Top-down modded Morrowind lets you experience Vvardenfell like it's Baldur's Gate

Morrowind's starting town of Seyda Neen as seen from above — (Image credit: Mehrunes Mike)

Morrowind came out in 2002, the same year as isometric RPGs like Icewind Dale 2, Divine Divinity, Freedom Force, and Dungeon Siege. Its first-person/third-person perspective was a selling point at the time, though some would argue that playing a full 3D game with randomized to-hit chances made for an unsatisfying experience. Nowadays, thanks to the mod combo of OpenMorrowind and OpenNevermind, we can experience Morrowind as if it was a top-down CRPG complete with click-to-move and having to zoom in so you can pick up small objects.

YouTuber Mehrunes Mike just uploaded a video showcasing OpenNevermind and a UI mod of his own design that gives Morrowind an action bar and a little bit of Baldur's Gate 3 flavor—minimap in the top right, enemy portraits across the top, you know the deal. It's an impressive piece of work, and I hope he shares it with the rest of us, even if it's not designed to deal with the massive inventory of the average Morrowind hoarder.

Isometric Morrowind is Cursed (and Kind of Awesome) - YouTube

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Mehrunes Mike stuck with the top-down perspective for most of his playthrough, in which he completed Morrowind's main questline, explored all the dwemer ruins, and killed every single werewolf to cap it off. There were a few moments where he had to cave in and switch back to first-person, mostly to pick up items that were tiny and obscured from above, and sometimes to go through doors.

For the most part though it works surprisingly well. It's fascinating watching someone play Morrowind from a completely different perspective yet do all the things I do, like trying to jump into the water from the top of Molag Mar and failing to clear the bottom level. And a lot of it looks great—areas with levels like the Waistworks, some of the dungeons, and anything with a bridge looks gorgeous, even if he has to rotate the camera a lot to see where he's going.

If you want to play Morrowind like this you'll need to download OpenMW and then OpenNevermind. The latter mod started out as an April Fool's joke but despite its issues has been embraced by the Morrowind community, who are pretty comfortable with a high degree of jankiness to begin with.

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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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