Arx Fatalis Open Sourced!

Good news everyone! Arx Fatalis, an awesome first-person RPG from 2003's source code was recently released under the GPL.Their dev team, Arkane, was acquired (thanks Sindwiller) by Zenimax last year which is interesting because id, the legends whose open source patronage we have to thank for almost all of our FPSes, where also aquired by Zenimax in 2009; I can only hope it becomes tradition for the rest of Zenimax's subsidiaries

.

Arx wasn't your run-of-the-mill generic fantasy RPG either: it has a rather unique setting (a frozen, lifeless planet where everything living has retreated to underground tunnels) and a bunch of interesting game mechanics (gesture/rune based magic casting, multiple factions to interact with, and a bunch of other interesting tidbits). It was a bit overlooked due to the Elderscrolls 3: Morrowind having been released the previous year, but this underdog is still definitely worth a play (the game is still available on Steam and Good Old Games)

So, the code needs quite a bit of cleaning up before we see it running on Linux or anything the like, but it would really be a nice inclusion to one of the slightly less-represented genres in foss gaming, so get coding!