The takeaway: The latest iterations of Epic's Unreal Engine can supercharge the appearance of decades-old classic games. Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is one of the latest, although it's just a playable tech demo at this point. Still, it looks incredible despite there not being much to do.
Greg Coulthard is a self-taught CG enthusiast and YouTuber with a passion for bringing classic games into current-gen visual technology. Using Unreal Engine 5, he updates aged classics to showcase modern graphics features. Recently, the modder applied the UE5 treatment to one of the best – and most heavily modded – games of all time – The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.
A few weeks ago, Coulthard began porting Morrowind to Unreal Engine 5.6, using a custom ESM parser he developed in C++. Morrowind uses ESM (Elder Scrolls Master) files to store its game data. Epic released version 5.6 of its game engine just a few months ago, with improved performance and enhanced graphics features, making it ideal for Coulthard's project.
Coulthard said he got carried away with the project, ultimately recreating the entire map of Morrowind in Unreal Engine. His main goal was to test whether he could port the game's virtual world to UE and see how it would appear in the new graphics environment. So far, the port does not include quests, NPCs, or other player-focused interactive elements.
As of yet, the project does not support DLSS 4 or FSR 3.0 and experiences some resolution issues in full-screen mode. DSOGaming notes that performance is solid, provided you have a recent machine equipped with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 GPU. Coulthard used the texture pack from Morrowind VanillaPlus, a mod designed to enhance the game's terrain rendering and environmental effects.
Coulthard offers a "playable" tech demo on his Discord server, though the experience remains limited to basic exploration for now. The mod shows that the enduring interest in Bethesda's classic action-RPG title hasn't wavered. Morrowind introduced the Elder Scrolls series to "real" 3D graphics when it launched over two decades ago.
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind's richly detailed and open world encouraged players to shape their own adventures. It introduced the series to an open-ended, freeform gameplay design that made the main quest entirely optional. Fans embraced that freedom, cementing it as the defining standard for subsequent TES games.
As one of the most heavily modded 3D games ever made, Morrowind has inspired the community to do some wild things with its official assets. OpenMW is a complete open-source re-creation of the original engine. Modders have ported the entire game into Oblivion's Gamebryo engine to create Morroblivion. Another team is actively developing Skywind, a full port to the Creation Engine used by Skyrim and Fallout 4.