Leap day 29 February 2004

Pic of the day: This picture (which can be found in full at the website discussed below) shows the continent of Tamriel, with colored areas marking the parts already defined in official Elder Scrolls games. There sure is a lot left.

Dreams of Tamriel

Morrowind is the third in a series of four very ambitious role playing games called The Elder Scrolls, by Bethesda Softworks. The first was Arena, the second Daggerfall, and the fourth will be Oblivion. These games are huge and take many years to make, so don't expect the final installment for another five years or so. In the mean time, the Elder Scrolls Construction Set is distributed with Morrowind for the PC and allows players to add virtually any kind of content to the game. Surely the most ambitious of these projects is "Tamriel Rebuilt".

We don't know the name of the planet on which the Elder Scrolls are written. It has two moons, one large and darkish red and one smaller and bright blue. (This is eerily similar to Darksong and Clearsong, the two moons of Liedwahr where L.E.Modesitt's Soprano Sorceress takes place, and the song magic of the vaguely Germanic people there is somewhat similar to the voice magic of the vaguely Scandinavian Nords of Tamriel ...) The constellations of Tamriel's sky are also quite alien to us. Tamriel is one of that world's continents, and presumably the largest and most hospitable. The original human races, Nords and Redguards, have come from other continents; it is implied that elves ruled Tamriel before that. The name is Elven and means 'Dawn's Beauty'; indeed it is a land of rich and varied nature, from the swamps of Black Marsh and the sands of Elseweyr to the snow-capped peaks of Skyrim. But due to the constant strife among its inhabitants it has sometimes also been called the Arena, thus the name of the first Elder Scroll. Here, you could visit the whole continent and the nearby Sumurset Isle, which together constitute the Septim Empire. Hundreds of cities, towns and dungeons were open to exploration.

One of those cities was Daggerfall, on the Iliac bay near where High Rock met Hammerfell. The area around the bay became the world of the second Elder Scroll, Daggerfall. Although only a part of Tamriel, the bay area was seen in closer detail. The cities are larger, and there must now surely be a few thousand named locations (cities, towns, villages, farms, manors, dungeons and graveyards). As always, the wilderness is fully walkable and offers random encounters. The size of it is said to be roughly comparable to Great Britain.

The shrinkage continues in Morrowind. Here the action takes place on a single island, Vvardenfell, not the whole province of Morrowind. By now, every stone and every spoon has been placed in the game by the developers; there is no random computer generated content anymore. (This certainly doesn't mean everything has a purpose. You can pick up virtually anything small enough to carry, except vegetation which you can harvest, but usually a fork is just a fork.)

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There is a toolbox which the developers used to finish the game, and this same toolbox is now given to their customers with the PC version. Already there are hundreds of "mods", modules of changed or new content added to the games. They vary from small single objects to whole villages. Some alter the very gameplay, like the Dynamic Magicka Regeneration which allows the player to slowly rebuild his mana reserves without the need to sleep, much like in the Ultima games. Some alter the game atmosphere by providing new context-sensitive sounds. Some allow new player races, classes or birth signs.

Perhaps it was only natural that someone would resent the smaller game world after the seemingly endless expanses of Arena and Daggerfall. (Although Morrowind is still enormous compared to other games, especially with the two expansion packs Tribunal and Bloodmoon). Various expansions have been proposed and attempted, including the 250MB Silgrad Tower. But by far the most ambitious must be Tamriel Rebuilt.

As the name says, Tamriel Rebuilt plans to recreate the entire continent of Tamriel, as known from Arena, but with the technology and level of detail in Morrowind. Recreating the province of Morrowind itself would be no small task, even with the island of Vvardenfell and the capital of Mournhold already part of the game. The other provinces are not just of a similar size, but also have their own geography, architecture, flora and fauna. Much of this is far less documented in the official Tamriel lore than is Morrowind. But above all, it is an insane amount of land to cover.

When Morrowind was new, the idea of adding gigabytes of game world must have seem far-fetched just because the game would kneel under the burden. It was already performing rather sluggishly on the machines that were common right then. But we who had played Daggerfall from the start, remember how outrageous its demand for hardware was when it was new, and before we stopped playing we had machines that were far too fast and had to be slowed down to play.

Already my second-to-newest machine runs Morrowind rather nicely, and hard disk space is unlikely to be a problem either. Both processing capacity and storage expand much faster than you can fill them with Tamrielan landscape.

And that's the core problem. It is a beautiful dream, but it is like a bunch of friends deciding to build a city. Not a model but a full scale city. They have most of the skills, or at least some of them have. But the problem is, there need to be thousands of them to finish it in a lifetime. And there aren't. So far, and they've been working long and hard, there are just scattered "claims" and a few spots here and there in Morrowind that are actually built. No one area is yet ready for public consumption, although fellow "modders" should enjoy some parts that are now available for download. The sad fact remains, with the current speed these guys' grandchildren will likely not live to see their work completed. That's how freaking huge this is.

If you can help them, they could sure need it. But whatever the outcome in the end, you have to admire the sheer spunk, chutzpah or whatever. And the vision that was planted in their brain. And the beautiful new Tamriel theme music by Dragonfly, which I've been humming half the day. Be sure to fetch the MP3 if nothing else, and maybe dream that this is the shape of things to come.

If I'm still around on next leap day, 4 years from now, I will surely look for Tamriel Rebuilt again.