Morrowind Modding Showcases - 2021 Year in Review

In a lot of ways, 2021 was a disaster of a year, and it's one I'm sure many of us will be glad to see gone. But, I have to say, from a Morrowind Modding Community standpoint, and certainly from the standpoint of the Morrowind Modding Showcases YouTube channel, it was a pretty stellar year for both new mod releases and video production.

We released more videos in 2021 than all of 2019 and 2020 combined. In fact, we released more videos in 2021 than any previous year on record, with a total of 196 public video releases in 2021, and another 8 behind the scenes videos. Our previous record, set in 2016, was 129 videos in a calendar year.

Granted, the lion's share of our videos in 2021 were Mod of the Day videos, 140 to be precise, and obviously those videos are fairly limited in scope, but in a lot of ways, those videos have really saved the channel. The past few years haven't been great for me personally; 2018, 2019, and 2020 were years with frequent depressive episodes and a complete lack of confidence in my own abilities as a mod showcaser. For a long time I was operating in a dark fog, but thanks to the ad-lib nature and the smaller scope of the Mod of the Day videos, I've rediscovered my joy in showcasing mods, and I hope that comes across in the videos themselves.

I intend to keep up the Mod of the Day format going in 2022, though perhaps scaling it back to three times a week instead of five, depending on how our production schedule shakes out.

But anyway, as a brief overview, here's everything we produced in 2021!

• 140 Mod of the Day videos
• 5 Core Episodes of Morrowind Modding Showcases
• 8 Episodes of the Mod of the Month
• 8 Episodes of Morrowind Modding Highlights (series now defunct)
• 1 Special MMS Episode for Morrowind Crafting 3.0
• 7 Trailers and Flyby Videos
• 3 Modjam Showcase Videos
• 3 Modathon 2020 Showcase Videos
• 2 Competition Announcement Videos
• 2 Episodes of Darkelfguy's Favorite Mods
• 2 Episodes of the Top 10 and Top 15 Videos
• 2 Episodes of the Gameplay-specific Top 5 Videos
• 8 Behind the Scenes Patreon Videos
• 2 Community News and Channel Update Videos
• 1 Episode of Morrowind Rebirth Update Overviews
• 4 Episodes of Morrowind Modding Manors
• 1 Episode of Morrowind's Abandoned Mod Projects
• 1 Episode of Oblivion House Mod Hunters
• 1 Random April Fool's Day Video

In total, those 196 videos featured or showcased about 409 individual Morrowind mods and 3 Oblivion mods, though that's a bit of a rough estimate.

If that sounds impressive though, first, you should consider that, based on our latest projections, the community as a whole released 1242 new Morrowind mods in 2021! Granted, that's a slight decline from the high of 1361 new mods released in 2020, but honestly, 2020 was a major outlier with the pandemic and quarantine. The same factors may have also contributed to increased productivity in 2021, but I really doubt the impact was as great as in 2020.

Regardless, it was an amazing year for the Morrowind Modding Community, with quite possibly more high-profile and high-quality releases than even 2020, and we'll have a heck of a time trying to narrow things down to a simple top 10 list! I can only hope that 2022, with Morrowind's 20th anniversary coming in May, will live up to the amazing modding highs of 2021!

As a personal note, while 2021 was a stellar year for Morrowind Modding Showcases, I do just want to say that it would NOT have been possible without the contributions and support of our patrons, so I want to thank you all, again, for continuing to support the channel! We wouldn't be able to produce even half as much content without you!

But anyway, that's all for now, we'll be back tomorrow with a new episode of our Behind the Scenes series, this time focusing on the construction set and building a new mod (the feature creep is real, it goes on for over 3 hours). And we'll also have our 2022 Road Map with our planned video production schedule going into the New Year up sometime on Monday, so stay tuned for that!

Happy Modding and Happy New Year!