Great news, guys: videogames are done. They're over. We're free. Someone has created the definitively best game ever made, so there's no use creating any more. Pack it up. Everyone head home.
A heroic modder named InfernoPlus has merged two great tastes that taste great together: jamming the entirety of Morrowind's world map into Elden Ring to create some sort of… Elden Wind. Morrow Ring. Todd RR "Miyazaki" Howard.
In other words, it's the incredible worldbuilding, lore, and spear-biting of The Elder Scrolls 3 but with a combat system that doesn't actively hurt to use. "Morrowind is one of my favourite games of all time," says InfernoPlus, "but goddamn is it dated. So my goal here is to try and combine the world and lore of Morrowind with the combat of a Souls game, basically just taking the best of both and slapping them together."
It's by no means complete but is already scarily robust. Wanna ramble from Seyda Neen to Balmora? Go nuts. Wanna climb Red Mountain and survey Vvardenfell? Fill your boots. Wanna stab Arrille (of Arrille's Tradehouse fame) in the back? You do you.
InfernoPlus originally tried to cram Morrowind's landmass into Dark Souls 1, only to find that the sheer weight of it was too much for the creaky old engine to handle. Dark Souls 3 did a little better—it "just barely fit within the world-loading restrictions"—but our hero eventually settled on Elden Ring, both because ER's modding tools have come a long way in recent years and because "Elden Ring is just a better game than Dark Souls 3." They're right, you know.
There's still plenty left to do, of course. For one thing, InfernoPlus has yet to figure out navmeshes for the game's enemies, meaning the myriad bandits that live in its caves are trapped in a life of eternal dodgerolling (which is, in fairness, how I play Souls games regularly), with no real strategy or tactics happening when it comes to their attempts to defeat you.
Also, they've yet to get around to making the world's NPCs other than a copy-pasted "default girl woman" (non-human NPCs are all goats) and you can speak with every single one of them about every single dialogue topic that comes up in Morrowind. Which isn't how OG Morrowind worked. Relatively few default girl women in Morrowind, if I recall correctly.
But really, the work InfernoPlus has already done is incredibly impressive, and I'd kill for a world where I one day got to enjoy my favourite game of all time (Morrowind) with all the slick mechanics of a modern FromSoft game.
Will we ever get there? Well, maybe. It's a lot of work, and InfernoPlus is clear they'll need outside help to get it all done, but on the bright side, I guess we don't have to fear a cease and desist. "You can just go ahead and stop writing that very threatening email," InfernoPlus tells Bethesda's lawyers, "because this project does not violate any copyright whatsoever." You'd need to own both Morrowind and Elden Ring to get it all working, and transplant the assets of the former over to the latter, much in the way plenty of other total-conversion mods work.
InfernoPlus also says they're not worried about FromSoft lawyers because "they're based as fuck." So that's that, then.