Earlier this year, a group of modders came together to do the unthinkable: port Bethesda’s Morrowind into FromSoftware’s Elden Ring. Essentially, the project looks to be an Elden Ring conversion mod that lets you see The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind in a new, third-person light, and we’ve just gotten our first update on the bonkers effort.
Modder and YouTuber InfernoPlus posted an update video this week to let everyone know how the mod was progressing since its announcement and since other volunteer modders had jumped on to help.
“Now the first thing to notice here is that, in this version, the implementation for NPCs is almost already at full parody to Morrowind,” the modder explained, which gave me a big chuckle since it comes right after an NPC delivers the most robotic line imaginable. Perhaps my memory of Morrowind’s NPCs is too kind.
“It’s never going to be exactly 100% accurate, but as it currently stands, it does everything it should,” InfernoPlus continued, before stating that the text-to-speech voices are temporary - the team just needs placeholder dialogue to make sure everything’s working as intended.
Other areas of the mod are also chugging along well. Items are “partially implemented.” You can catch a glimpse of the game’s speechcraft and how an NPC’s disposition can rise or fall. Oh, and you can even commit crimes, steal stuff, pickpocket, and eventually get sent to jail.
The one area that’s causing the modder anxiety is its navmeshes (navigation meshes), which is basically a view of the world that the player never sees but helps NPCs with pathfinding. As InfernoPlus says, “AI just doesn’t work without navmeshes.”
“Then on the navmesh side, we have not really made much progress,” he said. “That issue is currently our biggest roadblock, and in some ways it’s probably the only thing holding us back from finishing this project in the long term. It’s the only thing on the project that I don’t know what the solution will look like and there is a chance we just don’t solve it. Hopefully, it’ll be fine. I think it’s possible… but that is the one thing that worries me.”
That aside, the team is still looking for some help since, well, “Damn, this project has hands.” Rebuilding an RPG as massive as Morrowind (inside of another mammoth game) is a lot of work, after all.
