This one is nice and subtle: the game looks a little sharper for it, but it's still very much Morrowind as intended. There are endless MW texture packs out there, but most of them involve either departing from original artist intentions or using clanging oversharpening filters. Character models, less so, but it's the environment I care about.Īll this stuff can be adjusted or turned off, if you want to preserve more of the original look - for instance, some people find the pea-soup fog to be uniquely atmospheric, so you might want to restore some of that.įor what it's worth, I also stuck in Morrowind Enhanced Textures, a very recent mod which uses neural net tomfoolery to upscale the textures. Oppresive fog all gone, light and shadow is much prettier, water has reflections, I can see the world all around rather than empty distant landscapes, there's SSAO and depth of field, and it looks just lovely - and immense.

I also spent a little while maxing individual settings beyond the recommendations, and didn't find anything to trip up my (admittedly quite powerful) PC.Īnd that, basically, is that. Allow yourself ten minutes, as it re-jiggers various files. Download, extract into Morrowind folder, run MXGEXEgui.exe, click on the Instructions tab and do what it says. Next, the bigger, slightly more involved one - Morrowind Graphics Extender XE, which dispenses with OG MW's limitations on draw distance, fog and whatnot, and adds some fancy, but not too fancy, new shader effects. Download it, stick it in your Morrowind install directory, run it, press Apply, forget about it. The first is Morrowind Code Patch, which tinkers with the main executable to clear out some ancient bugs, overcome old RAM caps and improve mod support. This isn't the only way to do that, but it's the way I'm doing that, and I got fast, excellent results. All I want to do is give you some quick pointers on how to clear away the debris of 2002 technical limitations so it looks acceptable, even beautiful, on your 2019 monitor. In short though, what I'm doing is changing this:Īctually changing the inherent look of the game, with new character models, skins, textures, trees and whatnot is another story, and I leave you to make your own decisions about that by browsing NexusMod's Morrowind archive. They've got readmes, what the crikey do you need me for? I'm going to point you at a very small handful of key mods and leave you to figure the rest out yourself.

If you're about to play, quickly do these things first.

But, thanks to 17 years of mods, it now only takes a couple of installations and a tiny amount of work to make it stunning in the ways that most count. It's basically a world of fog and people who look like they were whittled from fallen branches. Gun it up today, for the very first time, and you'll think me completely mad to say that, however.

How to make morrowind look good