TES III: Morrowind can now be run directly in the browser
While Todd Howard and his team are busy porting Skyrim to yet more platforms and keeping TES VI under wraps, a modder who goes by Dumpster_Buddy took another route: reviving The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind for immediate play in the browser. You can try it here: https://morrowind.virtastic.app/.
Dumpster_Buddy built this on top of the open engine OpenMW, converting game code into WebAssembly so it actually runs locally in your tab — not streamed, not shoehorned into an emulator. That means nothing has to be installed. If you own Morrowind, point the page to your game folder (i.e., the data files) and it behaves best in Chrome, Edge, or Brave.
The in-browser build brings modern render tricks, an in-game save system, controller input, and mod support. Some engine bits that were written for desktop APIs had to be reworked to behave inside a browser environment; the author mentions these changes were nontrivial, esp. around graphics and I/O.
Most of the graphics work involved fixing shadows so they stop flickering when you move, adding blurred water reflections via a custom shader, and moving lighting to per-pixel calculations. Hardware AA on WebGL2 conflicts with post-processing, so we went with supersampling instead. All of this lets the game hold a steady 60 fps even when roaming Balmora, which used to choke performance.
Looking ahead, Dumpster_Buddy says he wants to add multiplayer and a mod manager for the browser version of Morrowind.