I never cease to be amazed at the modding community's ability to make PC games bigger, better, and in many cases weirder. But the love shown by modder KingDavidW to Arkane's pre-Dishonored hack 'n' slash Dark Messiah of Might and Magic goes above and beyond. As recently outlined in a lengthy update on ModDB, KingDavidW has been actively working with Ubisoft—Dark Messiah's publisher—and Nvidia to bring a swathe of mods and modding tools to the 2006 action game. Now, that collaboration has begun to yield fruit.
KingDavidW leads with details regarding the collaboration between themselves and Ubisoft/Nvidia, which feeds into numerous mods currently being created by the game's modding community. "The official support we've had from the Ubisoft and Nvidia partnership has allowed us to reach heights we never thought we could in our work here," he writes, noting that "Our contacts at Ubisoft have been fighting for us to bring everything we can think of to this amazing community".
One of the ways Ubisoft has assisted the modders is with restoring cut content to Dark Messiah, which is the new aim of the suitably titled "Dark Messiah: Restoration Mod". KingDavidW explains this mod was originally limited to fixing "gameplay related bugs" such as buggy ropes, level soft-locks and "the dreaded French keyboard popup", a phrase that sounds like a particularly difficult magic trick.
However, Ubisoft provided access to some "amazing assets" from Dark Messiah of Might and Magic: Element, the Xbox 360 version of the game. "Within that there was a load of cut content never before seen In Dark Messiah." Now, the Restoration mod provides access to bonus missions, alternate levels, a "cut level" from Dark Messiah called The Caves, and several cut weapons such as the "Sword of Misery or the Necromancer Staff".
Alongside this cut content, Ubisoft is also helping the modders work on an "advanced SDK", which KingDavidW hopes will result in a release within "the next few months instead of the end of the year." As for Nvidia's assistance, KingDavidW doesn't specify precisely how the company has helped. Presumably it has to do with the Dark Messiah RTX mod the community is working on. This remains heavily in development, as it requires reworking models and textures which KingDavidW says take "extremely long to make". The community has put together a trailer showing the mod's progress so far, which you can view below:
Finally, the modders have sort-of released a cooperative mod for Dark Messiah. This is still technically unfinished and hasn't been added to ModDB yet, but the modders have made it available on Github for public testing,. KingDavidW says that "all the main kinks should be ironed out for a playable experience" but that the team needs to "refine" the levels to make them ideal for co-op play. Regardless, I can easily imagine how much fun Dark Messiah must be in co-op, what with its bevy of physics-based traps and spells. Who fancies a game of keepie-uppies with a ragdoll orc?
You can read the full update here. Although most of these projects remain unfinished, it is nonetheless an impressive amount of work from the Dark Messiah modding community, and KingDavidW is themselves taken aback by how it has all fallen into place. "To see it all come together has been very emotional for us" he writes. "We're walking into a new era for Dark Messiah."
