This article is dedicated to Soter Dave: Community leader, educator, charity organiser. Rest in peace.
Intro #
Not often does a look into a game not only result in fascination, but obsession.
Mirage Arcane Warfare is the most unique Slasher game ever made. With it’s incredibly unique setting, absolutely brutal swordplay and it orienting itself towards a more strategic, team oriented gameplay style, it really is a game like no other in the genre. I first covered this game some years ago, concluding the Dead Game Review with a farewell to Mirage, but it turns out that I spoke too soon.
Obsession #
Some weeks ago, a friendly guy from the Mirage Leftovers server hit me up, someone who was willing to try and resurrect the game by hosting tournaments and trying to drum up a community of players.
I was deeply embroiled in other projects which all need to be wrapped up to some extend, from the bonus materials of Ukrainian Divide, to a potential video on Oblivion Remastered which may or may not be happening now and other projects, like a video version of my article on Holy Terror, and not to mention the various projects I needed to work on for the Frame Voyager channel. To say that Timbones’ message was disruptive is an understatement. What followed was two weeks of obsession, which while not completely successful in what I was trying to do, led to a deeper understanding of how Mirage works and potential avenues of getting the game to work, or making it even playable for free!
Every other project suffered, but in this very short term I didn’t care. Mirage is coming back after all!
The biggest breakthrough for me is figuring out how to modify bots. The bots of Mirage aren’t amazing, especially because they tend to be stupid, and they can often get stuck on themselves during a match, an unfortunate consequence of the shoddily implemented dynamic pathfinding. Other issues, like looking at the pseudo code of the game, trying to hack it’s executable, trying to find a way to get rank ups working or at least achieving those through cheats- I have been diving deep, and all of this information will eventually make it into a comprehensive PDF all about server hosting, modding and more!
I even set up a dedicated server, or two really, which are running off the same VPS, enabling EU players to enjoy the game with a not so terrible ping. Things have been going well for Mirage, the Leftovers Discored is more active than I ever saw it be and more players are asking if they wanna play a round or duel.
And then, something unexpected happened!
A Wizard appears #
One day I’m laying in bed and I am watching some video about slashers. I was surprised to see Mirage Arcane Warfare even being mentioned at the beginning of the video. How that YouTuber described the game also made me raise my eyebrow… I had a feeling he has previously seen my production on Mirage.
Not so long after, I was in shock.
This rarely happens to me. My video was shouted out!
The result of this is almost 800 people at the time of writing this article, seeking out my production and giving it a watch, throwing even more sets of eyeballs towards my channel and more importantly, Mirage Arcane Warfare, which is what led me to made my little update video that also doubles as an “Episode 0” of sorts for the Mirage Dead Game Revival series. If you happen to be reading this mister Wizard, thank you! You had no reason to do this, yet you did. I am incredibly grateful for that!
Also your 800 viewers made me 1 whole dollar.
So what happens now? #
We play Mirage of course! Since you are reading this anyhow, copy the following text:
steam://install/368420
And now paste it in the address bar of your browser. If you already own Mirage: Arcane Warfare, then you are in luck, you can download it right now and start playing!
If you don’t… then you are kinda out of luck. You can download Mirage Arcane Warfare from Archive.org, even a test version is available curiously enough, yet there are some challenges that lie ahead of you when it pertains to being able to play with normal Steam players.
You can disable Steam’s Online Subsystem which results in a Rank of 0 and being stuck on a scenic view of a map on connection. Which is not great.
Alternatively, if you download the Archive copy, make a burner Steam account and use an exploit I will not be going into detail on that tricks Steam into believing that Mirage actually is a free game everyone owns, you may have a Rank of one but the Server Browser is empty and on connection you will get kicked out and eventually the game closes on you. Weird stuff!
Sadly we did not figure out how one can play the game for free. So sadly, at least for now, we have to rely on keyshops like G2A to get gamekeys for Mirage. Luckily the game really does not cost that much, but having to buy a dead game understandably isn’t the most appealing thing ever.
If you have experience in cracking games and playing them online… then have a crack at playing Mirage and let us know how it went!
We need more players! #
To eventually fix these issues, step number one is joining the Mirage Leftovers Discord channel. Once you joined you can easily ask around for mates to play a match or two with.
If you also have any experience in game modding, hacking and reverse engineering, consider checking Mirage out! If you actually find a fix to the many issues this game has, you would be this communities messiah.
Anyhow, enough from me for now. More writings/videos on Mirage will definitely come out sooner rather than later, so stay tuned and see you in game!
Article is still incomplete! A Beauty Update will come soon!