A little bit of background for those who may be a bit confused about why a new, official Arx Fatalis patch is an awesome thing. Developed by French studio Arkane, Arx came out in 2002 - that's right, nine years ago - and made a big stir with old-school RPG fans as a "spiritual successor" to the Ultima Underworld games. It was weird, it was a little incoherent - it was very European, in other words - and it was far from a big hit, but as they say in the beer commercial, those who liked it, liked it a lot.
Nine years later, the game is available through GOG, Steam and Direct2Drive, but playing it on current systems can be a bit iffy. Which is why it's great news for those who haven't played it, and those who'd like to play it again, that Arkane today released the Arx Fatalis v1.21 patch. The new update improves stability under Windows Vista and 7, and also fixes a handful of bugs including HUD scaling at high resolutions, Nvidia performance issues, an EAX glitch and more. In other words, it's not just a bit of tweaking to get the game running on modern hardware, it's an actual, legit, bug-fixin' patch.
Great news, yes, but why release a patch for an obscure RPG that's almost a decade old? That I cannot answer, but I do think it speaks rather highly of Arkane and their new owner, ZeniMax, the parent company of Bethesda Softworks that bought the French studio last year. Any media company that buys a studio and then lets it horse around supporting old, semi-successful games is okay in my book.
Arkane said this will be the very last Arx update it ever puts out, so it also released the game's full source code for fans who want to make future updates or mods themselves. Is that cool or what? The patch and the source are both available from arkane-studios.com or you can grab them both straight off ModDB right now.
I've always found this game intriguing; played the demo a couple times but didn't get to the point of buying it. This might be a sign for doing so.
This is indeed a very kind gift from Arx's developers.
Wow, after all these years even. Admirable and interesting, I've yet to buy the game myself ... might have to pick it up from GoG.
BTW, I think the praise should go to Arcane Studios and not ZeniMax for the patch.
why not both?
Publishers don't have anything to do with the patching of a game.
Since Zenimax owns Arkane they most certainly do!
They only came to own Arcane early last year. Even before that, Arcane developers were posting on their forums and listening to fans. All praise should go to Arcane only in my opinion. After all, it was them who developed the patch.
Even though the 'news' is old now, it's great to have it posted nonetheless.
The release of the SDK and final Patch happened quietly, and not many were aware of it happening at all.
So this is of the good! Maybe it will rise the awareness of this classic game once more, and get us finally some mods.
:)
Man, I'm still waiting for Arkane Studios to pick back up on their "Crossplayer" FPS. That concept is so awesome the way they were going to do it.
Yay, I love these guys!
this must be the single greatest news in this decade
the game is available at gog.com for a nice price for those of you who missed out on it
here's to hoping that people will start recognizing the awesomeness of this and make some mods
Are you ******* kidding? This is one of my favourite RPG's. But even half a decade ago, I thought the moding and support community had died. And NOW we get the code? ******* A man!
wel then gues people wil go make patches or mods idk what i can do with the source pretty hilarious im a moderator and i dont know what i can do with the source haha lol ow wel i love the game and ill always love it
Yup, been posted for a while, check out the Linux port some guys started: Freegamer.blogspot.com
haha cool, was thinking yesterday about to play it again.
I bought this Game about 2 years ago via Steam and I never played it to the End.
this would be pretty awesome on psp or ds..
Wasn't the source released sometime at the start of this year...?
They only came to own Arcane early last year. Even before that, Arcane developers were posting on their forums and listening to fans.
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