It’s a heck of a year to be a Morrowind stalwart. We got a new version of OpenMW—an open-source, modernised reimplementation of Morrowind’s engine—back in July, Tamriel Rebuilt released its third expansion in just under a year, and now we’ve gotten another look at Skywind, an attempt to remake the game in Skyrim: Special Edition.
Specifically, we got a spooky Halloween first-look at the Corprusarium, the sanatorium where Morrowind stashes everyone afflicted with the incurable and always-fatal “divine disease” Corprus, created by the mad mortal-turned-god Dagoth Ur and unleashed across the isle of Vvardenfell prior to the events of the game. It’s basically a leper colony, or Dark Souls’ Undead Asylum before we had Dark Souls’ Undead Asylum.
It’s a quick but effective look, showing off Skywind’s rendition of a Lame Corprus victim as well as a Corprus Stalker. They look, well, as unhappy as you’d expect, being in the late stages of a disease that swells the flesh and distorts the bone.
We also get a quick glimpse of someone who I’m assuming is one of the four clone-wives of Divayth Fyr, the tremendously powerful, millennia-old Telvanni age who runs the sanatorium, but most interesting to me is the snippet of voice acting.
Original Morrowind had barely any voicework in it at all, but Skywind has—bravely and foolhardily—undertaken to have volunteers voice every line. It’s the aspect of the project that makes me most nervous, but as in other Skywind demos we’ve seen, the actors in this trailer turn in a quality performance for a line that is, in the original game, little more than a bit of generic dialogue.
So it continues to look remarkably faithful, and while I don’t think any project will ever replace the original Morrowind and the enormous library of mods and fanmade expansion it’s accumulated over the decades, I’m still very excited to get my hands on Skywind if and when it comes out.