Ever since The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall (which, yes, was set in Daggerfall), the mainline Elder Scrolls series has generally been pretty straightforward in its naming convention: plonk a number down denoting which entry in the series it is, then follow it up with a single-word suffix with the game’s setting, and you have yourself an Elder Scrolls game.
There was Daggerfall, there was Skyrim, and granted, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion mostly takes place in Cyrodiil, but we can give that one a pass given that you spend hours upon hours stomping around the hellish dimension of Oblivion. Also, Oblivion is clearly a cool-sounding word while Cyrodiil sounds like it could be a cough medicine.
But Morrowind has always been a bit of a weird one. Yes, the game technically takes place in the province of Morrowind, but only on the island of Vvardenfell, which makes up no more than 20% of Morrowind’s entire landmass (the Tribunal expansion teleports you to the city of Mournhold on the Morrowind mainland, but you can’t explore any of the surrounding area).
The series was still obscure enough at the time of Morrowind that Bethesda could get away with it without fans crying that they’ve been sold short (and let’s face it, Morrowind was an incredible and vast game in its own right). But still, imagine if it turned out that Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was only set in Los Santos. You’d be kind of wondering where was the rest of the state that was promised, right?
As it turns out, there is a reason for the discrepancy between name and location. The original vision was for the game to encompass the entire province of Morrowind. This map from earlier in the game’s production (way back in 1996) shows that the landmass was to stretch way beyond Vvardenfell. Production on the game restarted a couple of times since this map was created, and as we know the map would shrink significantly, but the original name, Morrowind, stuck.
As you can see, there were to be various highlands, a ‘Southern Marshes’ region, as well as myriad cities spread across the entire region. The game was originally going to feature all five of the great Dunmer houses too, but the final game only features the houses of Hlaalu, Telvanni, and Redoran, while the Houses of Dres and Indoril were omitted from Vvardenfell (though they continue to exist in the lore).
What’s interesting about the above map is that Vvardenfell was originally going to be almost entirely covered in Ashlands – hostile, craggy terrain that isn’t really that much to look at. When the game got scaled down, however, Bethesda moved things around, took elements from other regions, and made Vvardenfell a much denser and more diverse land than originally envisioned. In fact, Vvardenfell became kind of a vibrant microcosm of what the entirety of Morrowind was originally going to be.
The region surrounding what was once the city of Stonewood (later Seyda Neen) became the muggy, swampy region we now know as the Bitter Coast, while the region east of the Red Mountain became the relatively green and fertile Grazelands in the final game. While Vvardenfell is still a strange and surreal landscape in the final game, it’s also deceptively green, with tons of flora including those now-iconic giant mushrooms that grow around the more fertile regions of the game world. More cities were crammed into Vvardenfell, and the geography became more diverse, with the north, south, and east of the island becoming archipelagos with dozens of islands (it looks like the area once known as Sadrith Forest became the archipelago of Sadrith Mora, the seat of House Telvanni).
Condensing The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind into the Vvardenfell region could well have been the best thing that happened to the series, because with gaming tech where it was at the time, bigger almost certainly wouldn’t have meant better. The previous Elder Scrolls games, Arena and Daggerfall, were famously huge, but filled with bland procedurally-generated terrain that made the worlds beyond the cities feel largely hollow. By reeling in its title’s initial promise of an entire province, Morrowind gave us one of the densest, characterful game worlds released up to that point, cramming in an incredible amount of geographical and architectural variety onto one island that was originally going to be an ashen wasteland.
It’s a huge testament to the final design of the world that when the region of Vvardenfell returned in The Elder Scrolls Online in 2017, the landmass itself barely changed. You might have thought that a region from a 15-year-old game might have needed a bit of revamping, but beyond accounting for the fact that Elder Scrolls Online is set several hundred years before Morrowind, there really was no need. From its weird geography to its equally weird Dunmer inhabitants, Vvardenfell (or Morrowind, as most people know it) is timeless.
It’s well documented that Morrowind was a game subjected to a lot of crunch, and that the entirety of Bethesda was on the brink of collapse until Todd Howard took the team to a hotel, gave them a motivational pep talk, and rallied them to keep pushing on with the game (via Polygon). At some point during this process, the scope of the game was reeled in, which not only helped save the game, but signalled a paradigm shift at Bethesda, with subsequent entries Oblivion and Skyrim opting for worlds that struck a balance between feeling vast and lived-in.
With The Elder Scrolls 6 expected to be set across the two neighbouring provinces of High Rock and Hammerfell, I just hope that Bethesda isn’t stretching itself thin like it used to, prioritising scale over the kind of world richness that Morrowind first established in the series.
