Working on a 2002 Arx Fatalis game seventeen years later? It doesn’t sound too bad…

What’s Arx Fatalis? Let’s discuss it in a paragraph, that’s only fair: it is a game developed by Arkane Studios (Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, Dishonored, Prey 2017…), which came out in 2002 on PC, followed by an Xbox port in 2003. It was a respectable action-RPG, which ended up commercially flopping despite its quality (it got a ton of 7s and higher on a one-to-ten scale in international publications).

Now, a one-man developer team by the name of Blackgatgame Studios started reworking the game with Unreal Engine 4. On ModDB, we read that the game’s first level, namely the Human Kingdom village is already playable, with interactive NPCs, and the guards can also be fought. The story could end here, but now comes the usual twist!

„This is mind-blowing: Someone is doing an Unreal Engine 4 remaster of Arx Fatalis, my baby from 2002. Back then the game failed hard, the publisher ran out of business before the game was even in the stores. Bittersweet. Life is full of surprises,” Raphael Colantonio wrote on Twitter. Who is he, you ask? None other than the director of Arx Fatalis…

Arx Fatalis was indeed launched in chaotic conditions. Colantonio was financially in a bad situation when he signed a deal with a small publisher, but that has gone bankrupt in just a month. This is when JoWood, an Austrian publisher, picked the game up. (They went into administration in 2011 – then, Nordic Games, now known as THQ Nordic AB, bought all the assets.)

Dear modder, please stop using motion blur! It makes the game look worse than the original. Let’s hope the project can be completed. (Perhaps THQ Nordic should pick the idea up…)

Source: PCGamer