Skywind is a non-commercial, fan made modification for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim that seeks to merge the amazing world of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind with the enhanced graphics and capabilities of the Skyrim: Special Edition engine.
While ownership of both games is required to play, the player only actually plays Skywind using the Skyrim game, and not the older Morrowind game. This means that the user interface, combat, and graphics of the Skywind mod are based on those of Skyrim: Special Edition, and not Morrowind.
We’re keeping our release targets private for now, and it’s not possible to give a useful completion percentage. With a community project such as this, progress often comes at an irregular rate and is hard to predict. Providing even an approximate estimated date won’t help us deliver Skywind faster and will result in disappointment if we’re delayed. It’ll be done when it’s done.
Currently we have been experiencing a steady level of activity in several key sectors that has benefited the project immensely. When we have a release date in mind we will notify our fans via our various social media pages and Discord.
If you would like to help accelerate the development of Skywind we would love to have any qualified volunteers come on board! Please see our volunteer page if you believe you have the passion and aptitude to learn and help: https://tesrskywind.com/volunteer/
Skywind is being made for PC. Size limitations, inability to use the Skyrim Script Extender (SKSE), intellectual property barriers, and a number of other reasons prevent us from porting to consoles.
You will need the following installed on your system:
- TES III: Morrowind, including the Bloodmoon and Tribunal expansions or the Game of the Year edition
- TES V: Skyrim: Special Edition
You need legitimate copies of both games – even if you defeat the copy protection somehow, pirated copies of the games do not work right with Skywind and you will have problems. All legitimate installations of Morrowind and Skyrim are expected to work (including disc, GOG, Steam).
Skywind takes advantage of the graphical capabilities of the Creation Engine whilst having its own unique weathers, user interface, and other alterations that will make it somewhat demanding. The recommended system spec for the mod is slightly higher than that of Skyrim: Special Edition. More information about system requirements will be available as we get closer to completion.
Skywind aims to have full functionality upon release equivalent to recent Elder Scrolls titles, as well as to expand by reintroducing critical elements from Morrowind that did not make it into Skyrim. We cannot make any promises at this time about what will and will not make it into the final release but rest assured some are already implemented and others are being worked on.
Every asset in the game is being created from scratch, to as high a level of quality as possible. The level of quality upon release should rival or surpass the average Skyrim mesh or texture.
Because Skywind is being built with a higher level of detail than Morrowind, our team of artists conceptualize and plan all assets from scratch. We revisit the Morrowind concept art and explore the intent of the original designs to create our own interpretations. This means that architecture, creatures, clothing, etc should feel like part of a consistent world steeped in culture and natural history.
A separate TES Renewal team is working on an Oblivion conversion called Skyblivion. Skywind and Skyblivion will be separate mods. Visit skyblivion.com for more information on Skyblivion.
You will be able to use fast-travel and quest markers because they come with the Skyrim engine. However it will still be quite possible to play through the entire game without them, and the dialog and quests are designed with this in mind. We’re planning to make this configurable in the Mod Configuration Manager in our version of SkyUI.
Like Morrowind, Skywind will not have horses. As well as staying true to the original game in this regard, we think it’s important that Vvardenfell maintains the impression of a vast island to explore (which, incidentally, it is – 60% as big as Skyrim by landmass, but with more explorable terrain by far!).
Horses introduce a smaller world in terms of travel time, and inevitable glitches (as demonstrated by one of our devs, Thermocrius: https://youtu.be/YZQ1HsMwtDw). This also means we’re not obliged to do horse armor DLC… although maybe the guars could do with armor?
We’re determined to make the Skywind armor system much more modular than Skyrim.
There are major practical barriers facing us – implementing clothes over armor and having separable armor pieces sometimes requires a sacrifice of aesthetics, but the team continues to explore the option of implementing worthwhile modular armor.
We’ll be designing the remaining armors and reworking existing armors in a way that allows swappable pauldrons and greaves where achievable, without sacrificing existing design and modelling work. For compatible armors, the left and right pauldron will be completely independent, and greaves will be able to be worn separate from the cuirass for those armors.
Yes! Although we’ll probably not implement every weapon from Morrowind, we’ve included crossbows and have made great progress with spears and staves, with custom animations in both first- and third-person. Throwing weapons such as knives and stars are also making excellent progress. We plan to including some impromptu weapons like pitchforks and paddles, too.
We’re going to do as much as we can manage to make spells similar to Morrowind, but there are restrictions to how spells have to be done. Many spells, especially the ones from Morrowind, are not a simple “fill in magnitude and it magically does what you want it to” – they are scripted, and often rely on many other things, such as perks, other magic effects, other spells, and global values.
If we want a spell with that stuff, we can’t just simply change a magnitude or duration in one of them. We have to create new spell(s), new perks, new global variables, new magic effects and so on for each one with different magnitude/duration/area.
With that said, we are making great progress with support of custom spells. Check out Yeeb’s work-in-progress here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uErxH5C0vUs, here:Â https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q71RdJxPV_w, and here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2mNUeoJMiU.
The team is putting their heart into making Skywind the best product it can be, and we want to make sure that our fans get to experience our vision as it is meant to be. Due to the alpha stage of the project we have decided to keep our work internal and update you via our various social media channels. We will open Skywind to a beta testing in the future when we have reached a point where feedback will be constructive to polishing up Skywind. Currently, many aspects of the game are still a work in progress and it would be hard for anyone not directly involved in the project to know what is or what is not a bug or simply unfinished at this stage.
We greatly appreciate the interest our fans have in the project and understand how much you want to play it and we’re working hard to make it what it is destined to be. If you are interested in volunteering your skills to help speed up the project please check out our volunteer page here: https://tesrskywind.com/volunteer/
Because of the major changes Skywind brings in its implementation as a Skyrim mod, this unfortunately isn’t easily feasible. Skywind will act as a stand-alone game in its own directory with its own launcher.
We’re happy with this, from a creative perspective. Morrowind tells the story of the ascent of the Nerevarine: a hero reborn in the mantle of an outlander, shipped to a hostile and alien island, and left to fend for themselves, and to discover their destiny. Having crossover with the story of the Champion of Cyrodiil or the Last Dragonborn detracts from this story, and we’re content with Skywind telling the story that The Elder Scrolls III set out to tell.
We have added new skills along with their own unique perks. The old Skyrim constellation menu/structure is going away in favor of a menu that’s something of a mix between Fallout 3/NV and the Morrowind stats menu.
As for levelling up your character, we’ve also managed to restore the major/minor skills system from Morrowind. Some of Morrowind’s skills will be merged where we think it fits. We’re able to bypass Skyrim’s 18-skill limit through creative use of global variables and actor values. It functions much like Oblivion’s, where major skills are the skills tied to your class that increase your level, and minor skills are the ones that don’t. To make it less tedious/unforgiving, we are exploring ways to reduce the min-maxing that you were forced to do if you wanted to gain the maximum result from leveling attributes.
Attributes will also be making a return.
By and large, probably not. Certain mods should be compatible, and we will be getting our own separate page on Nexus Mods where people will be able to post their mods for Skywind. However, we are changing mechanics of the game, and not every mod will be usable. You’ll have to try the individual mods for yourself.
We don’t plan to include the expansion packs at this point, but it’s possible we’ll consider it as extra content once the main game is complete and released to the world. The official plugins will be considered on a case-by-case basis.
Our QA team hates bugs! They’ll be looking to remove all of the original bugs from the game, and make sure that no new bugs are introduced in the conversion.
Hopefully. We’ve set up a pathway for the community to tackle translations with some guidance from our localization lead. Translating all of Skywind’s text is a huge task, requiring co-ordination and automation, with relatively little support from the wider team. If you’re undeterred, please familiarize yourself with ESP-ESM Translator and contact us on Discord or via the application form.
We’re open to suggestions, but note that we get a lot of them, and it’s really important that we limit scope creep. Feel free to make the suggestion, but please understand that it might not be feasible or practical!
Even if you think it’ll be easy, or if you found a mod that already does it, that doesn’t always help much. We find that independent modders are rarely all that willing for their work to be absorbed into a bigger mod, and that many mods don’t meet Skywind’s high standards. If you think you might have an exception to this trend, though, we may well be interested :)
We occasionally run donation drives to help us with costs we can’t afford – most notably website hosting and service subscriptions. If you’d like to help us cover those costs, we’d certainly be grateful – you can visit our donation page.
This is never for profit. We will never charge for Skywind, and we will never accept donations to provide exclusive access or for any other preferential treatment. Don’t accept any imitations.
We love that Morrowind didn’t railroad your decisions about important characters, and we’re replicating that approach, wherein you may kill whom you want – you simply get a message that what you’ve done has broken the storyline. To avoid annoyances, we might stop important characters from being targeted by other hostile characters and creatures.
Probably not. Everything that gets implemented in-game has been worked on by a whole group of people, from ideas to concepting to modelling to getting it into Skywind. It would be unfair for any one developer in that chain to release it as “their” asset. As a team, we’re totally focussed on bringing Skywind to completion and at this point we don’t see a benefit releasing bit-by-bit; perhaps we’ll reconsider further down the line.
The scale of the Skywind worldspace is very similar to Morrowind. In a few cases we’ve pushed and squeezed areas of the map around where we felt it was necessary for level design, but by-and-large it will be the same size and shape as Morrowind, and landmarks will be in roughly the same place. Contrary to popular belief, the Morrowind world was really quite big; our landmass is a little over two-thirds that of Skyrim.
No. No man. Hell no, man. We’ll be retaining Skyrim’s collision-centric combat, but tweaking it to give it a Morrowind slant, e.g. giving stamina more importance.
Right now, we’re planning to use the Skyrim race appearances. We’re considering visual changes, e.g. tattoos, hairstyles, and markings that we feel are better suited to Vvardenfell, but it’s not very high priority. In that situation, the beast races would still have plantigrade feet, and wear boots and helmets as they can in Skyrim.
There’s a very small possibility that we’ll undergo a more major race overhaul, creating new models from scratch that are more in-line with Morrowind’s art style.
Regrettably, we’re not working on Skyrim VR compatibility; the existing scope of the project is already plenty! Adapting Skywind for VR is a massive extra task, which just isn’t feasible for us. With custom SkyUI modifications, SKSE plugins, and other changes and developments we’ve made under the hood, doing so would be a whole extra project in and of itself.
(P.S. Even though it’s a huge job that we don’t intend to take on, we would love to see it happen.)
Information on CE2 is limited, but moving Skywind to a newer engine is impossibly out of scope. Starfield is a space shooter, so anyone who tried to create a fantasy RPG mod for it — if mods are even supported — would have to start totally from scratch.
Skywind is remaining as a Skyrim: Special Edition mod.
Yes indeed – every single line of dialogue in Skywind will be voice acted. If you’re interested in helping with voice acting, inquire on Discord.
We’re adapting the Morrowind dialogue to flow a little more naturally. The bulk of dialogue is the same as Morrowind, just broken up into short segments. All topics will have prompts so that the player isn’t just clicking “latest rumors” or “orders” on the dialogue menu. Keywords will be linked up into actual conversation, with some minor dialogue edits to help conversational flow.
Main quest characters and faction quest givers are getting more extensive edits so that dialogue flows more like a conversation. Some faction questgivers in Morrowind tend to repeat themselves constantly and repeat back the what the player said; this is being addressed.
Finally, we’ll be adding a little extra material, including a handful of quests, where we feel the game missed opportunities.
That depends what you count as a starting point – there’s no definitive answer. We’re a collective rather than a company, so we don’t have a fixed incorporation date.
Ultimately, Skywind is effectively the same age as Skyrim, because it started as a port of the original The Elder Scrolls Renewal project ‘Morroblivion’. (In fact, some aspects of Skywind, such as the voice acting project, are older than Skyrim itself!) Modders from Morroblivion started tinkering just a day or two after Skyrim was released, in late 2011. With the release of the Creation Kit on 7th February 2012, porting of Morroblivion began in earnest, and six months later, Skywind had a name and logo. So if you want to bake us a cake, the 2nd August is as good a date as any!
Since then, the nature of the project morphed into a game that will recreate every asset, from texture to mesh to sound. This was a gradual change, not a pivotal decision on a specific date, leading to the total remake project that Skywind is today.