The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind - Development

Development

See also: Development history of The Elder Scrolls series

A third title in the Elder Scrolls series was first conceived during the development of Daggerfall, though it was originally to be set in the Summerset Isles and called Tribunal. Following the release of Daggerfall, it was set up around an SVGA version of XnGine, which Bethesda later used in Battlespire, and set in the province of Morrowind. The game was "much closer to Daggerfall in scope", encompassing the whole province of Morrowind, rather than the isle of Vvardenfell, and allowing the player to join all five Dunmer Great Houses. The blight was conceived as a dynamic force, progressively expanding and destroying cities in its wake. It was finally decided that the scope of the original design was too grand given the technology current at the time. According to Ken Rolston, something was said approximating "We’re not ready for it, we don’t want to jump into this and fail". The project was put on hold in 1997, as Bethesda went on to develop Redguard and Battlespire, though the project remained in the back of the developers minds throughout this period.

The completion of Redguard in 1998 led to a return to the Morrowind project, as the developers felt a yearning in their audience to return to the classically epic forms of the earlier titles. Finding that the gaps between their own technical capacities and those of rival companies had grown in the interim, Bethesda sought to revitalize itself and return to the forefront of the industry, an effort spearheaded by project leader Todd Howard. The XnGine was scrapped and replaced with a Direct3D powered engine, with transform and lighting capacity, 32-bit textures and skeletal animation. During their promotional campaign, Bethesda deliberately paralleled their screenshot releases with the announcement of NVIDIA's GeForce 4, as "being indicative of the outstanding water effects the technology is capable of".

The scale of the game was much reduced from the earlier concept, focusing primarily on Dagoth Ur and a smaller area of land. It was decided that the game world would be populated using the methods the team had developed in Redguard; that is, the game objects would be crafted by hand, rather than generated using the random algorithmic methods of Arena and Daggerfall. By 2000, Morrowind was to be unequivocally a single-player game, with no chance of multiplayer extension. In the words of Pete Hines, Bethesda's Director of Marketing and PR: "No. Not on release, not three months after, no no no." The project, despite the reduced scale, became a massive investment. According to the team's reasoning's, the endeavor took "close to 100 man-years to create". To accomplish this feat, Bethesda tripled their staff and spent their first year of development on The Elder Scrolls Construction Set, allowing the game staff to easily balance the game and to modify it in small increments rather than large. According to project leader Todd Howard, the Construction Set came as the result of a communal yearning to develop a "role-playing operating system", capable of extension and modification, rather than a particular type of game. Despite the additional staff, designer Ken Rolston would later state that, compared to Oblivion, Morrowind had a small design team.

In May 2000, Bethesda set the first expected PC release date in late 2001. On May 5, 2001, Bethesda announced the development of an additional Morrowind release for Microsoft's Xbox. The project was, according to the same release, something that Bethesda had been working on with Microsoft since they had first known of the console. Morrowind had an impressive showing at E3 2001, demonstrating a beta build to the public. The same beta build was demonstrated to the staff of PC Gamer for another preview, and was kept around the office as late as June 19 as the subject of later previews, while another test build was developed alongside. Later order forms, such as those by Electronics Boutique, set the date in November. On October 10, 2001, GameSpot reported that Morrowind's release date had been set back to March 2002. On October 12, a press release from Bethesda gave the date of "Spring 2002", confirming GameSpot's supposition of delay without agreeing on the more specific date of "March". Though no rationale behind the delay was given at the time, developer Pete Hines later attributed the delay to a need for game testing and balancing. Although the PC version of Morrowind had gone gold by April 23, 2002, and was released on May 1 in North America, the Xbox release was delayed further. On April 15, GameSpot suggested an Xbox release date sometime in May and a scheduled "going gold" date for the Xbox version in the first week of the same month. In contradiction of GameSpot's supposition, a June 4 Bethesda press release set June 7 as the Xbox release date.

On January 3, 2002, Bethesda announced that game publisher Ubisoft would take control of the European distribution of Morrowind and eight other Bethesda games. Under Ubisoft's supervision, Morrowind's European release took place in two stages. A "semi-localized" version of the game was released in May, containing a translated manual but leaving the game's text in untranslated English. A fully localized version of the game, with translated versions of both, was released in August. Ubisoft group brand manager Thomas Petersen described the difficulties of translating a "universe featuring more than a million words" as "quite a task".

In a break from standard industry practice, Bethesda decided to publish their strategy guide in-house, rather than contracting it out to a third party publisher like BradyGames or Prima Games. The decision resulted from a belief among Bethesda staff that they believed in and understood Morrowind more than any external agency, and deserved more royalties than were commonly rewarded. Bethesda hired Peter Olafson, a noted game journalist and friend of the company, and they began work on the guide in January 2002, four months prior to release. The resulting product, Morrowind Prophecies Strategy Guide, sold over 200,000 copies as of September 24, 2003. Although the royalties from most third-party game publishers approach 25% to 30% only infrequently, Bethesda managed a 70% profit margin on their own. In spite of this success, Bethesda decided to allow Prima Games to publish the "official" game guide for the release of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.