Inside the quixotic team trying to build an entire world in a 20-year-old game

“The entirety of Tamriel is, in our scale, roughly the size of the real-life country of Malta, which is small in real life, but quite big from a human perspective,” said Tiny Plesiosaur, a senior developer who has done mapping and planning for both projects but who spends most of her time on Project Tamriel these days.

Both projects aim to create a cohesive, lore-accurate representation of these realms as they would have looked during the fictional historical period in which Morrowind takes place. So far, they’ve made substantial progress.

One thing in their favor, said Mort, a 13-year veteran quest-designer of Tamriel Rebuilt, is that Morrowind design makes it especially amenable to large-scale modding.

“I’d say the thing that makes Morrowind most conducive to these kinds of projects is no voiced dialogue,” Mort said. “The reason that you see so many quest mods for Morrowind as opposed to Oblivion and Skyrim and even Fallout is that the barrier to make a quest is essentially nothing.”

Frequent, contained public releases also work to their advantage. “I know for a lot of projects, they want to [do a] ‘we’ll release it when it’s done’ kind of thing,” said Mort. “We’ve found that releasing content builds hype, it gives players what they want, and perhaps most importantly, it serves as a proof of life and a fantastic recruitment tool.”

Every time Tamriel Rebuilt pushes a release, he said, the team picks up at least a dozen devs almost immediately. So far, Tamriel Rebuilt has seen nine releases; the most recent is titled “Grasping Fortune.” The next release, “Poison Song,” is expected sometime in 2026 and will include a never-before-seen faction. The most optimistic estimate for when the project will be fully finished is 2035.

A map of the province of Morrowind for the Tamriel Rebuilt project. Note that the original game includes only the large island in the bay in the top half of the image.

Credit:
Tamriel Rebuilt

Project Tamriel has made most of its progress in Skyrim and Cyrodiil. The release of “Abecean Shores,” the coastal section of Cyrodiil, came in late 2024. Together, the projects have added hundreds of hours of hand-crafted quests, dungeons, and landscapes to a game that was already robust.