Morrowind runs in a browser tab through the OpenMW-Web project

The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind can now be played inside a web browser, using a project that compiles the game’s open-source engine to WebAssembly.

The project is called OpenMW-Web and reached version 1.0 on GitHub, according to Polygon, which credits its release to a developer working under the name Virtastic. It is built on OpenMW, the long-running open-source reimplementation of Bethesda’s 2002 engine. PC Gamer, which reported the project after it was posted to Reddit, quoted the creator describing the approach.

What had to be rebuilt

The creator said the work amounted to replacing the parts of the engine that assume a desktop. The OpenSceneGraph renderer was moved to WebGL2, and most of the graphics effort went into shadows that stay stable as the camera moves, water reflections produced by a custom shader blur, and per-pixel lighting. Because hardware anti-aliasing does not survive post-processing on WebGL2, the build supersamples instead.

What runs in the tab is the engine itself rather than a video stream or an emulator. Saves work, and the build supports controllers and existing mods. The developer has said multiplayer and a mod manager are under consideration.

You still need the game

The full experience requires owning Morrowind on PC: players point the site at their locally installed game files, which the browser then reads from disk. Both outlets note the obvious limitation, that anyone in a position to do this could simply launch the game normally, though the files could in principle be carried on a portable drive.

A small demo world is available without any files, dropping visitors into a town with a handful of NPCs, guards and creatures. Polygon described it as a proof of concept that runs surprisingly well, with some bugs, and placed it alongside other recent Morrowind projects including a dual-screen handheld build and the long-running Skywind conversion.