One demo, plenty of trailers and several delays later... Dark Messiah of Might and Magic is Gold! That's right, the time has finally come for the team at Arkane Studios to fire up Nero (or whatever it is they're using) and burn the gold master disc with their latest action game. Today's announcement from the Might and Magic website reveals that Ubisoft will be shipping Dark Messiah to stores across Europe from October 27, and in North America on October 24.

For fans of New World Computing's classic role-playing games, this will be the first Might and Magic title played from a first-person perspective since early 2002, when Might and Magic IX brought the long-running series to a halt, after 15 years of plentiful existence. It will be less of a RPG and more of an Action game, however, and it will also be playable in multiplayer. That part of the game was developed by Kuju Entertainment, while the single-player was taken care of by Arkane Studios (creators of Arx Fatalis).

The official gone-gold announcement predictably mentions Valve's Source engine as well, which had to be modified to some extent in order to accomodate Dark Messiah's pretentious features.

"Powered by an enhanced version of the award-winning Source Engine created by Valve to power its Half-Life 2 video game, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic allow players to immerse themselves in an environment that responds and envelops them like never before, thanks to the Source Engine's exceptional technological enhancements in areas such as character animation, advanced AI, real-world physics and shader-based rendering."

You can find out more about the game from our recent Dark Messiah hands-on preview.

(N.B. Archive text, links removed)