It's been a hard wait since the excellent Dark Messiah of Might and Magic demo debuted a few months ago, but Valve has announced that starting tomorrow, the full game will officially be available through download today.

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic is coming to Steam this week for just $49.95. In North America, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic will be made available via Steam at 10 am EDT this Wednesday, October 25. Outside of North America, the game will be made available at 10 am GMT this Friday, October 27.

Those who pre-purchase and pre-load the game prior to its availability will have everything they need to begin playing at the times listed above.

Adjusting for times in America is always tricky, since we use Metric chronometers over here while you're still stuck on the Draconian Fahrenheit system, but if I'm doing my calculations correctly, that's a little under 2 hours from now for you Yanks. Tell me how it is: I'll be holding off on it until I get some Bully under my belt. And since I intend on going the gay path, I think you know what that means. Florian Eckhardt

Those who wish to avoid as much as possible of the inevitable Steam congestion when Dark Messiage of Might and Magic is released later this month should be aware that the game is available for pre-order and pre-load now:

From Valve:

Dark Messiah Might and Magic is now available for pre-order via Steam for just $49.95. Those who pre-order and pre-load the game will have everything they need to start playing the moment it is made available.

Of course, if Dark Messiah's launch is anything like Half-Life 2's launch, you'll still face a few hours of smashing your fist impotently down upon your keyboard as you wait for the files to unlock. Florian Eckhardt

I recorded two videos showing some Dark Messiah multiplay at PAX this weekend.

The first shows some play using the archer and magician and the second shows warrior play. I love watching the warrior get blasted across a courtyard by a magician's point-blank fireball. Brian Crecente

In the second part of the Ubi panel the developer showed of Dark Messiah of Might and Magic.

The community manager for the game and the lead design for Kuju, who created the multiplayer mode of the game were on had to show off the multiplayer portion of the game and do a Q&A.

The way the maps are arranged, in the Crusade mode you have five maps that stretch along the battlefield.

There are five classes you can play in the game. They started the demo with the archer.

One of the most interesting things about the first-person shooter-type game is that the arrow is an actual physical item that travels through the world and is effected by things in it.

They showed off some cool arrows. The bramble arrow slows down warriors with brambles. There's also the fire arrow, the double arrow (which is like a shotgun blast.), the drill arrow, a poison arrow and a flare arrow.

Next, the assassin.

He's got a pair of daggers, but it's not good in fair fights. They have to kill people in tricky, back-stabbie ways.

The assassin also has cloaking, which lets them go invisible in a puff of smoke. It's sort of like the predator model of cloaking.

He can disguise himself as members of the enemy team or pretend to be dead. He can also set bombs and poison traps.

Next is the priestess. She can heal, but she also has the ability to be offensive by using curses.

The better she gets at curing people the worse she gets at causing damage and vice-versa. Kinda cool idea.

She can also resurrect dead people. She can see souls and she just has to heal the soul. Once she resurrects someone they are bonded to her temporarily. If she dies during this time the people she resurrected die too.

She can soul mark a person and if that person is killed the killers gets bonus XP.

Now the warrior.

Obviously, the warrior is the basic character. There are two types of attacks, a quick attack and a slow, charging attack. They also have a lock-on in mulitplayer.

You should be afraid of the warrior if you are not melee. However, he has no range attack at all.

He is lethal up close, but with no range attack at all.

Overtime he can get faster, stronger and can build resistance to magic, though that also slows healing magic.

Quick attacks don't effect other warriors, you have to do charge attacks. That's the way dueling works.

You hold down your attack button and do a stance move, the only defense is another stance move. If done right, the sword blows will clash and there will be no damage.

While doing this you can walk around each other and such. The duel is all about timing and distance, they tried to create something similar to real dueling.

Sounds very cool, especially the whole dueling aspect.

Now the mage.

The mage is sort of like your artillery. It has all the drawbacks of the non-melee classes. But he has awesome weaponry.

Next they talked about XP and skill tree. Kind of a ying-yang thing they have going on there. Very interesting.

Wow, this game is soooo Hexanie. I can't wait to check it out. The graphics are amazing and I love the class-based first-person shooter feel of it. Also, there's XP.

This totally wasn't on my radar before the panel. Brian Crecente

That Dark Messiah of Might And/Or Magic demo we mentioned last week was released with great fanfare yesterday. Partly because it's a swell demo featuring a beautiful graphics engine, some extremely fun gameplay and the ratio perfection of chocolate-to-peanut-butter in how much RPG Arkane swirled into its FPS. But more largely because the 30 minute demo is an astonishing 1.4 gigs. That last sentence should be followed by a slurry of exclamation points and perhaps the muffled internal pop of your heart exploding.

But if you've got the pipe, go download it, because it's a lot of fun. I spent about thirty minutes just firing flaming arrows at things to see if they caught on fire. There were no small children about, making it an inaccurate simulacrum of my life, but otherwise, all good!

We're linking the GamersHell download page, since I always tend to find that I have the greatest luck with them. Florian Eckhardt

Dark Messiah of Might & Magic Demo [Gamers Hell]

While there's nothing Fileplanet could ever offer that would get me to sign up for their service, the forthcoming Dark Messiah of Might and Magic demo — a FilePlanet World Demo Premiere! — is mildly tempting, if not for the fact that it'll be up on BitTorrent within moments.

Still, I'm excited about the demo: Arx Fatalis screamed more potential than it exhibited, and I'm fascinated by the prospect of what the imaginative Arkane guys can do with a budget and the Source engine.

The demo will be released on August 8th to FilePlanet subscribers, and you can sign up to an email list to be informed within seconds of its download availability. Florian Eckhardt

Edit: Andrew Burnes of Voodoo Extreme wrote in to point out that I don't know what I'm talking about. It's not an exclusive of Fileplanet: they are simply debuting it, and then it'll be available everywhere else. Thanks for the correction, Andrew!

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic Demo [File Planet]

Ever since the E3 gameplay vid found its way into our grubby hands, we've been drooling over Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. The single-player just looks top notch and the Arx Fatalis boys finally have a budget to go wild with.

But we've ignored the multiplayer in our fascination. So how's that shaping up? According to Games Radar, it's absofrigginlutely amazing:

Forcing Dark Messiah of Might and Magic's single-player story and gameplay into a single, distinct genre is just about impossible. But pegging Dark Messiah's multiplayer Crusade mode as sharply influenced by the iconic Battlefield series, and finding the fingerprints of the seminal Team Fortress all over its deep gameplay is clearly right on the money.

OK, so it's got a magical (and mighty) twist, but this is class-based team multiplayer at its core - and dare we say - at its finest. We got a chance to play on two of the levels during a bloody hands-on session that unveiled the answers to all of our questions about the up-till-now mysterious multiplayer.

When the hell is this game coming out? When can I preload it through Steam? Florian Eckhardt

We bear witness to the Messiah's amazing multiplayer [Games Radar]

According to Shacknews, if you've got one of those user accounts that Ubisoft is always obnoxiously thrusting upon you, you now have the opportunity to sign up for the Open Beta of Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, the upcoming Source engined FPSRPG. Will you be the lucky son of a gun whose computer first explodes in a shrapnel storm of jagged microchips over "shippable" bug X1G54Alpha? Go sign up and find out! FLORIAN ECKHARDT

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic Beta Sign-Up

Sadly, when they say contextual sword fight combat, they don't mean Die by the Sword. But at least it looks like Arkane has upped Half-Life 2's ante with the Source engine, though.