspective, but, as usual, turned an unique thing loved by its original audience into a mass product liked but hardly loved by a wider audience.

If I were to look for a new great game, I'd look at the up-and-coming companies making their first big product, and not at established AAA game makers.

I'm a very big fan of a game called Enderal [1] which is essentially a mod built upon Skyrim's engine. It's amazingly high quality considering it's a passion project by a small team of devs. They created an entirely new world complete with lore, quests, a new leveling/magic system, voice acting (!), etc.

It's really proved to me that all it takes is a few people with passion and creative control to craft a good RPG. Skyrim could not be the result of anything besides creative bankruptcy and a realization that impressive graphics sell games. Kind of ironic considering that Morrowind looked awful when it came out, even by the standards of the time.

1. https://store.steampowered.com/app/933480/Enderal_Forgotten_...

If you're gonna give good ol' Morrowind a go, may I suggest using the openmw.org engine instead of the original one? They've basically improved everything.

Yes! OpenMW is amazing. I just did a full play-through without any issues and heavily modded to boot. Very stable, good performance, etc.

I also recommend this site:

https://modding-openmw.com/

for a good curated list of mods. It takes an age and a half to go through the installation of any of the lists, but the results have been very pleasant.

You can also play OpenMW in VR! It's one of the coolest forks of any software I've ever tried!

https://openmw-vr.readthedocs.io/en/latest/manuals/installat...

I wish someone would script this, or publish a completed folder (less the official assets that those of us who own a copy can paste in), I want to play this, but there's no way I'm going to spend hours and hours and hours following those instructions ...

I believe a lot of mod authors frown upon this for some reason.

Mod authors like having feedback and recognition on their own work, which might get lost if their mod becomes part of a whole big mod pack.

Yeah, but the end result is that I just never see their work at all. Seems a bit counterproductive to me.

There is portmod, which is an attempt to semi-automate the process. It's still a rather manual and clunky process, for example there is no scripted downloading of mods from Nexus. But it automates some parts and holds your hand through the others.

https://gitlab.com/portmod/portmod

I gave up interest in playing Morrowind ages ago but I still follow this project just because they continue to impress. With this as a foundation, we’re looking at a feature complete FOSS Skyrim engine in under a decade, maybe.

Skyrim just didnt do it for me, yay more draugrs to kill..

That would be awesome.

But isn't there the fear, that Bethesda would just pull the legal plug, if it gets too successful?

That thought would hinder me, from serious contributions.

I mean a rebuild if the engine is probably legit. But all the game content is one letter from a lawer away, from oblivion?

with openmw it's just an engine, players have to source the original game files themselves to play and so there's no legal threat afaik

People thought the same with the GTA 3 and GTA Vice City engine re-implementations but they still got lawyers sent after them by Rockstar.

Openmw on the other hand is slower than the original engine. I’ve found it to be too slow to be played using integrated graphics cards found in older laptops.

I’m currently playing using mcp + mge xe + dxvk on Windows and it’s basically flawless, it looks better than openmw, and it is also faster.

Yep, I found that OpenMW in large city (Vivec) is barely playable, 3-5 fps at best. That's on GTX 1050 Ti (Windows). Though that may be due to the mods (Fullrest Repack).

Besides aforementioned low fps in Vivec, OpenMW is great. I've completed the main story and almost all side quests in Morrowind and both DLCs without any issues. Unlike original engine which crashed every hour or so, and even corrupted savegames sometimes, OpenMW never crashed and never corrupted any savegame during my playthrough.

Can you play this mod with OpenMW?

Yes, absolutely :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJvzXVi3lAg&list=PLWNeFFHP3F...

But also try the original with graphics mods, which I prefer to OpenMW.

If you think Tamriel Rebuilt is cool, check out Project Tamriel. They are creating Cyrodiil and Skyrim in Morrowind, but without the giant letdown that was the bad lore and worldbuilding featured in TES 4 and 5.

Here's a map of existing mod projects:

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/132891272666021888/...

Here's a video of their WIP heightmap for all of Tamriel:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ELlodEMHZdA

Keep in mind, this is at Morrowind's scale. The Cyrodiil you see there is roughly four times the size of the Cyrodiil featured in Oblivion. All that extra space + no deadlines means a lot more settlements and regions. Check out their planning maps. Check out their Cyrodiil in more detail: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/261849327020933132/92...

So in short, its the ultimate Elder Scrolls experience. If you want to know more, join their Discord server.

I thought the world-building in Skyrim was pretty good actually.

In comparison to Morrowind though, it's nothing.

It’s nice they all focus on a different area, though I imagine that took some time to sort out.

The original goal of TR was to build all of Tamriel at this scale, but they soon realised this was far too ambitious. The fact they're still not finished with 1/10th the original intention 20 years on indicates they were correct.

It's a completely different mod scene than it was in the beginning. The modern TR project is just a few years old. Progress is very quick these days, and many of the common showstoppers, such as lack of 3D assets, no longer are a serious issue. The actual bottleneck is lack of quest writers and implementers, something which anyone can learn to do. Progress on exteriors and interiors is far ahead of the released and next to be released areas. Also, they aren't planning on building ALL of Tamriel. TR is taking Morrowind and PT has Cyrodiil and Skyrim (and maybe High Rock).

Time will only tell, this is the best project for Tamriel that I have seen so far.

I'm a big Morrowind fan, and Tamriel Rebuilt is an impressive undertaking, but a part has always wondered -- where are they getting all this content from? Is there some design bible from which they are filling in the gaps? Are the quests wholly original? And is the rest of Morrowind sufficiently interesting to keep our attention?

Their lore is based on info from Morrowind itself, from TES 1: Arena, and from The Pocket Guide to the Empire, a booklet that shipped with the previous title Elder Scrolls Travels: Redguard. Previous titles such as Redguard, Shadowkey, and Battlespire are considered canonical information in their universe. Oblivion/Skyrim/ESO are not. On top of that foundation, they have their own original lore.

To answer your last question: yes! I've had a lot of fun with the quests in the new areas. Old Ebonheart is also a great place to explore.

I've played several hours of Tamriel Rebuilt and quite enjoyed the quests. My favorite region to explore is the Telvanni one; there are many islands to visit and each has interesting quests. In one you'll find an underground Daedric ruin the size of a Skyrim dungeon. There is a lot of ground to cover, so I recommend Boots of Blinding Speed with a 1s/100% Resist Magicka spell in order to move quickly and still be able to see.

Oh no, using Boots Of Blinding Speed with 100 speed skill kills all attraction from exploring world. I don't like fast speed.

I don't expect anyone to believe me, but just a few hours ago when I was at work (without any internet so I 100% did not read this thread), I had a sort of mental scenario in my head about Tamriel Rebuilt and Project Tamriel being discussed on HN. In the scenario, the topic was Beyond Skyrim, and I brought up TR and PT to say how much more impressive they are. Now I come home and see there's an actual thread. Pretty crazy coincidence.

Worthing noting that Morrowind, and presumably also this mod, is now playable in VR thanks to the OpenMW project:

https://uploadvr.com/play-elder-scrolls-morrowind-vr-openmw/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OU0Gil2lov8

Also in multiplayer https://youtube.com/watch?v=AM-ELVReLMQ

The modding community has totally transformed Skyrim VR with mods like VRIK for adding player bodies with inverse kinematics and HIGGS for wildly improved physics interactions.

I dream that one day mods like those will be compatible with a some iteration of a VR OpenMW engine.

Nothing Elder Scrolls beats Daggerfall for me:

1. Steal something, attract the attention of the guards

2. Climb on any building using your easily trained climbing skill

3. Cast Slow Fall and hop from building to building to make your escape from angry guards

And the world is just humongously huge. Too bad that randomly generated dungeons were like a very messed up spaghetti pile.

You could also overflow uint spell cost in Daggerfall to craft essentially free, super-potent spells with full invisibility and invulnerability.

I heard, there are actual cheats around, too.

(But sure, exploiting a glitch is more fun, than lame straight cheating)

I enjoyed the Tamriel Rebuilt quests I discovered around Old Ebonheart, Firewatch, and Port Telvannis. The world was a joy to explore. I really recommend this mod.

TR is the most impressive mod I have ever seen other than maybe Nehrim. It easily doubles the content in the game.

Interesting modeling and worldbuilding. But I noticed many of the screenshots ("The Sundered Scar region as it stands" and above) look quite gray, with fake-looking SSAO or vertex coloring. Ironically, "Grey Meadows" is colorful and high-contrast, like some of the other lower screenshots.

It’s still the morrowind engine. There’s only so much you can do.

Looks like they are screenshots from the game editor (Creation Set), so that's not the in-game lightning.

Aesthetically it's quite consistent with Vvardenfell (the part of the map that was in the original game).

Interesting, I wonder if this could eventually provide a freely redistributable game playable with OpenMW? Then, ironically, most people probably would play this game without the landmass featured in the original Morrowind - only with the new free content created by this project.

The OpenMW construction set isn't nearly as mature as the one from Bethesda, but there is a tiny non-Morrowind starter kit built using this engine that you can use to make your own game: https://gitlab.com/OpenMW/example-suite

Fond memories of playing Morrowind back in the day. Never heard of Tamriel Rebuilt. I’m on winter break this week, might be time to check out the modern mod scene.

Does it work with OpenMW?

Yes.

Can confirm. I've played it in OpenMW.

Yes.

IIRC this guy also installs some of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJvzXVi3lAg&list=PLWNeFFHP3F...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com