Dark Messiah modders given 'blank check' from Ubisoft to develop toolkit are now releasing a Community Edition of Arkane's classic

Six years prior to releasing Dishonored, Arkane studio made a game about booting orcs from cliffs. Dark Messiah of Might and Magic had other things going for it, obviously, but it was mainly about the booting. What originally started as an effort by modder Dave Wiltos and a team of others to add co-op to the game eventually resulted in a "blank check" in terms of permission from Ubisoft to develop an SDK. "To quote Ubisoft, they 'don't want to impose any sort of restrictions so that the community can really appreciate the full value of the work that's being put in here,'" wrote Wiltos on ModDB in 2023 (via RPS). Since then, they've been working on projects to add RTX and a dungeon generator, alongside co-op.

Now, Wiltos and the team have announced that, following a trip to Ubisoft Montreal in which he got "[console port] Dark Messiah Elements to work on PC", they're working on a Community Edition of Dark Messiah "with approval from Ubisoft and support from Valve" (via RPS). Elements, released on the Xbox 360, expanded and tweaked features from the original PC release, including a new prologue.

"We're not really remaking the game, just porting it over thanks to our deep knowledge from the Advanced SDK and Ubisoft's dev trip, but that's still a job in and of itself," says Wiltos. "Over the next few months I'll be contacting mod makers and players alike so that we can integrate works and desires." Wiltos also says he can't share all the features and directions "just yet", but "we'll have a lot more stability on this new SDK and most importantly direct code access for expanding and fixing issues.

"Best of all it's in the hands of the community, meaning we'll all be working together on making this amazing game even greater," he continues.

The post goes on to detail the team's progress on the co-op, RTX, and dungeon generation mods, plus a project to port Elements' maps over multiplayer. It also introduces a new system they're working on named 'runes', which takes the relics from Elements that gave players extra skill points and repurposes it to offer "mutators that can make your game more challenging, wacky, or easier".

It's always heartening to see this much passion for both a game and series that's lain dormant since 2016's DLC for Might & Magic Heroes VII. That's set to change this year (following a couple of delays) with the release of Olden Era, a demo of which is still available on Steam.