The Morrowind Graphics Overhaul (MGSO) alone is sufficient to comprehensively improve Morrowind's graphics, while remaining faithful to its original aesthetics, and at most a few small supplemental mods are required to fix various minor issues.
This image is the perfect example for what passes as "high-res texture improvement" in the modding community. I often ask myself whether people have some kind of eye damage.
I take the original textures over anything like that every day.
Edit: I think Konjad illustrated this nicely elsewhere:
It's possible to avoid this (mostly), but you need to be selective in which texture packs you mix and match from. Architecture is mostly fine because you can just grab
Tyddy's Arkitektora series of textures (even featuring a retexture for
Necrom in Tamriel Rebuilt), or
Aesthesia which are nice updates to the vanilla textures without straying too far from the style. They are high enough definition to create a notable improvement, but not so distinct that they cause issues with tiling. This is what the same spot looks like in my version of the game, running STEP shaders etc. etc. (ignore the lack of anti-aliasing):
So architecture is mostly covered, and actually works perfectly fine. Texture tiling mostly becomes noticeable when you move into landscape retextures, none of which are optimal, although
Vanilla Land works the best out of the box, as it tries to stick to the style/colour scheme of the original textures while introducing 2K phototexture stuff. The problem is often that modders seemingly don't actually
look at how their textures work in-game. If you walk from Balmora to Moonmoth Legion Fort, you can see this on display in an amazing way. Tyddy's old retexture from 2013-2015 (2K with some 4K extras) is literally missing textures for "rocky scrub", and changes the colour of all rocks in the West Gash region. This means that portions of the landscape which blended seamlessly in vanilla, now have significant and obvious clashes in colour and texture.
Lougian's Landscape Retexture 2K is at least not missing textures, but it also has the problem of clashing colours, conspicuous tiling in textures, and an overall feeling that "surely he doesn't ACTUALLY play the game with these".
This is what the area outside of Balmora looks like in vanilla (well, these are those ESGRAN upscaled textures, but it still proves my point):
There's three main textures on display here: tx_wg_rockydirt is the brown speckled part of the landscape, tx_rockyscrub is the green bits with some grey mixed in, and tx_rock_grey is the...rocks. They're distinct from one another, but blend well enough. Here's the nightmare that most people encounter when they install a texture pack:
Viewing these texture in ImageGlass without any context, they look really nice. The problem is that in the actual game, they look wildly different to one another and do not blend seamlessly, and because of the higher resolution and detail of tx_rockyscrub, it starts to more noticeably tile. This is because it's a photo of some actual rocks with tufts of grass sticking out, and this pattern becomes very obvious when you place two of the same texture next to each other, not to mention 8 or 9, as is the case travelling north of Caldera, where the tops of small hills are
nothing but this one texture. Here's the
actual texture, for reference. Looks great, right? But it should be obvious why placing a bunch of these next to each other in tiles intended for 256x256 textures isn't going to work fantastically. That tuft of grass in the middle, once in game, sticks out like a sore thumb and you begin to see it everywhere.
Some highly-recommended retextures manage to fix some things while ruining others.
Apel's Azura Coast and Sheogorath comes with some really nice textures and some new meshes for things like mushrooms and mucksponge in addition to it (perfect candidates for appropriate shiny normal-mapping,
unlike everything else which this community demands must have it). However, it sports some pretty egregious tiling for tx_land_darkstone_02, for reasons not entirely disimilar to Lougian's tx_rockyscrub. If you travel around the east side of the map, you will find
entire islands mapped using only this texture. It needs to be something less conspicuous, which Vanilla Land and Lougian's ReTex achieve by using an image with
flat lighting and no vegetation. It still tiles noticeably if you don't have any groundcover/grass mods, but you really only notice it if you're levitating and have an aerial shot of the landscape, unlike Apel's where you notice it while walking around.
What's the point of Apel's retexture, then?
Observe. tx_landstone_grass is also present frequently and for large areas in this region, most noticeably all along the western hill of Sadrith Mora. On the left is the texture found in Lougian's ReTex and Tyddy's, and on the right is Apel's. Vanilla Land also has a similarly rocky texture. These all tile quite badly.
Do you remember what I said about how it feels like modders don't even
play the game?
So, is it possible for the intrepid Morrowind modder to un-fuck their shit? Sort of, but you'll need to play around and see what you like most. Vanilla Land is probably the best starting point, overwriting his Ashlands textures with someone's else's (I use Tyddy's) and then installing Apel's AC&S on top of that, while deleting the darkstone textures that tile the most noticeably. That's just a starting point. You'll need to play around with it and see what works in-game. Maybe you like the colour scheme of someone's Ascadian Isles grass more than the others, or maybe you think that it's less visually distracting due to the amount of noise. Maybe you're playing with HDR on and the brighter textures grow brighter than a nuclear bomb when hit by sunlight, requiring you to pick something darker. And most importantly for landscape modding - get a grass mod. Ozzy's is nice, but it might be a bit over the top and colourful for some people. Aesthesia is the same colour all over the map, which is annoying, but it also includes grass for Tamriel Rebuilt and TR Preview. I've personally used Ozzy's Merged for Vvardenfell and then I'm using Aesthesia for the mainland. It really helps to cover up that low-res orange and green ground texture outside of Old Ebonheart.
It's not perfect, and I fully expect people here to call me a gay retard who epitomises DECLINE, but if you mix and match you will eventually get something that doesn't look like complete garbage. I'm still working on my install. Some of the texture are a little too bright, and I may have a look at fixing them with a quick overlay filter etc. in Photoshop since I have the .dds plugin, but at least I can view landscapes from 30 metres away in-game without saying "Oh God", and I can still look at the ground below my feet and say, "Hey, this isn't half bad". Also those West Gash trees are definitely too bright - I keep forgetting to install the darker alt. version.
Edit: changed final screenshot to be under more similar lighting conditions, so no atmospheric scattering etc. HDR was also making things appear brighter than they were.
(so no harm pushing your eyecandy up to 5, unless you're sucker for complete vanilla look).
setting although it fares a bit better in interiors.
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