ModWatch: Morroblivion

Jul 31 2008

I am a big fan of mods… be it store-shelf or low-amateur quality, there’s something about mods which have a different appeal from retail games. There’s a lot more scope for originality… doing things the original developers couldn’t possibly do themselves due to financial or legal restrictions (they wouldn’t sell enough copies of a Half-Life 2 Meets Metal Gear Solid Crossover to cover the cost of covering legality issues). It also produces a game made by fans, with their own interests in mind… meaning something more humourous (albeit sometimes unintentionally) and definitely cheekier than anything made by the bigwigs.

Morroblivion is a fantastic Olbivion mod which allows the player to revisit the dark plains of Vvardenfell - where life is cheap, and loot is abundant… or the frosty forests of Solstheim - where the locals’ hearts are as cold as the land they inhabit (bar Uncle Sweetshare of course; what a gangster) or… the rubbish land of Mournhold, where there’s little to do and much to lament (such as the fact that you’d spent your hard earned on a pathetic excuse for an expansion pack).

Morroblivion converts all of your Morrowind (plus whatever expansions you have) files to ones compatible with Oblivion (and yes, that does mean you need to own a copy of Morrowind unfortunately. Wish you hadn’t sold it now don’t you - ey?). So far, so good then… you can explore the lands of Morrowind and it’s expansions while admiring the scenery and getting into fights with native creatures and locals (with Oblvion’s graphics, physics and gameplay: that’s right, it improved the graphics too!). At the moment though that’s all you’ll be able to do, as the mod is in Beta stage and it currently just converts NPCs, Land and Items (basically it converts most things apart from dialogue and text… but that’s on it’s way in future editions).

I’ve already installed the mod (it takes quite a while to convert the files, I must warn you) and sadly, for me it doesn’t work! It seems to work for most people who try it so I must just be a very unlucky person. You need to have a half-decent degree of computer knowledge in order to start the conversion, but the readme explains what needs to be done quite clearly so unless you’ve never edited a config file before, you shouldn’t have any trouble.

Watch this space for more news on the latest mods… including news on updates for exciting mods such as this!

[Show as slideshow]