I have, in my career at this illustrious publication, covered my love for Morrowind exhaustively and exhaustingly. It’s simply the best one. The best game in Bethesda’s catalogue and, perhaps, the best videogame. Ever.
Or it was.
A damning investigation from an excellent YouTuber named Any Austin has shed light on a secret sickness at Morrowind’s heart: The game’s rivers are a lie. They’re actually sloughs. Kind of. Except they’re not. Look, the important thing is that Todd Howard has pulled the wool over our eyes yet again.
As Any Austin explains in disconcerting detail, the many rivers of Morrowind’s isle of Vvardenfell don’t actually have many of the characteristics necessary to make them, well, rivers. They’re wet, yes, verifiably, but apart from that? They really don’t have the flow to them that you traditionally associate with your Niles, Amazons, and Mississippis of the world. They’re more like long, useless, skinny lakes than real rivers. Or sloughs. Apparently those are called sloughs.
It’s worth watching the video in its entirety just to see a real person apply actual hydrology to the task of explaining the geographically impossible choices made by level designers in the early 2000s, and Any Austin comes perilously close to achieving a true grand, unified theory of Morrowind’s not-rivers. It all makes sense: The tectonic makeup of the volcanic Red Mountain at Vvardenfell’s centre, case studies from real life that resemble Morrowind’s waterways, he even pulls up a paper from 1983 to make his case. Nothing has ever sloughed harder than Morrowind’s sloughs. Not even Slough.
Which makes it all the more impressive when, after 10-or-so minutes of carefully constructing his argument, Austin spends the last five-ish comprehensively demolishing it. Vvardenfell’s skinny puddles aren’t rivers, that much is certain, but they aren’t really sloughs either, for complex historical and hydrological reasons I won’t spoil here. They’re just… there. They’re elongated natural pools with no good reason to exist, relatably, and neither a river nor a slough be.
Which is quite funny, if you ask me, and no doubt a thousand times more work and analysis than any overworked Bethesda level maker ever thought anyone would pour into their work over two decades ago. But that, I reckon, is Morrowind’s magic. Unlike the games that followed it, the third Elder Scrolls was genuinely interested in itself and its own lore and invited you to be, too. I think that’s a big reason people are still obsessed with it this far down the line, and it’s why people are doing things like, well, 15-minute hydrological analysis videos of it. That’s not just a mark of quality, it’s a mark of legacy. Starfield could never.
