The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind Is Now Playable In Your Browser (For Free)

The Elder Scrolls is still in a fantastic spot overall, despite the fact that fans have been waiting forever for the next entry. Fans of the series are generally in it for life, and the strength of classic games like Morrowind really helps secure its legacy.

Plus, there’s Elder Scrolls Online, which has been in operation since 2014, and Skyrim is still acting like it was just released a few months ago. Every time you turn around, someone has crafted and uploaded a mind-blowing Skyrim mod to play. The community is as active as ever.

Now, thanks to a new update found by a creator on Reddit, we can add another series achievement to the pile. Thanks to some wizardly, we have a playable free browser version of Morrowind.

Available at OpenMW, you can play the full version of Morrowind from your browser. You can run the free sample world, or you could use your own version of Morrowind to play from a legal installation.

Here’s the full statement from the creator Dumpster_Buddy: “I got OpenMW (the open-source Morrowind engine) compiling to WebAssembly, so the whole game runs in a browser tab now. You open a link and you’re standing in Seyda Neen. No install, no launcher. It’s the actual engine, not a stream and not an emulator, so shadows, water, saves and gamepads all work. There’s a small free example world if you just want to poke at it, or you can point it at your own Morrowind install and it reads the files straight off your disk. Nothing gets uploaded. Desktop Chrome, Edge or Brave work best right now. All credit to the OpenMW team, I just built their engine for the browser. It’s free and open source, same as the engine.”

Right now the game will run, but updates are planned for the future, including the possibility of multiplayer. A mod manager is something that’s also in the works, and users are reporting that mods will work with the browser edition as-is. As the creator notes: “A huge shout out to the guys who build and maintain web assembly. They have really made it possible to do the impossible with a web browser.”

The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind remains one of my favorite RPGs of all time. It really takes the idea of “role-playing” to another level, as Bethesda thought of basically everything, and packs in so much that you can do whatever you want to do.

Systems

Released

May 1, 2002

ESRB

T For Teen due to Blood, Violence

Developer(s)

Bethesda Game Studios

Publisher(s)

Bethesda Softworks

Engine

Gamebryo