OpenMW 0.49 arrives to enhanced Morrowind and they're looking to support later Bethesda games

Whew, this one took a while. Around three years of development went into OpenMW 0.49.0 which is now available to play Morrowind with lots of enhancements.

An absolutely massive update for the open source game engine reimplementation, with so many things new it would be impossible to list them all here. Easily one of my absolute favourite projects because Morrowind is such a classic it deserves to be kept alive and well.

Should look better than ever too with many new graphical updates like water ripples, water transparency, specular lighting, improved post-processing and more. There's physics improvements, upgrades to the scripting system for modders, UI improvements, a faster launcher, translations support in the launcher, animation blending support, pathfinding improvements and it feels like the list goes on forever. The list of bug fixes is also rather long.

General gameplay was a focus for this release too, like getting melee combat to actually look and feel correct. As they said "Nobody knows how it works, and if you think you do, you don’t. Even if your name is Todd Howard. Nevertheless, trying to get it right was a focus for this release, and we replaced the physics-based hits of previous releases with Morrowind’s more simple scanning of the player’s surroundings based on a hit cone defined by the game settings". The result is that it should feel better and hitting flying enemies is now much easier. But it's also now easier for flying enemies to actually hit you too.

Perhaps even more exciting is that they've begun prototyping work to support Oblivion (2006), Skyrim, Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 4. What they said about it: "You’ve read that right. Leveraging community research, we’ve begun prototyping support for Oblivion (2006), Skyrim, Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 4, games based on later revisions of Bethesda’s open-world game engine. Their game files can be enabled as “mods” for Morrowind or the OpenMW Example Suite in the launcher. The console can then be used to teleport to their locations. As we’re picking the low-hanging fruits, early support includes very basic “walking simulator” functionality".

See more in their release announcement. You need to own Morrowind to play it which you can grab on GOG and Steam.