Dark Messiah modding community got Ubisoft approval
moddb.com
moddb.com
In the world of AAA game studios, this is about as good as it gets. EA or Activision would have told them to kick rocks.
Or worst case scenario (like what Rockstar and Nintendo sometimes does), suing the 3rd party developers.
To be fair, my experience dates back to around 2005 to 2010.
There is also an anecdote of the "Halogen" mod which wanted to recreate Halo as an RTS (years before Ensemble Studios announced their Halo RTS). Of course they got a cease and desist.
I mean, I know "urggh, EA" and they're the big bad and all. And I have plenty of reasons to hate them, but this just sounds like a kneejerk response.
Additive only modding is arguably easy, however mods in which you extract and rework assets are more tricky since those assets are protected by their own copyright.
There could be cases in which the licensing agreement that covers those assets may not be compatible with modding since the license the publisher and developer have received is rather restrictive - speedtree generated assets come to mind as Autodesk(?) has or had a rather restrictive license on those, store bought art assets these days also probably have a non mod friendly license.
Then there is the whole thing around using trademark names in your sites and content.
Overall you want an approval especially for a large scale remaster mod.
And publishers/developers that may appear hostile to modders may actually have a valid reason rather than doing it just out of spite.
I am overfed with same looking and same experience modern warfares, just like few years ago WWII oversaturated the market. Another potential direction may be say Vietnam-like games.
I was very disappointed, when this facet of the game didn't really catch on, and other games did not copy it.
I mean it makes sense, they probably won't find someone easily if they put out a job advert, the original developers will have long gone, and you cannot beat someone training themselves over the span of years.
A sequel maybe.
Using some very light immersive sim elements and solid first person melee combat, the game rewards you for winning fights unfairly:
- You can lure enemies in front of a trap and kick them into it.
- You can freeze the ground near a cliff and watch enemies go sliding off into the void.
- You can throw an oil jar at the feet of enemies and cast a fire spell to ignite the oil and burn them to death.
- etc.
My only tip when playing is: if you're squaring off with multiple enemies at once and actually using the (very solid) first person combat system, you're probably missing out on some underhanded way to kill one or more of them in that area.
It's hardly a great game -- the plot is cheesy and there are some frustrating difficulty spikes -- but as an Arkane fan and game design nerd I find it interesting.
Plus, there's a dedicated "boot" key and it's fun to kick orcs off cliffs.
I remember one of the reviews called the game something like "The adventures of sir-kicks-a-lot in the land of dangerous spikes".
Game combat was showcased in the demo which made a lot of people at the time to believe it would be the game of the year. Unfortunately the demo contained all the best levels and the full game fell short with less engaging ones.
I did not play much games since that time so i do not know if some other games outclassed the Dark Messiah combat experience but trying the demo is worth it for a lot of fun in great level design. https://archive.org/details/DarkMessiahMightAndMagicDemo
Looking at you Nintendo. Iwata rolls in his grave.