OpenMW 0.50.0 Released – open-source Morrowind reimplementation
17 comments
·November 7, 2025evanjrowley
kqr
Not to mention the immense effort from the modding community.
The Tamriel Rebuilt mod opens up much of mainland Morrowind for exploration (the official game covers only the island of Vvardenfell) and it is huge. It's as if they had released a Morrowind 2 but made it twice as big and still in the exact same style as the original.
4ggr0
one of my favorite games i've ever played is Enderal: Forgotten Stories[0], total conversion mod for Skyrim. liked it way more than Skyrim, includes some new gameplay elements and the story is absolutely phenomenal. while playing it i was constantly in awe of the fact that this was a free conversion made by a low amount of people. played it for about 90 hours over a couple of weeks.
ndriscoll
Also:
* Graphics updates with shaders for improved water and fog (which you can combine with much higher view distance), godrays, etc, improved meshes, improved grass, high resolution textures with normal maps, and PBR.
* Modernized UIs
* Turn the books into audiobooks and add full voice acting if you're a mild heathen.
* Combat and leveling system overhauls if you're a full heathen.
Caius-Cosades
OpenMW my beloved.
NoboruWataya
Still my all time favourite game, and the work the OpenMW team are continuing to do is incredible. Really breathing new life into an old game while remaining faithful to the original vision. I didn't even realise they are aiming to support later game engines, that is very exciting.
boriskourt
The Lua integration has grown massively over the last couple of years. Can really get up to some very cool stuff now. Its been fun to see how it contributes to a lot of the dehardcoding in the C++ codebase too.
agluszak
If you have some spare time, please consider contributing! The community is really nice, I have sent a few PRs myself :)
saubeidl
On a related note, there's a fork of OpenMW that lets you play the game multiplayer with your friends: https://tes3mp.com/
Unfortunately, it's a bit outdated (based on 0.47), but OpenMW devs have announced their intention to add multiplayer to upstream as well.
Additionally, one can't talk about Morrowind fan projects without mentioning Tamriel Rebuilt, a 24-year-and-counting effort to build all of Tamriel within Morrowind. It's not done yet, but it already has twice as many quests as the base game [0], massive landmasses, joinable factions and a city that's way bigger than anything the base game has to offer, all while staying lore-friendly and neatly integrated.
Times are good for Morrowind fans.
[0] https://www.tamriel-rebuilt.org/about/frequently-asked-quest...
mdtrooper
I love this kind of free software (or open source) project.
It is a hard work for several years.
I think that the goal or finish of this work is the engine and a new (similar to old close game) set free assets (sprites, 3D models, maps, music...). And I know few projects in this point, OpenTTD and FreeDoom.
Are there more projects in this point?
NortySpock
I've been enjoying and contributing patches to Beyond All Reason, which traces its inspiration back to the Total Annihilation real time strategy game.
It's truly incredible what a community can achieve over the course of ~20 years of open-source contributions.
NoboruWataya
OpenRA (Command & Conquer), CorsixTH (Theme Hospital), ET: Legacy (Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory) and FreeCiv (Civilization) are the examples I have spent the most time playing. I know there are others targeting games like Age of Empires and Heroes of Might and Magic but I haven't played them and I'm not sure if they are as mature.
saubeidl
VCMI (the Heroes of Might and Magic 3 one) is amazing!
saubeidl
There's a whole lot! Here's a list I found: https://github.com/radek-sprta/awesome-game-remakes
This project never fails to impress me.
If you scroll to the bottom of the announcement, you'll see maps from Skyrim, Fallout: New Vegas, and Oblivion loaded into OpenMW.
Games people spend 1000 hours playing earn a level of cultural significance that deserves protection from rent-seeking publishers. Each time Bethesda announces an update to Skyrim or Fallout 4, I cringe, because what the updates do above all else is break the existing mods. OpenMW is solving this problem for older Bethesda titiles, but I am pessimistic about Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5. Those two are years away and already lost causes IMHO.