You can now play Morrowind entirely in your browser: 'Honestly just wanted to see if it could be done'

A developer known online as "Dumpster Buddy" has successfully ported Bethesda's classic 2002 role-playing game The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind to run natively inside a web browser tab.

The project is built on OpenMW, an open-source recreation of the Morrowind engine, which was compiled directly to WebAssembly. Unlike remote cloud streaming or traditional emulation, the browser-based project executes the actual game engine on the user's system.

"I got OpenMW (the open-source Morrowind engine) compiling to WebAssembly," the creator explained, "so the whole game runs in a browser tab now. You open a link and you're standing in Seyda Neen. No install, no launcher."

Asked about the motivation behind undertaking the technical challenge, the developer noted: "Honestly just wanted to see if it could be done."

Rebuilding the Desktop Engine for WebGL2

Bringing a complex desktop game engine into a web browser required rebuilding several core components that originally depended on desktop environments.

"Getting it there meant rebuilding the parts of the engine that expect a desktop," the creator said in an interview with PC Gamer. "The renderer (OpenSceneGraph) had to be brought over to WebGL2, and most of the graphics work went into shadows that stop crawling when you move, water reflections done with a custom shader blur, and per-pixel lighting. Hardware anti-aliasing doesn't survive post-processing on WebGL2, so we supersample instead."

How to Play and Features

To play the complete campaign, players must provide local game files from their own installed copy of Morrowind, which the browser interface reads directly from local storage. For those without the game files handy, a bare-bones demo world is accessible immediately without any assets required.

Despite running in a web tab, the port preserves major feature sets, including controller support, progress saving, and mod support. Looking ahead, the developer has expressed interest in potentially expanding the project with an integrated mod manager and multiplayer capabilities.

---

• PC Gamer Hero image: https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/JmF4o6RuMPxHWWr64cRf5N-1280-80.jpg