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The Most Essential Morrowind Remaster Upgrades

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On May 16, 2025

With how legendary The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion became in the years since its initial release in 2006, any remaster would have been a guaranteed success. Virtuous and Bethesda Game Studios knocked it out of the park with The The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered

,however, and not just because of the fantastic visual makeover accomplished via Unreal Engine 5.

Review: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered

This isn’t a remake by any means, but the updated visuals create the world of Cyrodill that’s been in your mind for years.

As many have pointed out, this new version of the game received a number of gameplay and quality-of-life updates that both make it more playable in 2025 and resolve longstanding fan grievances. Between this and the success of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, one cannot help but hope that Bethesda Softworks might consider giving The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind a similar treatment eventually. If it does, these are some of the updates that would be absolute must-haves.

10

Quest Bug Fixes

You really shouldn’t have come here.

Unfortunately, quest-breaking bugs still abound in unmodded Morrowind. Most have to do with performing certain actions early, so players should, in theory, be able to avoid them. Given the overall lack of direction in Morrowind, however, it’s still easy enough to stumble into, say, Huleen’s Hut and accidentally get locked out of the Mage’s Guild quest line.

So these, along with a number of issues like dying from a Fortify Health potion wearing off, would need addressing in any potential remaster. Fortunately, modders have stamped most of them out over the years, so it would hopefully just be a matter of referencing their work.

9

Movement Speed

I wanna go fast!

It’s not so much that there’s something wrong with the movement speed in Morrowind. It’s more of an annoyance than anything else. Vvardenfell may be smaller than Cyrodiil, but it doesn’t feature horses, and fast travel is limited to boats and silt striders. That means players must spend a lot of their time walking from place to place and the Nerevarine is nowhere near as fast as a horse without some sort of augmentation.

Oblivion Remastered Imperial City Mages Guild

How to Enchant Gear in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered

Creating the best gear possible is not as hard as it may seem.

Raising the base movement speed, or at least including an option for it, would help cut down on the amount of time one would have to spend just wandering around. It’d also possibly reduce cliff racer encounters too, but that’s likely a sacrifice most would be willing to make.

8

Expanded UI Features

Adding a few more tools to the belt can only be a good thing.

The UI in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind

doesn’t exactly have issues, but it could use a few more features. In particular, the inventory can become cluttered if one isn’t proactive about either selling or storing items and gear that they don’t immediately need, so features to help keep track of everything would be much appreciated.

Features such as searching, filtering or more organization options would go a long way towards keeping things manageable. Also, an additional “help” tab that lists Morrowind’s many unintentionally hidden tools (like custom map markers) would be a literal game changer.

7

Improved Quest Management in the Journal

Who am I doing this for again?

By default, it can be tricky keeping track of quests and quest progress in the journal. It’s a deliberate choice Bethesda made to help players feel more like they’re really participating in the world of Morrowind, but it’s still frustrating. It turns out, however, that the journal can be arranged in a way that makes it much easier to keep track of finished and unfinished quests. It’s just a matter of clicking Options, clicking Quests and then toggling Show Active by clicking Show All.

Since this capability already exists in vanilla The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, it would just be a matter of the developers ensuring that this is the default journal configuration in the remaster.

Adjusting how the journal displays information is probably one of those things that was covered in the original game’s manual, so we probably can’t fault Bethesda there. Unfortunately, game manuals lie firmly in gaming’s past now, so the optimal configuration should be the default, especially considering that most players aren’t looking for their quests in the “options” menu.

6

More Ways to Regenerate Magicka please!

Mages need to be able to cast more than once a day!

Magic is, in every sense of the word, busted in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Bethesda Softworks lets players get away with practically everything they can dream up thanks to the spell-crafting system. There’s just one catch: magicka doesn’t passively regenerate. If one wants to play

an effective mage,
it’s either keep a very healthy stock of magicka potions or rest overly frequently. It is, so to speak, a total buzzkill.

There’s just one catch to magic in Morrowind: magicka doesn’t passively regenerate.

Adding capacity to passively regenerate magicka by default would bring a Morrowind remaster more in line with Oblivion and

Skyrim,
as well as make mages a much more fun and viable option in the early-game. Slinging magic is fun after all and who doesn’t want more fun?

5

More Straightforward Leveling

I just want to play the game and get stronger.

Even though leveling up incorrectly in Morrowind has fewer negative consequences than it does in the original Oblivion, getting it right still takes a little while if one forgets to consult the internet before getting started. So, just like in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, tweaks to the leveling system would be welcomed.

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Even just making it clearer as to which skills affect which attributes would be enough, as would a few additional tool tips. Just about

every road
eventually leads to becoming OP in Morrowind, but this would almost certainly go a long way towards helping players find their footing in the early game.

4

Optional Dice Roll Combat

My sword connected, so why did I miss?

Just like with leveling up, dice roll combat is much more of an early-game problem than it is in the mid- to late-game. Once one actually gets some decent gear and gets their build going, combat in Morrowind can feel similar to how it is in the later games. Before then, though, it can feel awful thanks to constant misses and much greater vulnerability to status ailments.

Ideally, a remastered Morrowind would feature combat that reduces the overall nastiness of

early-game combat
and it should be doable considering all the existing mods that already do exactly that. It’d just be a matter of either striking the right balance or somehow making it an optional feature rather than mandatory.

3

More Voicelines for Major Characters

Vivec would be a lot more impressive if he could speak.

It makes sense that most characters in Morrowind don’t have voice lines, given just how much there is to be said and the technical limitations of the time. There are a few NPCs that should have voiced dialogue, however, such as Vivec, Almalexia, Yagram Bagarn and Divayth Fir. Now that fully voiced games are so commonplace, it feels weird having text conversations with important characters.

Virtuous already did this in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered by adding new voice actors and lines in places that were lacking before, so there’s at least no technical reason why it couldn’t do something similar in an Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind Remastered.

2

Make Bloodmoon and Tribunal Trigger Later

I haven’t even done anything yet and there’s already a price on my head?!

Morrowind’s Bloodmoon and Tribunal DLC expansions are great, but they’re endgame expansions and should only involve endgame characters. From the very beginning, however, turning on these expansions causes the Dark Brotherhood to start targeting the Nerevarine. They don’t mess around either; be the player level three or level thirty, the brotherhood is sending its best dudes right away.

The Ebony Armor in Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion Remastered is amazing

How to Get the Ebony Armor in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered

The Ebony Armor in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered can be earned surprisingly quickly.

Again, there are plenty of mods on PC that fix this already, but it would be beyond nice to just keep those assassins from going after the Nerevarine too early by default. One can’t exactly have a grand adventure if they’re murdered in their sleep on the first night now, can they?

1

Cliff Racer Elimination Quests

It didn’t have to be this way, but you forced my hand.

Lorewise, it’s Jiub (the dark elf that the Nerevarine meets on the boat to Seyda Neen) that succeeds in almost completely wiping out the Cliff Racers on Vvardenfell, but that doesn’t mean that the Nerevarine couldn’t help get things started. Jiub’s one-man crusade comes after the Nerevarine’s story concludes, after all, which is too late for Morrowind players.

Sure, cliff racers are as iconic as they are annoying, so eliminating them might take away some of that “classic” feel from a Morrowind remaster. Still, that’s why it should be a quest. New players can experience the cliff racers in all their obnoxiousness and long-time fans can book it over to the quest-giver and finally enjoy a game without them. Heck, Jiub could even be that quest-giver, making the whole enterprise lore-friendly.