![]() “We started placing, like, just static characters and seeing how when you play 64,” Löfström says. First, Torn Banner was a 20 person team building a game for 64 players, meaning it was 44 people short to effectively test the maps they were making. But Torn Banner faced several unique problems when implementing them into Chivalry 2. The idea of big maps in multiplayer games is nothing new. “It was very much like Source multiplayer levels in scope, and that made the castles not feel like castles.” Hence, one of the key pillars of Chivalry 2 was to get rid of the “corridor shooter” DNA lingering in the first game, to create levels that looked more like battlefields and felt more open and natural, and didn’t make players feel “like a rat in a maze” as Piggott puts it. “We actually didn't have a proper castle in Chiv 1”, Lofstrom says. The maps, meanwhile, were very limited in scope. “It had some things that were really good and a lot of weak areas.” The melee combat, for example, was great if players played fairly, but it was also filled with what Piggott refers to as “ballerina exploits” that allowed players to “spin like a top”. “The first Chivalry was successful in spite of itself,” Piggott says. According to Piggott, a sequel to Chivalry had always been part of the plan, but the team had wanted to gain more development experience by making another game before tackling it. The only silver lining in the failure of Mirage is that it was Mirage, and not Chivalry 2. “And it just became obvious that in certain ways we had gone too far, and in other ways we hadn't gone far enough, in getting that balance right.” Indeed, Torn Banner’s initial experience with UE4 was so bad that, according to Löfström, “we actually weren't able to take that much from it” and that development of Chivalry 2 “was almost like starting from scratch.” “How you empower designers versus programmers really changed between Unreal 3 and Unreal 4,” Piggott explains. In addition, Torn Banner took on some ambitious tech challenges for Mirage, switching to the then brand-new Unreal Engine 4, and targeting support for 64-player matches. "It just became obvious that in certain ways we had gone too far, and in other ways we hadn't gone far enough." “It turned out that when you don't know what the vision is, and everyone is on the same page, then it starts to pull in different directions, and then you don't get a cohesive or product that anyone wanted to make at the beginning,” says Löfström, Torn Banner’s COO. But this organisational effort ended up taking precedence over the vision of the game itself. With Mirage, Torn Banner tried to formalise the studio, taking on new hires and moving into an on-site office. When Medieval Warfare launched, Torn Banner were essentially still a modding team, with 13 members working remotely. But this doesn’t account for the extensive internal struggles Torn Banner suffered during Mirage’s development. The setting is less authentic and less immediately engaging than Chivalry’s straightforward medievalism, while the addition of magic into Mirage’s combat sat awkwardly alongside the swordplay. It was a really clear, fundamental warning sign.”įrom the outside, it’s not clear why Mirage went so awry, although there are clues. We had to change the way we were doing things to fix it. “We had to reckon with the fact that things went really wrong. “The scale of the failure with Mirage was total,” says Piggott, who founded Torn Banner in 2010 after working on the Half-Life 2 mod Age of Chivalry. In the five years between the launch of Mirage and Chivalry 2’s impending Steam release, Torn Banner has gone from a studio on the brink to being more successful than its leadership ever imagined. It turns out that, while broadly correct, I wildly underestimated Torn Banner’s reversal of fortunes. Mirage had not been as well-received as Chivalry, yet despite this stumbling block, the studio had found its feet again with Chivalry 2, a souped-up sequel to their earlier work with more nuanced combat, bigger maps, and support for 64-player battles. After finding success in 2012 with their breakout hit Chivalry: Medieval Warfare, Torn Banner had gone on to compose the difficult second album Mirage: Arcane Warfare – an Arabian Nights-inspired take on Chivalry’s multiplayer melee combat. Going into my chat with Steve Piggott and Rasmus Löfström of Torn Banner Studios, I thought I had a reasonable grasp of the developer’s trajectory up to that point.
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