I played the main quest, a high fraction of the sidequests & major faction quest trees, one of the expansions, and most of the other one, in OpenMW something like 18-24 months ago. With a few mods, and draw distance cranked up fairly high, and at 4K resolution.
Worked perfectly. Zero glitches the whole time, and the official engine would have crashed at least a dozen times in such a playthrough, while this one didn't even crash once.
[EDIT] I mean, zero unexpected glitches. Obviously the entire game is made of glitches.
This got me to finally play through and beat Morrowind in my 30s, avenging my 13yo self who had looted and lost an essential quest item got stuck in the main quest line.
I played it while taking notes about the quests which was a bit more fun than just following quest markers. Though that was only fun because of Morrowind's weird alien world. There are only a few games intriguing enough to warrant note-taking.
Something interesting in the ecosystem is the tes3cmd cli tool anonymously(?) written in Perl: https://github.com/john-moonsugar/tes3cmd/blob/master/tes3cm... for manipulating game/mod files.
OpenMW is nothing short of amazing.
I only wish there was a similar undertaking for Oblivion. The PC version is playable, but the game came out in the weird, awkward dark ages for PC configurability and accessibility, so there are some stumbling blocks.
For example, despite first playing and loving Oblivion on my Xbox 360, the PC version still does not have controller support, and any attempts to hack it in require mapping the mouse to a joystick (Which is not a great approximation).
There's a fantastic fork of this project which adds multiplayer also: https://tes3mp.com/
It's a bit awkward to set up, but I played coop with a friend and it worked great.
Morrowind was just fantastic. I loved that everything seemed to always exist. You could wonder around and find a super powerful artifact or kill or lose something required fornthe main quest. It felt more immersive that way.
OpenMW is one of my favorite open source projects. The upcoming 0.48 apparently fixes the Lady birthsign bug. Someone must have bit the bullet and reworked the magic effect system. Thanks guys!
"I fear not the man who has released 10000 games once, but I fear the man who has released 1 game 10000 times." - Todd Howard.
I really miss the old commentary videos on youtube :/
For weirdsexy life got in the way and suddenly stopped doing the commentaries and was replaced by some german dude (sorry don't know his name). Somehow watching the release videos wasn't as fun anymore as it was before. I don't want to talk down on the work the new guy does, but only want to highlight how exceptional high quality (especially for their time) the old release videos were.
Also... I can't stand the german accent
There is also a fork that has very basic initial support for Skyrim. Here are videos: https://www.youtube.com/@PetrMikheev/videos https://www.youtube.com/@cc9cii/videos
I wonder if there's some new opportunities for these game engines with generative AI.
One possibility is treating the game like scaffolding. It feels like textures and images could all be replaced fairly easily with generative versions. Toss them in Midjourney with /describe, play around to create replacements. Or Stable Diffusion or whatever. (Not sure how many things are "images" and how many are other structures like shaders.)
Maps are harder, at least I imagine harder to deconstruct into atomic pieces that can be replaced. Though it's interesting to think about whether an LLM could decompose them into more semantic pieces, if it could understand the underlying structure that may only have existed in the mind of the original map creator.
I imagine things like quests, stats, etc., would all be amenable to generation.
Maybe the big question is if things really are separable enough to use the old game as scaffolding: can you replace 10% of the game, or 50%, or 90% and have a meaningfully playable game?
It re-implements a little more than MW :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8jkNO-M9cg
I love this just on principle, but maybe someone can clarify something for me. Does this:
1) Provide a better experience of the game immediately?
or is it
2) The (very high) value of this tool is that it will lend itself to faster/better/easier fan base development and modification of the game, enhancing the entire ES ecosystem?
3) something i didn’t think of
4) some combination. Of the above
Regardless, it makes me want to kick my current gameplay to the curb (it’s Shadow of Doubt, it’s incredible check it out) and dump another 100 hours into Morrowind right now.
Nice work!
There's also an Android port: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=is.xyz.omw with more info at https://omw.xyz.is/
It has onscreen and physical controller support + an emulated mouse mode that can be helpful for navigating menus and such. It works well on the Retroid Pocket 3+
Just some advice if you want more people interested, put some images and/or videos of the gameplay. Clicked around and could not find even a single image of what the game looks like.
I've used this project, really appreciate the ambition and quality.
Hmm, this got my hopes up. Turns out this is just a random mention, and not a new release. Last release seems to be from 2021.
I did a recent full playthrough of Morrowind and all the expansions on OpenMW, using one of the available curated mod lists as a starting point. It was rock solid throughout, looked much better than the original, and was at least as much fun as I remembered it was. Highly recommended for TES fans.
For those that have a liking to the blog style project updates some other projects do, the main website is a good feed https://openmw.org/en/.
Interesting. So it's basically the game engine without the assets.
I'd like to mod Cliff Racers into every Bethesda game.
OpenMW is a great way to play Morrowind on Android.
Not seeing a binary for mac. Is there one?
I did not know 0.49 had been released. I wonder what the highlights are.
This is only Singleplayer, right? How is the Linux support?
>Open source.
>You need to own the game to play.
So, what's the point?
Bethesda games community is amazingly insane.
For example yesterday I found out that modders managed to "merge Fallout 3 and its DLC into Fallout: New Vegas, allowing both games to be played in a single playthrough".
It is called Tale of Two Wastelands and it goes above and beyond modding. This is art. More info: https://taleoftwowastelands.com/faq#What-is-ttw
If you like playthroughs, Gopher youtuber is recording an amazing series of it:
- Playlist of Chapter 1 (57 videos): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE7DlYarj-Dekit0ce4ni...
- Playlist of Chapter 2 (4 videos): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE7DlYarj-Dfag97E44fF...
- Playlist of Chapter 3 (32 videos): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE7DlYarj-DcRVZclOtOY...
- Playlist of Chapter 4 (10 videos): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE7DlYarj-DeLxMTphztm...
- Playlist of Chapter 5 (9 videos and counting): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE7DlYarj-DcDxBImozYs...