Preview: Dark Messiah of Might & Magic

It's like Half-Life 2, but with Source-powered swords instead of plasma guns - and it's a big deal, as Ubisoft explains to Kikizo. We think it's destined for console, too.

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"We want the AI to be smart obviously; the challenge in the game is not really about how you are going to outsmart the AI, but more how you are going to defeat the AI in groups or as an individual. When you look at a shooter's AI, you really look at team tactics, how you move together and how they corner you - that's not really how it works here, the enemy is as aware of the environment as you are, they will throw at you, kick things to clear their way, they'll see traps the way that you see them and try to use them against you. New things always happen."

And it all looks great as well. One of the singleplayer battles we witnessed against a huge Cyclops boss was impressive; this badass would literally hurl out of sight any defensive rock or structure you might be hiding behind to continue his attack, but flexible control that lets the player 'peer' around corners without exposing themselves seems to balance out a fight.

Storyline is going to be an important factor in singleplayer, and the team assured us they have the best people on the case. "We hope that we have a good storyline," Romain puts in a modest tone, "we have a group of writers working on it, at least a group of three mainly, including the person who did the story for Heroes V and the person in charge of the universe of Might and Magic."

"I think we're furthering interactive stories with things like our multiple endings" he said, referring to the four endings promised for Dark Messiah, "and players have more of a choice in the future of their character and even the world around them."

The collaborative work between Ubisoft, Arkane, Kuju and Valve is "fascinating", says Romain, allowing everyone to focus on what they're best at. "It's quite a lot of teams involved in different areas of the game, Kuju is focussing on their skills with multiplayer and so on - so you can make a very good game in many different respects."

	Halsby: "There is no reason why any of the stuff that we've built wouldn't work on a console, none at all"

Alistair Halsby, Lead Designer at Kuju, the UK-based developer heading up Dark Messiah's multiplayer game, agrees: "From our perspective, we came in and we already saw a very competent singleplayer game when we started, so a lot of our task was to take their ethos and their whole idea from singleplayer, and convert it into what we knew about, which was the multiplayer side. We'd take the things that worked well in a multiplayer environment, and create alternatives or slight variations of the things that maybe didn't work so well."

"A simple example of that is in singleplayer mode, when you do an adrenalin move, time slows down slightly, so you get to see the blood flying everywhere and it looks glorious, but it's not exactly something you can do in a multiplayer game. They're not creative differences, just different limitations for different platforms; we see the multiplayer as a slightly different 'platform' from the singleplayer game in that respect."

But is there room for a few more developers - say, the community itself, for example? "We need to sort out a few things; we're not working on our technology, it's Valve's technology, so we need to sort it out with them. But yes, [releasing a community SDK] is what we really want to do," reveals Romain. "So hopefully if everything goes well, we could even release the tool before, so people will have time to build levels and stuff."

Based on our preview time with Dark Messiah we'd say PC gamers have good reason to be excited, with a title that very convincingly combines the celebrated power of Source with the feverishly popular mythology of a big geek franchise - but what about console gamers? After all, it's no secret that sometimes, what certain publishers publicly admit might be coming to PS3 or 360, and what will actually end up happening, are two different things.

We pushed: "There is no reason why any of the stuff that we've built wouldn't work on a console, none at all," offered Halsby. Romain added: "All I can say, is that it would be a shame if it does not end up as being a 360 or a PS3 game. And also, the universe is something that adapts to movies, game consoles or books - we want to expand the Might and Magic universe."

Adam Doree
Director, Kikizo

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Video Coverage (Latest Videos & Video FAQ)
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Description	Dur.	Size	Details
New Videos (8/10)
Dark Messiah New gameplay video 1	1:45	64MB	DF, ED, 16:9 856x480p30 6Mbps
Dark Messiah New gameplay video 2	1:23	43MB	DF, ED, 16:9 856x480p30 6Mbps
Dark Messiah New gameplay video 3	1:23	46MB	DF, ED, 16:9 856x480p30 6Mbps
Dark Messiah New gameplay video 4	3:15	83MB	DF, ED, 16:9 856x480p30 6Mbps
Recent Videos
Dark Messiah Direct feed gameplay   (PC - Ubisoft)	00:45	16MB	DF, ED, 16:9 852x480p30 3.0Mbps