Not to mention the immense effort from the modding community.
The Tamriel Rebuilt mod opens up much of mainland Morrowind for exploration (the official game covers only the island of Vvardenfell) and it is huge. It's as if they had released a Morrowind 2 but made it twice as big and still in the exact same style as the original.
* Graphics updates with shaders for improved water and fog (which you can combine with much higher view distance), godrays, HDR, etc, improved meshes, improved grass, high resolution textures with normal maps and PBR.
* Modernized UIs
* Multi-mark (extra marks as you level mysticism)
* Turn the books into audiobooks and add full voice acting if you're a mild heathen.
* Combat and leveling system overhauls if you're a full heathen.
I played it a year ago. To my surprise, in some ways, the advanced graphics broke my immersion. Standing in Vivec and expanding the render distance to Seyda Neen takes away part of the mystery.
I had the same with Gothic, where my more powerfull computer could render Xardas' tower when standing in the old camp.
Both games partially depend on limited render distance to provide an illusion of vastness.
one of my favorite games i've ever played is Enderal: Forgotten Stories[0], total conversion mod for Skyrim. liked it way more than Skyrim, includes some new gameplay elements and the story is absolutely phenomenal. while playing it i was constantly in awe of the fact that this was a free conversion made by a low amount of people. played it for about 90 hours over a couple of weeks.
I found Enderal so compelling that I watched a full playthrough, it's the only game I've ever done that with. I wanted to play it all the way through myself, but my PC at the time had very strange audio cracking issues with Skyrim so I wasn't able to get far.
The Tamriel Rebuilt mod opens up much of mainland Morrowind for exploration (the official game covers only the island of Vvardenfell) and it is huge. It's as if they had released a Morrowind 2 but made it twice as big and still in the exact same style as the original.