If you are playing Morrowind in 2026, my recommendation is that you do so using OpenMW, its 18-year-old fan-made and open-source engine reimplementation that makes it run smooth as butter on any modern machine you point it at, whether you're running Windows, Linux, macOS or, hell, FreeBSD if you wanna get really sicko with it. It's simply the most convenient way to get a cromulent version of Bethesda's best game running on modern systems.

And now it has a new version. Or rather, a new release candidate that will prove the basis of its upcoming 0.52 version. Released a couple of days ago, OpenMW 0.52 RC1 contains a bunch of fixes, some new features, and one minor alteration to the fundamental forces of the universe. It's not the doozy of, say, OpenMW 0.50—which added gamepad support and thereby made Morrowind on Steam Deck dizzyingly easy—but it's still pretty meaty.

For instance, consider: "Water-walking actors now drown when knocked out" and "Implemented terminal velocity". Say what you like, but the second of those seems pretty meaningful for a game that contains Scrolls of Icarian Flight and the first is quite a funny sentence. The terminal velocity fix contains, within itself, a sub-fix for the basic laws of reality: "fixed gravity being 0.01% off"). We are free of our shared hell.

The biggest new feature in OpenMW 0.52 is probably the lighting stuff. It's called clustered lighting and it removes "the normal per-object light limit". I don't really know what that means either, but the short and tall of it, per an explanatory August blog post, is that "it has a dramatically lower performance impact than raising the limit to Aetherius. In fact, the performance can in some cases be better than with the regular light limit."

Morrowind, one of the best videogames ever made, continues to get better.