We caught up with Torn Banner Studios' game designer Steve Piggott and senior brand manager Alex Hayter to learn more about what in a nutshell can be described as Chivalry with magic.
"That's kind of the basic starting point we get to people to get the basic idea across," says Piggott. "But it's Chivalry but in terms of the actual melee combat system that people love from Chivalry, the epic sword fighting, that's still there. But what we've done is added on top of that a layer of magic combat. We've built those systems together so that it actually ends up feeling like a sword fight from twenty feet away. And we've done that by making every projectile blockable, every attack, every movement ability blockable. So it's about the intersection of that combat and making it reactable and something that players have a lot of skill-based precisions in their actions."
Piggott and Hayter also described the Arabian and Persian inspired setting as well as the work that has gone into making the design easily readable for the player.
While we're only a few weeks away from the initial announcement, Mirage: Arcane Warfare will launch later in the year.
"We actually have a very condense schedule this time around," says Piggott. "We only announced it a week or two ago [interview filmed at GDC], but we're launching it later this year. There's going to be a beta in the summer and we're actually going to be at PAX East next month, first time going hands-on with lots of people so there's a lot going on for us right now."
"We're going to release at a fixed price," adds Hayter. "Around 30 dollars US. And you buy the game, you play the game that's really all there is to it."