Ubisoft isn’t doing so well of late. The beleaguered publisher is in the process of rearranging itself to death, while its share price remains at rock bottom and its staff rebel against management. So it’s a rare moment when we can find ourselves saying: Good work, Ubisoft! But that’s the entirely appropriate response to news that the company is not only allowing a team of modders to port the incredible Dark Messiah of Might & Magic to the current version of Valve’s Source engine, but is even helping them with the task. Good work, Ubisoft!
As reported by RPS, a modding team working on keeping Arkane’s classic first-person RPG alive has stepped up from creating packs that let the game work on modern machines to porting the whole game across to the latest version of Source. And it’s being supported in this process by both Valve and Ubisoft.
Arkane, the studio behind some of the best PC games of all time—Dishonored and Prey—released Dark Messiah of Might & Magic through Ubisoft in 2006, years before the company was bought by ZeniMax and then later eviscerated by Microsoft’s closure of its Austin division in 2024. The RPG, which became famous for featuring the meatiest kick in all of video gaming, was a delightful spin on Ubisoft’s Might & Magic series, combining stealth and magic with extraordinarily brutal melee violence, and all with the mad joy of physics.
“I am proud and excited to say,” wrote David Wiltos on ModDB a couple of days ago, “that with approval from Ubisoft and support from Valve, boasting the latest Source 1 SDK, the team and I are working on a community edition of Dark Messiah!” Wiltos recently visited Ubisoft Montreal “for help with our Advanced SDK,” got elements of the console version of the original game working on PC, and seemingly secured “direct code access” for the game from Ubisoft.
That’s very significant. Publishers are legendarily paranoid about sharing access to code, convinced that it will cause some irreparable tear in space and time, despite the wealth of evidence about what a boon it has been for all of gaming when companies like id release the source code for their previous games. (Multiple developers have told me how seeing Carmack’s Doom and Quake coding was their breakthrough moment.) So Ubisoft’s willingness to share Dark Messiah‘s code, albeit privately, is no small deal. Wiltos’ post continues,
“There are features and directions I can’t quite share yet, but at the very basic 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.”
The group, under the name wiltOS Technologies, had previously reverse-engineered something they called the Advanced SDK, in order to allow modders to more easily build mods for the original game. The plan now is to see that ported back into Source SDK to see it have access to the same level of modding ease that Valve’s games receive. However, there’s also to be a concerted effort to ensure the mods created for Advanced SDK will continue to work.
The modding team is now looking for new volunteers to help work on this major project to get the Community Edition completed as quickly as possible. In the meantime, the current updates have given the 20-year-old game new life with an RTX mod, a co-op mode, and even the addition of new game elements like Runes.