MirageArcaneWarfare - This article is part of a series.

Part 1: Mirage Arcane Warfare: Chivalry's forgotten Successor

Part 2: Revival: Resurrecting Mirage Arcane Warfare [Part 0]

Part 3: This Article

Back in late 2022 Massi introduced me to Mirage Arcane Warfare, the spiritual successor to the popular First Person Slasher game Chivalry Medieval Warfare, made by its developer Torn Banner.

Chiv dates all the way back to 2012 and was based on TB’s earlier Half Life 2 mod Age of Chivalry, released in 2007, so by the time they released Mirage in 2017 they were keen to break the mould.

Mirage has the same fundamental combat mechanics and game modes but makes significant changes, replacing a more grounded Medieval Europe style with a cartoony Eastern theme particularly inspired by the Arab world (think Aladdin with blood and guts) and making the classes much more distinct from each other with no sharing of weapons and each class having its own set of cooldown based magical abilities.

A combination of factors made Mirage an intense flop, racial prejudice (especially inflamed by the spiking “War on Terror”) made the setting unpopular in parts of the community, the cartoony theme didn’t sit right with a lot of people, the game’s scale was reduced compared to Chiv with smaller maps and much smaller player counts (the usual max is 6vs6 - 12 total, in Chiv its 32 at 16vs16) and the game was poorly marketed, leading to very low launch engagement.

Then when TB released the game for free, briefly making it their most played game ever, it worked too well, crashing the servers as they couldn’t handle the overload. The strain caused all of the massive momentum they suddenly built up to vanish just as quickly, and so a year after release they pulled all official support from the game. This was blamed on GDPR, but given that TB were still able to main Chivalry for many years after, few took this seriously, nothing was stopping them from tweaking some tracking systems or making an EULA to cover liabilities, they just didn’t want to maintain a game with no future anymore.

We found Mirage to be an incredibly interesting game and covered it for Dead Game Review,

although the scale of the game is a bit underwhelming and I do sometimes take issue with the cartoony visuals as well, the combat mechanics are very fun, with classes that feel genuinely distinct and movement abilities that make traversal interesting, the worldbuilding is something TB put little effort into highlighting at the game but when you look for it in the game’s maps and dive through Trading Card descriptions and old blog posts there actually is quite a bit to talk about.

A revival community for the game, the Mirage Leftovers, emerged shortly after the shutdown to organise community server hosting and events, but went dormant after Torn Banner released Chivalry 2, and I can’t really blame them, Chiv 2 is thematically more of the same but plays really well and doubles the scale, there’s a lot to love about it.

But last year one of the Leftovers, Timbones, decided to put the work in and revive the revival again. He organised a Summer Tournament for the game then moved into weekly match organisation and several other major events, leading to us returning to Mirage. Massi revived his plans to make a hosting guide for Mirage similar to the one made for Dark Messiah, we planned a new Dead Game Revival video documenting the revitalisation of Mirage and he started work on our second Entropic Domain sister site dedicated to the game.

But as he found himself sidetracked from these plans I basically took over footage gathering, recording all of those major events for a future Revival project. After I pitched the idea of adding footage to the Leftovers YouTube channel, leading to Leftovers founder Dark giving me a Manager role there, I decided to just put all of the major events footage into one big compilation.

I also got sidetracked by my work on other projects and rollercoaster personal life stuff, but after Tim nudged me to release the footage from our Winter 1v1 Tournament held in February, which I’d bundled into the compilation, I rapidly got to work on it after I finished the first Wavelength episode.

Most of it didn’t take too long since I just added title cards that appear at the start of each event with their name and date, but for the Tournament I did a bunch more since filming it as a spectator meant I could add extra text without HUD elements getting in the way, so I put text naming combatants in their team colour so you always know who is who, match numbers so you know how far into the tourney you are and intermission text so you know when there’s a gap between fights, and On Deck text telling you where the next fight is.

It only took a few days to put together, but I was delayed slightly longer because of a few issues.

Mirage shows your friends list on the pause screen including the main menu to try and encourage you to invite others to your matches, and while my friends list is public the nicknames I use for people on it, which can sometimes include real names, are not, so I had my artist Mela draw banners based on the game’s factions to cover them when they appear, that meant hours and hours of combing through the footage to find all the pause spots.

The compilation is just shy of 8 hours and the only event where I didn’t pause at all except for a brief server change was the Tournament, which was just under 3 hours. So I had around 5 hours to comb through. Those other 3 were also vulnerable to all sorts of mistakes with the tourney text, bad timings, missing transitions, poor positioning and so on.

It took me 10 hours to render the whole thing and around 2 more for it to be uploaded and processed, so I was really hoping that I wouldn’t have to do many fixes and could catch them all in one go, after I got Tim to help me we each did several watchthroughs on 2x speed after I uploaded the video unlisted on Sunday, several days of checks revealed a few errors but nothing big enough that I would see it as worth it to go for another 12 hours.

But then just to be sure, I did a 1x watch through on Wednesday and ¾ into the whole thing I found a friends list appearance I hadn’t covered because it was very brief and right after one I’d already done, so I fixed it alongside everything else I’d spotted then rendered it again overnight, but as me and Tim wrapped up the painstaking process of adjusting the timestamps in the description (because YouTube had processed the video as 1080p60ps when technically the original recordings I based the original stamps on were 59fps with a few ms of fluctuations, which stretched out over nearly 8 hours led to up to 24 secs of disparity) he noticed one visual that transitioned way too late, going from Intermission to Match number way after a fight started in the tourney.

It was annoying but not that big a deal, normally I would’ve just said fuck it and released the video anyway, but it was a very easy fix and I could just re-render overnight, and it didn’t sit right with me knowing it was there again, so I decided to re-render it and only do brief spot checks on the third version so I knew the basics weren’t a disaster zone before punting it out so there wouldn’t be any more “just one more thing” moments.

And then I woke up to find the render had frozen 85% of the way through. So again, against my better judgment, I rendered it a 4th time, sacrificing a day’s use of my PC, killing time by watching TV and playing Modern Warfare 2 on my PS3, so I could get it out as soon as possible, then, about 10 minutes before finishing, DaVinci crashed.

A screenshot showing the render page of the video, the render is stuck at 85% completion with the timer endlessly estimating around 3 hours remaining on the render, the timer would occasionally change but not the frame being rendered or the percentage, and it had been in this state many hours after the whole render should've been finished, so I quickly gave up on the render when I realised what had happened.

A screenshot showing the crash page on DaVinci Resolve, asking me for a crash report, I didn't bother to fill it out, closing it and deleting the failed video file.

So yeah, I just gave up and published the pre-fix version anyway, lol, lmao even.

So it still has a few underlying issues, that wrong timing, seconds of lost footage or audio glitches baked into the recording, that kind of thing, and you know, human error on an 8 hour project, some other things might have slipped through, but I’m pretty happy with it and I’ve spent enough time on it as it is.

Even if there were to be a missing friends list cover, I did actually check the names on them before the last render and they weren’t really the ones I was worried about leaking, it was more an “I’ve started so I’ll finish” kind of thing and I guess fate decided to remind me of my own lesson I like to pass on to others, perfect is the enemy of done.

So here it is, The Mirage Events Compilation, with intro and outro narration from me on the history of the Leftovers and future event plans and many hours of Mirage gameplay of varying modes, maps and classes, enjoy!