Modding project Tamriel Rebuilt's quest to make the rest of Morrowind continues apace, even over two decades after it began. The team has just released Grasping Fortune, its biggest expansion yet, bringing with it the sprawling city of Narsis. As House Hlaalu capital, Narsis took years to put together and features over 600 interiors, which means it dwarfs every other playable city in every Elder Scrolls game.
So, obviously, it's nearly time to make an even bigger city.
TR's next expansion will "start introducing parts of the Indoril heartland right outside of [Morrowind's capital] Almalexia," says TR senior dev Cicero in a chat with PCG, "And I think Almalexia might be on the cards of opening up development really soon as well… I think we might be doing it in the next few years."
As Morrowind's capital and home to the mortal-turned-goddess who shares its name, Almalexia makes even Narsis look like some podunk hamlet. "Almalexia is kind of like two cities," says Cicero, "and just looking at our math, it's about twice the size of Narsis. It might not be quite as dense as Narsis, just for our sanity and also for performance, but it's gonna be twice as widespread, and it will have more buildings, for sure."
Of course, an interesting wrinkle is that Almalexia—part of Almalexia—is already in the base game. Morrowind's Tribunal expansion takes place in Mournhold, located in Almalexia, which means the TR team will have to do a touch of light surgery to integrate that official content into its eventual expanded version of Almalexia as a whole, raising questions about preserving Bethesda's work and intent.
"The idea is we wouldn't delete anything," says Cicero, but Mournhold as it stands is built in a finicky way: "Mournhold itself is in what's called a fake exterior… it's just meshes in an interior cell with a skybox." In other words, it's an inside pretending to be an outside.
"You can't really have that if you want to incorporate it into the actual mainland… it has to be implanted into Almalexia within the same worldspace, and things would have to be spread around." So a bit of Bethesda's work might end up shuffled—King Helseth's castle might have to take a jaunt to a new bit of the province, some NPCs would have to be scattered around, farther apart.
One of the things I admire about TR is its determination to expand Morrowind just as Bethesda would have done it, so I'm very curious to see how it navigates transplanting Mournhold into its expanded Almalexia. As creature animator Grumbling Vomit told me, even on such a venerable and large project:
"The biggest challenges are always interpersonal. The talent is present, but the talent doesn't always agree. Even something small like the name of a city can cause debates… it shows just how much care is put into even the smallest of details." When it comes to Morrowind's capital, there are a whole bunch of small details to consider. I'm excited to see how TR approaches them.
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