Despite being regarded as one of the greatest role-playing games of all time, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind disappointed some fans upon its release in 2002 because it didn’t match the colossal scope of its predecessor, The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall. Almost immediately, fans began modding the remaining parts of the series’ fictional continent, Tamriel, into the game.
Over 20 years later, thousands of volunteers have collaborated on the mod projects Tamriel Rebuilt and Project Tamriel, building a space comparable in size to a small country. Such projects often sputter out, but these have endured, thanks in part to a steady stream of small, manageable updates instead of larger, less frequent ones.
A tale of (at least two) mods
It’s true that Daggerfall included an entire continent’s worth of content, but it was mostly composed of procedurally generated liminal space. By contrast, Morrowind contained just a single island—not even the entire province after which the game was named. The difference was that it was handcrafted.
Still, a player called “Ender,” stewing in disappointment over Morrowind’s perceived scope, took to an Elder Scrolls forum to propose a collaborative effort to mod the rest of Tamriel into the game. Tamriel Rebuilt was born.
After realizing that re-creating the entire continent was too lofty a goal, the group decided to instead focus on the rest of the Morrowind province alone—but that didn’t last long.
There had been others working toward similar goals. The makers of the fan project “Skyrim: Home of The Nords” were working on putting the province of Skyrim into Morrowind well before that location was officially made the setting of the 2011 sequel The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
Credit: Daniel Larlham Jr. A screenshot from Skyrim: Home of the Nords. A screenshot from Skyrim: Home of the Nords. Credit: Daniel Larlham Jr.
Other modders were working on “Project Cyrodilll,” an attempt to put The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion’s province into Morrowind. In 2015, those two projects combined to form Project Tamriel, reigniting the goal of adding the remaining provinces of Tamriel.