Dark Messiah of Might and Magic may have launched over seventeen years ago on PC, but its status as a cult classic remains cemented in the hearts of many fans. Arkane struck gold with the excellent first-person melee-based combat, which remained the benchmark in action RPGs for quite a while.
Unfortunately, no sequels were ever produced, as Arkane moved on and made Dishonored. The wider Might and Magic franchise also largely languished (although there are now rumors of a revival in the works at Ubisoft). But the wiltOS Technologies modding team is still passionate enough about Dark Messiah of Might and Magic to be working on several projects, including a complete visual overhaul powered by NVIDIA RTX Remix. To be able to take advantage of NVIDIA’s remastering toolkit, the modders had to bring back the original DirectX 7 mode, but the results are apparently worth it. ‘KingDavidW’ wrote on ModDB:
Within the RTX mod settings, I was actually able to create a replacement that would not only continue to refract but also have light bounce appropriately for raytracing to take over and even create an almost “moisture” to the air around it. The results are stunning and I’m hoping to finalize some more pictures on the beach areas of Dark Messiah. Additionally, more dynamic function behavior has been replicated with the asset settings in RTX Remix, such as our now fully shaped smoke puffs (with light bleed through!) and more comfort in the tool has allowed us to map the actual material (metal, wood, etc.) on various parts of a single texture for more realistic behavior.
You can check out some of the impressive work below. Do note that in these screenshots, some of the assets haven’t been remade yet, and the modders plan to do just that: remake every individual asset level by level. Additionally, these captures are from the RTX Remix runtime, but they have recently got access to the upcoming creator toolkit open beta, which should produce even better results.
That’s not all. The wiltOS Technologies team is also working on a co-op multiplayer mod for Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. Closed testing should begin before the end of the month, with open testing scheduled to go live on Valentine’s Day. We’ll definitely keep an eye on all this.
