THE SCRIPT FOR “The Surprisingly fun Multiplayer of Dark Messiah of Might and Magic”. THERE MAY BE SPELLING MISTAKES OR DIFFERENTLY VOICED BITS. I COULD FIX THEM, BUT I THINK I WON’T.
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Working Title: Dead Game Review – The Tragic Fate of Dark Messiah of Might and Magic
Introduction
Not many people know of Dark Messiah of Might and Magic and even fewer people actually played the game or ever tried the multiplayer mode. The game isn’t perfect, I still don’t remember most characters names or what exactly happens in the story, the voice acting is really bad, which honestly is more of a blessing than a curse-
[SHOW SOME SKILL BEFORE I KILL YOU]
-and when it comes to the combat a lot of it feels a bit clunky and at times unrefined. We will get to the multiplayer, but since Dark Messiah is so underappreciated I want to dedicate just a little portion of this video to the single player experience. The Dark Messiah single player is an Action RPG at heart. You collect skill points over the course of the game through mandatory and optional objectives and the game allows you to skill into different ability trees. No limits are set in what combination of abilities you can skill, but be warned that you can severely handicap yourself if you skill the wrong abilities. The combat is excellent, frankly my favourite first person melee combat ever. Even though a majority of the combat in this game revolves around swinging a sword and decapitating people, be aware that Dark Messiah expects the player to abuse the world around them in order to do significant damage to enemies. When fighting one of the easier enemies with only swords you won’t do much, but if you utilise your environment the battle easily turns in your favour. Enough about the single player, just get the game you will not regret it!
The Multiplayer
Welcome to the world of Might and Magic! A very barren rendition of Might and Magic sadly. Getting into the Multiplayer I had a very grim outlook on ever experiencing the full potential this game could offer. When it comes to the server browser… It’s empty. The playcount of this game pretty much is 0 and if there are people playing, its friend groups experiencing the game in private servers inaccessible to the public. The game tragically does not feature bot support, although a mod exists that adds very primitive bots to the game for the crusade mode exclusively. For the longest time I feared that all this game would ever be, is a collection of maps for anyone to explore all alone by themselves.
Mayhem
Luckily, I could convince a few people to play the game with me! Dark Messiah features a collection of game modes. CTF, Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch and two more modes which are a bit less cookie cutter in nature, being the colosseum mode and the Crusade mode. The colosseum is a competitive Duel mode where players get to fight in 1 versus 1 duels. Rather straightforward. The other mode is the Crusade mode, a multimap campaign about territorial conquest, an epic war between the living and the undead!
While both factions look visually distinct, the classes one can choose from for both the Living and the Undead are identical. One thing the multiplayer inherits from the singleplayer game, is that the players can spend skill points in order to modify the abilities of their character the more time they invest in the game. Every class has distinct strengths and weaknesses that can be counteracted or abused by opposing forces depending on what class they play and how they decide to invest skill points.
Warriors are immune from light melee attacks when attacked from the front and can block incoming arrows with their shields, yet are more vulnerable to magical damage, unless you decide to skill magic resistance and the safeguard ability that can absorb magical attacks.
Assassins are a highly situational class that can turn invisible, play dead and use various abilities to inflict great harm on other players, like the highly entertaining poison grenades. Assassins also do tremendous backstabbing damage, but are themselves easily killed due to having no resistances to magical or physical damage.
The Archer shoots arrows, that is pretty much it. The Archer is a highly offensive class that has no defences, but a huge arsenal of offensive tools that can inflict handicaps and high damage. In the right hands, the Archer may even become a nigh unkillable class.
The Priestess is all about keeping the team alive and being as obnoxious as possible. Blinding effects render ranged classes impotent and make Warriors highly dangerous for their own teammates and a bit more ineffective for the enemy as they cannot read the names of players anymore and cannot see how much health their opponents have left. The priestess can even resurrect dead players, but if the priestess or the resurrected player bites the dust, the other will die too! The priestess can also set her affinity to corruption or restoration, either favouring damage over healing or healing over damage. Also, in case enemies put down magical shields, those shields are only good against mages. Priestess attacks pierce magic immunity.
The Mages possess some of the strongest attacks in the game and are definitely the most overpowered class in the game. Mages can put down spherical magic repellant orbs that deflect any magic attack, including the attacks of teammates which introduces high griefing potential. Mages can also choose lightning or fire affinity which dictates how much damage a mage can do with electrical or fire based damage respectively. The highest level magic skills the mage can obtain, resemble weapons of mass destruction, highly lethal blasts of fire or slowly moving waves of electricity that fry any victim standing under next to or in front of it. The most ridiculous ability is the fire grenade, an awkward attack but if hitting an enemy it is a guaranteed kill.
Game of Tradeoffs
That is a lot to take in isn’t it? Mechanically speaking the game is more complex than it seems. Dark Messiah of Might and Magic is the brainchild of Arkane Studios. The Singleplayer can be described as a proto Dishonored and the Multiplayer is a one of a kind game. You can’t compare it to Chivalry, or other conventional FPS multiplayer games. The battle depicted between the Living and the Undead is unique to Dark Messiah. While Arkane Studios are mostly well known for their Immersive Simulation games, like Arx Fatalis, Dishonored and Prey, the studio also dabbled in Multiplayer action game experiences in the late 2000s with Dark Messiahs multiplayer mode being the only glimpse we have into what Arkane can do with Multiplayer games.
Back to the game! We talked a bit about abilities, but not much about how the player is expected to handle skill points. Abilities can be bought and unbought and it is important to reskill into different abilities when encountering too many counters to your character. A warrior can skill into magic countering abilities, but what if only a few mages are in the game that don’t even have the stronger magic spells skilled yet? Then it makes more sense to skill other abilities you could use for the time being. Using certain abilities over others also comes with disadvantages. A warrior can skill magic resistance meaning that he takes less magical damage, but the tradeoff is that it is an overall magic resistance, so friendly priestesses heal you less and less efficiently the more magic resistance you possess.
The devastating Magical attacks like waves of lightning and massive fireballs igniting every player in its radius also are highly damaging to players on your team. While you can spam those attacks without much thought in a deathmatch scenario, in every other team based mode, more discretion should be applied when using incredibly powerful attacks which could wipe out half your team in a single blow.
With these examples alone you can see that Dark Messiah of Might and Magic Multiplayer in large part is a game of tradeoffs. It also is a game of balance through imbalance, a game where each class is distinctly ridiculous and powerful when left unchecked. One problem that may arise from the game is that new players on a server have a harder time killing players that played for a much longer time on the same server. The good thing is though that gaining levels in the beginning is quite easy, giving you the tools for survivability and damage output rather quickly so you can take on the goliaths of the server. Also, if you lose connection to the game and rejoin, the dedicated server remembers all your skill points and you do not lose progress on your class levels.
While we have a good idea on how Deathmatch looks like, we still haven’t looked into what the Crusade mode has to offer, we can only imagine that it is awesome!
[jump cut to a scenery shots]
Hey, Cheecken here! Sadly only about 5 people saw the same potential in the game as I did and we couldn’t scrounge up people to play the Crusade mode properly, even with one of my dear supporters Kenny offering to buy copies for people who would have liked to join in on the fun. The Crusade mode will keep being an enigma unless more people find an interest in actually playing it. Until then, the team objective modes together with the Crusades will stay dead indefinitely and considering how much of a pain it is to set up a dedicated server, I am guessing it will never get revived. I will keep hosting my dedicated server now and then so if you want to try this game out, you will be able to. On to the conclusion.
Conclusions
I hope I could interest you to try this excellent game out for yourself! Even though the game has no bot support or any active servers that I know of, setting up a game is relatively easy. All you need to do is run a dedicated server that is provided to you through the steam tools, or alternatively hosting an internet game in the game itself with a service like Hamachi for easily connecting to a game and playing it with your friends. For the dedicated server solution you need an alternative Steam Account on a second computer you can leave running for as long as you need. You should forward your ports before hosting, UDP and TCP ranging from port 27000 to 27015. Since Dark Messiah runs on the Source Engine, connecting to a dedicated server is quite easy. First you enable the console as a launch option on Steam and then when the game starts you type “connect” and then the IP address you need. Remember that the local IPv4 address you see in ipconfig on Windows only works on a local network. In order for external clients to connect to the server, the host has to look up their external IP address, which can easily be done by googling “what is my IP” and copying the external IPv4 IP address displayed on the webpage. I will definitely keep playing and hosting my dedicated server for Dark Messiah of Might and Magic and if you want to gain access, you can join my Discord linked below to gain access to a guide on how to get the game up and running and the IP address you can connect to. Below in the description you can also find a useful tutorial on how to host a server and what to do in order to establish a basic map rotation. You will also be able to find many useful console commands that allow you to alter the game in any way you like. Hope you enjoy it and maybe we can play the game together soon enough!
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