Play Morrowind Right in Your Browser Thanks to Fan-Made Project

Fans can make wildly impressive things when they love something enough. Take, for example, Virtastic, a team of enthusiasts who ported The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind right into Chromium-based browsers.

All you need is Chrome, Edge, or Brave and legally obtained game files to enjoy one of the most popular parts of the series. 

Yes, it means that you might as well play the game the way it was supposed to be played, but there are many possibilities opening up with the project. As one Redditor mentioned, you could put the files onto a portable drive and play anywhere. I'd think of it as a basis for future porting abilities.

To make this wonder happen, Virtastic used OpenMW, the open-source reimplementation of the Morrowind engine, cross-compiled to WebAssembly with Emscripten and rendered with WebGL2. "It's the real C++ engine running in the tab, not a video feed of a game running somewhere else."

"Getting it there meant rebuilding the parts of the engine that expect a desktop. The renderer (OpenSceneGraph) had to be brought over to WebGL2, and most of the graphics work went into shadows that stop crawling when you move, water reflections done with a custom shader blur, and per-pixel lighting. Hardware anti-aliasing doesn't survive post-processing on WebGL2, so we supersample instead. It holds a steady 60fps, including the walk through Balmora that used to be the worst case."

The creators ran into some challenges along the way, and if you're curious about the development, you can check out their blog.

I'm sure you're itching to try it out. Good news: there is a small demo scene with NPCs, guards, and creatures. However, it doesn't work as intended for me, so I can't really say how indicative it is of the full version's performance.