Bethesda won't make a game as cool as Morrowind ever again, so thank god an original dev has come back 20 years on to make quest mods for it

Joshua Wolens
·2 min read
Morrowind.
Morrowind.

The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind is my favourite game of all time. It's also ugly, unintuitive, and has a combat system assembled by someone who wanted to combine all the worst parts of tabletop RPGs and videogames just to see what would happen. Now, to right-thinking people like you and me, that just adds to its charm, but it probably also goes some way to explaining why Bethesda moved on to develop much more digestible fare and why there are so few Morrowind-likes that aren't made by mad, wonderful indie devs.

But wait, there's more Morrowind! And it's even kind of official, or at least as official as we're gonna get without Todd Howard having a radical change of heart. It's called Red Wisdom – An Ashlander Prophecy (via GamesRadar), and it's a mod for Morrowind that adds a chunky new questline to the game written by Douglas Goodall, who worked as a writer and designer on Morrowind in the way-back-when of the early 2000s, before leaving the studio in 2002 after creative disagreements.

But now he's back with a mod that sees you "unravel the ancient prophecy of Red Wisdom" in a plot that promises to add new dimensions to the game's Ashlander tribes, the ornery Dunmer who retreated to Vvardenfell's harsh wastes after a bit of an altercation with the province's theocracy.

The mod isn't all Goodall, mind you. It was made in collaboration with modders Melchior Dahrk and Greatness7, both long-time Morrowind tinkerers themselves. Still, the fact that the mod comes in part from one of Morrowind's original makers is doubtless the most head-turning thing about it, and I'll be very curious to try it out the next time I embark on a playthrough of the game (my semi-annual runthrough is just about due, after all).

Oh, and although it's probably the meatiest quest he's worked on as a modder, it's not Goodall's first rodeo over at Nexus Mods. Working under the name Affa, he's also created mods like AFFresh—which adds 30 low-level quests to the game's starting areas—and the Python Morrowind Character Builder. But we all know what the real jewel in his crown is; how could anyone pass up a mod with the name Fargoth Says Hello?