It’s a blazing afternoon in downtown San Francisco, and two men are playing speed chess in a park. Around them is a small crowd offering tips and commentary in mutually incomprehensible languages, but the players are completely silent. Their hands dart forward towards the pieces and stop, hovering, hesitating, as they rapidly compute the risks and the rewards involved. Then they move, sometimes so quickly that they appear to be acting simultaneously, their hands intertwining over the board.
Two blocks away and eight floors up, in a hotel suite dominated by one huge monitor, Steve Piggott is exhibiting his attempt to create something similar. Piggott is the president of Canadian indie studio Torn Banner, and Mirage: Arcane Warfare tries to bring some of the grace and tactical complexity of speed chess to the usually chaotic world of the multiplayer FPS.
“We want players to pay really close attention to what the enemy is doing and react to that,” says Piggott. “Like in speed chess, there are all kinds of different moves and counters and reactions, but they happen at a very fast pace….what other games don’t do that we do is create a sense of deliberation to your actions. It’s about making the opportunities very, very clear, and the results very, very satisfying.”
Mirage is a spiritual sequel to 2012’s Chivalry: Medieval Warfare, a gloriously gory Kickstarted stabbing simulator which Torn Banner’s brand manager Alex Hayter describes as “more like a fighting game than an FPS” in its commitment to close, deliberate control. But this is a very different fantasy: in place of mud, chainmail, and western Christianity, there are shimmering deserts, Islamic horseshoe arches, Persian-inspired domes. And, of course, magic spells.
Alex boots up a match replay, six versus six in an intricate landscape of yellow sands, orange rocks, and shaded purple gullies. In the background is an impossibly steep mountain garlanded with floating rocks; magic has dropped violently into this world, and the game’s two factions disagree about whether to control it or commune with it. A woman in the bright lilac armour of the Bashrahni Emirate, armed with spear and shield, runs towards a chokepoint; this is a Vigilist, the closest thing in the game to a tank.
Then a spindly little man in vaguely piratical dress leaps round the corner. He is an Alchemancer – a “glass cannon” who can dish out damage but cannot take it – of the exiled Azar Cabal. A fireball the size of a luxury toaster starts growing between his hands. Seeing it happen, the Vigilist drops her shield and projects forward from her eyes an ethereal barrier which meets the fireball in mid-air. In a small way, this exchange reveals the core of the game: even more so in Chivalry, each attack is elaborately “telegraphed” with magical special effects so that savvy players can recognise what their enemies are doing and come up with a response.
The Alchemancer is dispatched and the Vigilist’s team surge forward to a decrepit temple, where a lavamancing Taurant class spots them and retreats through the vast stone doorway. In fact, he’s merely stepping behind cover to charge his attack without anyone seeing his tells. The Vigilist rounds the corner and gets a face full of molten rock, ragdolling off down the stone stairs. “Magic in our game is not pixie dust,” says Piggott. “It’s throwing bricks at people’s heads.”
All of this happens very quickly, and Alex often has to rewind before I understand what happened. Preventing confusion is part of the reason behind Mirage’s dreamy, abstract art style – a contrast with Chivalry’s grimly realistic blood and stone. “Whenever you add fidelity, you add complexity,” says Piggott. “We’ve used very bold colours; at a distance there’s not much detail. We’ve done that so that things remain reactable and readable for the players. All the art is designed with that in mind.” The name Mirage is a reference to the false serenity of these visuals, and they do conjure a certain dreamlike atmosphere which feels appropriate to the game’s magical themes – like a duel inside an impressionist painting.
Now the two teams approach a capture point inside a rundown temple. An Alchemancer trapped in a corner with a Vigilist teleports himself out of reach, only to be stabbed in the back by a Vypress (the ghostly assassin class). Bashrahni soldiers drop a healing totem on the ground as they try to storm a doorway, but scatter to avoid a flying wall of arcane energy, allowing the totem to expire without helping them. I’ve seen Chivalry fans complain that Mirage is merely a gimmicky “reskin” of the previous game, but I don’t think that’s fair. Magic and melee are integrated into one combat system, and both feel percussive and powerful. There is a sense of exchange between the fighters, of tangible gains and reversals. “We’re playing with players’ egos,” says Piggott. “We make them feel invincible for one second, and then we just take it away from them.”
At one point we freeze the game, looking up at a leaping Vigilist who is about to land a big aerial attack. If we were a player, we would know we were about to die, and Piggott feels that’s important. “In competitive multiplayer games, dying is the worst experience,” he says. “To take some of the sting out of that we let the player accept their fate for one second before their head comes off.” That’s not a figure of speech:Mirage, like Chivalry, has a fairly messy dismemberment system which lops off limbs and turns heads into red mist.
As the two teams battle on through the Emirate’s swanky purple marble city, backstabbing and ground-pounding and scattering magic everywhere, a pattern, a tactical flow, does seem to emerge. But I often lose it in the whirl. Of course, I’ve never played before, so my eyes are untrained. Still, Piggott admits it’s a challenge to keep the clarity of speed chess when you have twelve customizable characters running around and barking voice commands at each other in real time 3D space. Indeed,Chivalry often devolved into a bloody if entertaining mess in which nuance and tactics were forgotten.
Torn Banner’s challenge, and the mark of their success, will be to prevent Mirage from succumbing to that chaos – while keeping enough of it to give the game life. They will need to create a tactical structure which is readable even through the purple starbursts and lava balls, without being rigid or staid. If they can do it, perhaps they will capture at least some of the calm mastery of the chessmasters outside in the park.
Mirage will be released on PC in 2016. You can sign up for the beta here.
