An open letter from Mail.ru about the game “Allods II: Lord of Souls”

Dear Mail.ru Group employees!

The community of the game " Allods 2: Lord of Souls " is contacting you . This is an ingenious RPG game that the Nival team created in 1999; a few years ago, the Allods came under the wing of the Mail.ru Group.

Allods 2 is an RPG game, which is a textbook example of the most interesting original gameplay. In addition to the masterpiece single-player campaign, the network mode in Allods 2 is comparable in its phenomenality with Ultima Online and World of Warcraft, possessing truly unique mechanics, setting and spirit. It is no coincidence that this game, despite its considerable age, is of interest not only in the Russian-speaking environment, but also in the international community - it is still played by people from all over the world.

Recently, Allods 2 turned 20 years old ...

All these years, the alloder community has been trying to improve the game, using disasm ( assembly ), fixes bugs and crashes, adds new features; Unfortunately, without source code it is extremely difficult to change something; although we have achieved some success. There are also two parallel projects for porting the game to Unity:

1. focus on the network game ;
   
   video:
   
   
   
2. focus on coop single campaign ;
   
   video:
   
   

But again, without the source, it is impossible to transfer the game exactly as it was originally; to preserve its subtlest features and its "soul".

In honor of the twentieth anniversary of the game, we allodes appeal to Mail.ru with a huge request to open the source code for Allods 2 for non-commercial use. This will allow the game community, including many talented programmers, to fix bugs and crashes, add compatibility with Windows 10 and implement many interesting gameplay mechanics to make the game better. We have the resources for this: there are people who are ready to work on this open project in their free time for the benefit of the community. We contacted Sergey Orlovsky, the creator of Allods 2 - and he supported the idea of ​​publishing Allods 2 in open-source.

Consideringthe position of Mail.ru Group on the development of open-source in Russia - we hope that Mail.ru will set the trend in the publication of all your favorite classic games in open-source. In the Russian-speaking environment of developers, this is already practiced; For example, in open access the source codes of "Vanger" are laid out .

Allods 2 is more than just an RPG game. This is a national treasure, a unique example of the work of our compatriots. It would be great if this project, thanks to Mail.ru, saw a second life and, already being a legendary part of the Russian-speaking game industry, entered the international community's hall of fame. The community of alloders, for their part, will try to do everything possible for this.

pkruglov

The text of the letter in the blog of our server