I, the Breton wizard Vidal von Astral, watched as my partner—a Argonian assassin named “Lizzy”—sneaked downstairs and into the cellar of a bustling tavern.I said “sneaky” but it’s actually old and cute Morrowind The animation system and digital structure of her lizard legs means she’s jumping slowly like a Saturday morning cartoon character trying to telegraph the audience They’re doing something cunningThe guards seemed confused, watching her downstairs and around the corner, but didn’t commit to following her – perhaps this hilarious Argonian invisibility was more deceptive than encountering non-NPC eyes.
Then one of the guards moved and began striding down the stairs along the unmistakable Morrowind. I gave my partner a signal to end the raid on Cyrodillic Wine and get out of there. She escaped, but – she was a kleptomaniac – couldn’t resist groping in a sack as she was out, and the guard came in just in time. We were forced to flee and immediately became fugitives in the crossroads town of Pelagiyad. This is the first twist on our freewheeling co-op adventure in Morrowind, and it feels great to do these traditional Bethesda RPG shenanigans together.
The classic 2002 RPG Morrowind, like every mainline Elder Scrolls entry, was never designed for multiplayer, but thanks to the wonders of OpenMW (the Morrowind engine’s open source entertainment) and TES3MP (the project that added server and networking capabilities to OpenMW), You can now enjoy it as a near-seamless co-op game. While it’s rudimentary in some places, it still shows how the fully integrated co-op mode has become a star feature in The Elder Scrolls 6 (whenever it comes out), and one of the most important evolutions in the franchise’s history.
Before anyone points out that The Elder Scrolls OL is a thing, I’ll counter that the intimacy of exploring the world with a group of friends can’t be compared to the cacophony of a crowded MMO. I don’t want to go into caves and mines looking for trails of monsters that have been killed by the previous player, I don’t want to grind forever (but weirdly frictionless), I don’t want text boxes and sellers full of acronyms and “LFG”.
Sure, the idea of a fantasy city bustling with other players sounds great, but the reality is these players aren’t sitting in a tavern, talking about world events in a fantasy accent, taking part in a bar fight or fishing in a canal – they’re all just doing the same thing as you of quest givers encounter bottlenecks in talking to merchants. I’m trying to convince myself that The Elder Scrolls Online is my dream game, but even the nostalgic Morrowind expansion from a few years ago doesn’t feel like a safe, sanitized tourist trip than the one I know and love game.
Playing Morrowind in multiplayer has been itchy since I first disembarked at Seyda Neen about 20+ years ago and explored the surrounding swamps. There’s a lot of lag: enemies will focus on attacking one player even when the other side is beating them, and the RNG-based real-time combat system is outdated (though like most things, it can be fixed with mods). There’s a rustic charm to all of this, and beyond that, it showcases the potential for cooperation within the Bethesda RPG framework.
As a highly systems-driven — and lore-buggy — series, The Elder Scrolls has always been a great story generator. We all have stories about that time when we punched a guard in Oblivion, setting off a chain of events that led to a town-wide brawl; or in Morrowind we used the Ikaria flying scroll to jump straight to the endgame hill ; or when a giant in Skyrim beat us so hard that our ragdoll corpses were sent into the stratosphere. These games are potent potions of spontaneity and inevitable bugs that allow for infinitely shared experiences – see how Oblivion and Skyrim remain an infinite source of YouTube content, Let’s Plays, and meme material after all these years. In a series defined by “you won’t believe what happened to me” moments, having someone with you is the logical next step.
Morrowind’s (and the entire series) flow between stealth, action, skill building, and role-playing makes for a very flexible pacing for all kinds of co-op sessions – from 20 minutes of dungeon crawling to hanging out around town to shore up your enchantment, or Half-day expedition to the wilderness of Vvardenfell. My partner and I often parted ways—I was investigating the Dark Brotherhood riots in the Fortress of Mourning, she honed her lockpicking skills at people’s homes in Balmora—and reunited after I discovered the whereabouts of the Brotherhood base. We’re almost like each other’s AI buddies (though the joke is slightly better than Skyrim’s Lydia), our personal stories and missions intertwined but still feeling separate.Of course we Can It’s been sticking together like a traditional RPG party, but the beauty of The Elder Scrolls opening is that it’s very much an option.
The Elder Scrolls is certainly a precursor to “large-scale single-player open-world” games, but as a template maker, it’s sometimes reluctant to build from it. For example, some of the most lauded features in the build for the 2011 version of Skyrim are dual wielding and dragon fighting – which is certainly fun, but there’s a feeling that aside from the changes in settings and grooming graphics, there hasn’t been that much since Oblivion Even Morrowind really evolved after (I still feel the latter reigns supreme with its world building, story and old-school design, no map markers and handhelds).
The game world has changed a lot since Skyrim.The Witcher 3 raises the bar almost across the board, while the revival of more traditionally-styled cRPGs like Wasteland 3, Divinity: Original Sin 2, and (more recently) Solasta: Crown of the Magisters has fully embraced integrated co-op modes, allowing The once-radical concept of playing with friends suddenly became not only viable, but This The best way to play a deep RPG.
Like Morrowind’s multiplayer games, these games don’t just flag additional players, they give all players equal autonomy in the world. Naturally, they go a bit deeper than TES3MP’s admirable but relatively minimal effort, creating rich role-playing scenarios where, for example, two player characters might disagree on whether to kill or free a captured enemy, or (in Divinity case) quarrel over who will ascend to the realm of the gods. These situations help develop characters from their initial whiteboard, create interesting friction and disagreements, and complicate big decisions in the best possible way.
Well-designed co-op RPGs have produced exactly the kind of features that The Elder Scrolls have been lacking, and this may be both the making of the next Elder Scrolls and its greatest challenge. For a series that always puts you in the role of a silent protagonist who answers via prompts just to get the NPC to talk, throwing another player (or a few) into the mix will force Bethesda to show them their way The writing and role-playing chops are less customary.
On the other hand, Vidal von Astral and Lizzy prove through Vvardenfell’s adventure that The Elder Scrolls 6 can thrive as a co-op game, inspiring a new kind of RPG that draws inspiration from elements of Original Sin 2 but sticks to what makes Bethesda games special place. In those places where cRPG-style games are very explicitly party-based and story-driven, it would be more in line with The Elder Scrolls’ idea-rich if players could decide how much they would like to take part in each other’s adventures while sharing the same content. world. The combined lesson of the somewhat confusing Fallout 76 and the excellent TES3MP is that Bethesda really doesn’t need to deviate from its single-player RPG structure to accommodate co-op play.
Co-op RPGs are on the rise, and countless modders have spent countless hours trying to integrate these features into The Elder Scrolls (let’s not even start playing Skyrim together, an expensive and almost-failed attempt to add co-op to Skyrim). In a series that often thrives with the modding community, Bethesda just needs to look at TES3MP’s incredible work on the next big feature, which will help The Elder Scrolls 6 in a year better than the series last time. Thrives in a richer RPG environment when surfacing.
