Morrowind in Elden Ring mod is now "mostly playable", despite the fact its creator's "entire existence has been consumed with interpreting gibberish code"

"I've got like a dozen different horror stories I could tell you guys"

Regular RPS readers might remember me writing a couple of times last year about a modder kicking off an attempt at porting Morrowind into Elden Ring. Their early progress looked promising, if living under the cloud of several complex things the group would have to figure out in some form to get it working.

After about half a year of major updateless silence, modder InfernoPlus has emerged from the dungeons of Vvardenfell to reveal that the mod's now "mostly playable", following several months of battling a number of infuriatingly complex issues.

"We have made tremendous progress on the mod," InfernoPlus said at the start of their video, before delving into a demo of some quests. "Many things that I thought would be impossible have taken shape, and the game has entered a fairly playable state. It's still got a ways to go before it's done, but what we have built here is actually really quite interesting."

Rather than having a bunch of cookie-cutter placeholder NPCs just lurking around Morrowind's world, the mod's now looking a lot closer to an actual game, with NPCs in different getups wandering around and providing the services they should in addition to dishing out dialogue. The likes of a crime system that has guards properly chase you, an alchemy system that steps in for Elden Ring's crafting, and even the likes of the persuasion minigame have taken shape, even if they need more tweaking. The port even mostly supports some Morrowind mods, such as the absolutely essential Balmora Burger Franchise.

It's not all been smooth sailing though. InfernoPlus pinpointed the likes of developing a map builder that matches the "giant jigsaw puzzle" of smaller images which make up Elden Ring's world map, FromSoftware's complex way of handling references for JSON audio files, needing to dig into Elden Ring's executable in order to even begin navmeshing, and the "absolute horror of dialogue and script compiling" as things that've kept them up at night. "In order to make all of this work, I quite literally had to replicate the entire Morrowind NPC behavior system inside of Elden Ring," they explained in terms of the latter. "To achieve this, we actually have JortPob procedurally generate code in two different programming languages that is then compiled into binaries that are wrapped in binder files for the game engine to load on demand. Now, while that sentence may have only taken 15 seconds to say, it unfortunately took three months to actually do. And that's not even the end of it."

As for what's left to do going forwards, the modder explained that while their work's now "mostly playable", "playable does not mean fun". "A large share of the remaining work is game balancing and design," they continued. "For example, the potions you make with alchemy right now are not scaled to Elder Ring stats. So, a Sujamma can give you 50 strength for 60 seconds, which is an absurd amount." Hand placing enemies, creating boss rooms, making fully custom NPC faces, voice acting, and designing features like lockpicking are all still on the to do list, lest you think the mod'll be out imminently.

It's looking good though, provided the folks behind it continue to march on through the fire and war of development.