Even though it's already playable for those that pre-ordered it on PC, the new Morrowind expansion for the Elder Scrolls Online makes its official debut on June 6. Which is when players across PC and console will be able to revisit the island of Vvardenfell, the iconic and mysterious land of giant mushrooms and slightly bigger volcanoes that has been stuck in the minds of Elder Scrolls fans since the release of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind back in 2002.

At a recent Elder Scrolls event in rural NSW we had the chance to play the expansion and talk to Elder Scrolls Online Game Director Matt Firor about revisiting and recreating such an iconic RPG location.

"We did [go back to the 2002 original]. There are extensive modding tools, for Elder Scrolls III, so we actually went in and used the tools to kind of remind ourselves how the quests worked, and how the stories were told. I don't know if anyone actually played through the whole thing, but we certainly installed the game and played around with it for hours. 15 years is a long time, so it was fun to go back and look at it, and then it was even more fun to kind of show the ESO version of that."


In recreating Morrowind in Elder Scrolls Online the team went to great lengths to ensure that it was very much the same place as before. But, with the added bonus of 15 years of graphical fidelity. "With Morrowind, it's interesting, because everyone remembers the game from 2002, but it was still a long time ago, graphically speaking, and so we kind of built it from the ground up. We went in and took the height map, you know, the actual graphical representation of the terrain, we lifted that from Elder Scrolls III, and then we kind of built it up from there, making sure that the scale was correct, and that it was not too big, and not too small."

Be sure to check back tomorrow for our hands-on with the expansion and the full interview with Matt.