Minions of Mirth

[cutterjohn]

Prairie Games

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PRAIRIE GAMES, INC RELEASES GROUNDBREAKING ROLE-PLAYING GAME:

MINIONS OF MIRTH

Wishek, North Dakota - December 15th, 2005 - Prairie Games, Inc today announced that its groundbreaking role-playing game Minions of Mirth has been released for Windows and OSX.

"Minions of Mirth gives the player an incredible amount of freedom in their role-playing experience! It can be played in single player, multiplayer, and even allows friends to run their own custom persistent worlds! We're very pleased to be releasing this amazing product. We've worked very hard with our community to make sure Minions of Mirth totally rocks!", says Josh Ritter co-owner and programmer of the title.

Minions of Mirth is available for Windows and OSX at

http://www.prairiegames.com

for the special price of $25 through January 31st, 2006. The full price of the game will be $29.95 and there are no monthly service fees. Prairie Games, Inc hosts the complimentary PrairieWorld server and there are also community hosted worlds to play on. Minions of Mirth is also fully playable in single player with no internet connection.

Minions of Mirth Features:

Auto-patcher that delivers immediate content and feature upgrades

Full single player support

Player vs Environment and Player vs Player multiplayer

No monthly service fees for multiplayer

Form your own party of up to 6 characters. Join other players in online alliances with up to 36 characters

16 playable classes, 12 playable races, Multiclass characters in three careers up to level 100

3 playable realms: Fellowship of Light, Minions of Darkness, and the Monster Realm

14 huge and diverse zones to explore

Unlock monster templates to create your own stable of monsters

Epic Battle System

A tremendous amount of unique NPC, creatures, items, and quests

2 hours of original music

Free dedicated world server with source code is available. Host your own persistent world with your own original content

Players are encouraged to visit

http://www.prairiegames.com

to get all the latest news, game information, and to download the free demo.

About Prairie Games, Inc:

Prairie Games, Inc is an independent game company dedicated to creating fresh and innovative role-playing games and technology. The company has offices in Wishek, North Dakota and Los Angeles, California. Minions of Mirth, it's debut title, is now available on Windows and OSX. The company's website is:

http://www.prairiegames.com

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So, has anyone around here tried this single/MMO RPG from an Indie developer?

From what I've been able to find out through my own research(BTW: rpgcodex is a complete pit) is that it's vaguely similar in play to EQ, first person view, supports a party(up to 6, others controlled by programmable macros), seems to be vaguely muddish in design(players can add their own content, server source is provided for private or other "worlds" running), prairiegames runs their own server(no monthly charge), full quest line for evil and good(alignments) with multiple subquests, ability to play monsters(somewhat vague as to whether you can enter the regular online game as a monster, or if you play on a completely seperate server/"world"), etc.

Graphics are reported to be somewhat dated looking(sound familiar?) and of varying quality(professional to very amateurish), but the game itself is fun to some people.

The game was developed by 2 full time people(Josh Ritter looks to be the main developer and cheerleader, not sure about his partner's involvement, Lara ???), and 3 contractors(mainly artwork/models from what I gather), and uses the Torque Engine(garage games IIRC). The ingame rules were internally developed, and overall the game is said to be heavily based on EQ, and less so on Diablo 2.

It's currently $25 until the end of January '06 at which point it goes to $29.95, and is only available as a ~226M download. (They are considering a CD distribution next year.)

[ShoHashi]

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So, has anyone around here tried this single/MMO RPG from an Indie developer?

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I downloaded it the other night and have been playing it off and on. It's not too bad, it's keeping my attention so far. I'm sure some people will nitpick at things.

Once nice thing is that your can play a singleplayer world and still have global chat with other people in their own game or on IRC. Comes in handy when you need to ask some questions.

As far as graphics are concerned..I agree, they are not WoW or Everquest. But hey, it's the gameplay that matters.

[cutterjohn]

Shohashi, how's the combat? Is it anything like EQ?

As to the graphics, others have described them as EQ1 class, but they look a little better than that to me in the screenshots. I think that I will purchase this in January, but I may just wait for a CD version.

Sys Reqs:

Windows 98

P3/Celeron 1GHz, 32M Video card

(Reported run ok, on an 800M machine with everything turned to lowest setting, also recomended for the above spec)

Mac: OSX 10.3

G4+ 800MHz+, 32M Video card

Thats about it for system requirements, as they were non-existent until the last few days, and these are, pretty much, ad hoc caveat emptor.

It's been strongly recomended that you download and try running the demo first.

[ShoHashi]

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Shohashi, how's the combat? Is it anything like EQ?

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Combat...hmmm...well...it's different. You can't actually tell if you are hitting a creature unless you are reading the text readout in the tome or looking at the really small health bar under your health in the upper left.

They really should consider making a much bigger creature health bar right over or above the creature you are attacking (WoW-style) to make it easier to tell if you are landing hits and misses.

[cutterjohn]

...ok, I sprung for and downloaded(@ a whopping ~5kbps for ~12h) game. Played for ~2h, finished basic intro quests(class and bear clearing).

Graphics: definitely better than EQ1, and approximately as good in quality as Gothic II. There are some glitches and seams showing in some spots, but I am unsure if that is because of my GPU or the Torque engine. The sun image isn't very good, but the sky, etc. are as good a G2. Animation is a little shakey and could use some additional work.

Sound: not bad, better than expected

Combat: Melee, basically click and attack, feedback isn't synched closely enough with actions. Haven't tried spellcasting yet.

Writing: Ahm... well... gets the point across, but not really in a professional fashion. It shows that most developers are NOT authors/script writers, but it does the job adequately, and if you play online primarily should not be a factor.

(Haven't noticed any major grammatical/spelling problems though, mainly it's the execution/flow of the text and it's brevity.)

UI: Pretty nice, scales to resolution run.

Overall responsiveness: exhibits some lag on my system. I'd recomend at least 512M of RAM for this game(as with G2) as it seems to be VERY memory hungry. (Morrowind runs fine on my system with 256M although as implied above G2 wants more memory as well.) I'd really change the basic system requirements to at least 1GHz and 512M RAM, although there are reports of people playing it and well enough to enjoy on even lower specced machines, so YMMV.

Online: dunno yet, I'll add it when I try it.

Misc: Download was 226M, install space req. was reported by installer to be 294M, haven't checked actual size yet. Lack of a manual is VERY annoying, but there is ingame help with keyboard commands, engine/server "commands", a short FAQ for getting started and basic operation. Additionally initial default quests in the journal pretty much tell you what you need to do, nevertheless a coherently written manual separate from the game is sorely needed for most people. (It's in the works, just not available yet.)

Bottomline, it's a decent game, well worth the $25 so far, and should stay that way as online play is free, and the source for the server engine is available. (No client source as to be expected since they use licensed technology(Torque Engine, etc.)) All of this being said, I really think it's more late beta quality right now than release, Prairies games should've pushed the release date back unless they really needed the cash flow...

Final description: More like a graphical MUD than EQ, with graphics of higher quality than EQ1, but whose writing/ingame text currently detracts from, although a relative non-issue for MP.

...must stop being uber cheap and spring for some more memory at least, which I hate doing as it will be useless in my replacement machine, and the current machine will end up replacing my current/primary FreeBSD file server, and so doesn't really need uber(or even slightly better/more) memory/gpu/etc... sigh... happy new year.

[ShoHashi]

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Combat: Melee, basically click and attack, feedback isn't synched closely enough with actions. Haven't tried spellcasting yet.

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Spellcasting definately helps combat. Especially when you can buff yourself with protection and combat spells, as well as use offensive spells in conjunction with your weapons when attacking.

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Overall responsiveness: exhibits some lag on my system. I'd recomend at least 512M of RAM for this game(as with G2) as it seems to be VERY memory hungry. (Morrowind runs fine on my system with 256M although as implied above G2 wants more memory as well.) I'd really change the basic system requirements to at least 1GHz and 512M RAM, although there are reports of people playing it and well enough to enjoy on even lower specced machines, so YMMV.

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Fortunately, I haven't experience any lag at all.

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Lack of a manual is VERY annoying, but there is ingame help with keyboard commands, engine/server "commands", a short FAQ for getting started and basic operation. Additionally initial default quests in the journal pretty much tell you what you need to do, nevertheless a coherently written manual separate from the game is sorely needed for most people. (It's in the works, just not available yet.)

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The in-game encylopedia in your tome tells you lot of information (quests, npcs, etc.). However, it needs to be a bit more organized. In it's current state you have to do a lot of digging in it to find what you need but the information is there.

Also, the Prairie Games forum has a ton of game information to include gameplay tips and hints.

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All of this being said, I really think it's more late beta quality right now than release, Prairies games should've pushed the release date back unless they really needed the cash flow...

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I disagree...it's very playable the way it is now and plus, it's nice to be a part of the game's infancy with a say in the game's direction.

I've only been playing Multiplayer, IMHO when your MP you can at least interact with other players.

One thing I don't like, is that if you start a character/party in Singleplayer, you cannot transfer them to Multiplayer. That's another reason why I've played only MP, I don't like to have to re-level my characters all over.

It's important to remember that this game is still very much work in progress and is still in it's infancy. I'm very sure that as time goes by it will become better and better.

Another neat thing about this game is that you can mod it and create new zones. If the zones are good enough, the game creators will add the zones into the game. A good case in point is the user-created dungeon that will be added in the very near future.

Also, this game not only runs on the PC it's also for the Mac.

-Sho

[cutterjohn]

Shohashi, want to try a party adventure some evening/weekend? (My chars(thinking of running a mini-party of 2 for starting dwarf cleric(keeping) and some warrior class to tank until the cleric levels enough and can multiclass) will be low level.) I'll talk to you on MoM chat some time...

I'm currently fighting with updating as my windows machine sits on a hybrid wired/wireless network(which needs some tweaking) with a linux box provide net access(dialup). I'm waiting to see if I can get the "manifests" from the server right now.

Release quality: I'm still not sure about that one. A beta game SHOULD be playable, beta just means that the game/application/whatever is basically finished(featurewise) leaving only major bugs to be hunted. I guess as I've not crashed to desktop, nor run into any incredibly annoying bugs that it could be called release, better to release early and often I guess... :shrug:

[ShoHashi]

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Shohashi, want to try a party adventure some evening/weekend? (My chars(thinking of running a mini-party of 2 for starting dwarf cleric(keeping) and some warrior class to tank until the cleric levels enough and can multiclass) will be low level.) I'll talk to you on MoM chat some time...

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Sure thing, cutterjohn.

I have ran across one annoyance. When you get quests, the specifics don't save in your journal. With this happening, by the time you tackle your quest, you can't remember exactly what and where you have to go so you end up asking in chat.

Another thing is there is no in-game map of the world. This would come in handy when you are trying to find places that you need to go while playing. As it stand now, you have to look at the loading screen (with the map of the world) as you are zoning.

[cutterjohn]

Heh. I didn't even think about a world map until you mentioned it. Should find the jpeg of the map, do a threshold conversion to B&W and print it out...

Quests: I sort of noticed that a little already, which is, again, annoying. Does the encyclopedia offer any help/more details on these?

Anyways, about online play, I've run into a slight kink in that plan, namely it took me, oh about 3h to download the manifest(~20m) then the balance was downloading a lousy 2.5M of client updates. I need to figure out whats going on with my network here as the windows machine cannot sustain bandwidth to the outside world, which make patching ridiculous as it can ONLY be done from inside the client. (I asked about this today and Josh said nope, and maybe they'd add it later... meaning I MUST find and fix this problem before the updates get too built up. Once I'm in the game everything is fine as it doesn't sustain large transfers, only infrequent small data chunks which sail right through.)

(I've got a linux notebook that dials out and acts as a router for my wired/wireless hybrid home LAN, packets aren't being fragmented so thats not the problem. Next step I'm going to try a direct wire via the 100M switch to the notebook and see if local spectrum pollution may be the culprit, or the wireless bridge maybe... also going to try using an OSX notebook acting as the router as maybe it's some linux network flakiness in this kernel version... 2.6.10-5 powerpc, add to this my trees don't have leave/branch sprites when in close, which has been suggested might be an nVidia driver problem, so I've spent most of my free time today searching about for nvidia geforce 2 sprite problem, before just biting the bullet and trying the latest detonators, but IIRC I have the last GF2 upgrade already as it's no longer supported... and geez, their release notes weigh in at 122 pages, mostly revision history though...

At least this is forcing me to finally finish tweaking out the dialup based network, but it sure is a PITA compared to broadband, which was, comparatively easy to setup. I think I'm going to run along and try the OSX variant... I'll let you know ingame global chat sometime... hopefully soon before you're level(s) 100/100/100 }

[Eclipse]

I gave this a shot tonight, and I was very... how shall we say... underwhelmed?

the control setup is very nasty, you either need a click to move system (which would fit better with the combat style) or a full blown mouselook lock with an "activate" key for interaction and inventory similar to Morrowind. I also found it to be over sensitive. Even after setting the mouse sensitivity down I had problems with not doing 360s on stairs or even getting up them without falling off. Inventory movement was a pain and the first time I got a shield the darn thing just wouldn't go quietly into my inventory... instead decided to plop around in the marco panel and handily erase all the preset ones. Now some of this could be user error but I really don't want to be looting a corpse when I'm being attacked nor do I want to be stuck holding a shield that just won't drop or equip while under attack.

Now Im not usually a big fan of graphics but the torque engine if I remeber right is the same one used in Tribes 2 and last I ran that i could run at full res with no slowdown. Not so with this, I well night have to run on the lowest graphic setting and resolution just to get acceptable framerates... in menus. Could be a driver or vid card issue, I don't know but whatever it was the impression of the game doesn't get bonus points for 2d menu slowdowns.

Maybe if they keep developing it it'll be a decent game and a fun MP one but right now all I found it to be was frustrating. I felt more like I was fighting with the controls than being able to enjoy the game iteself.

[cutterjohn]

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the control setup is very nasty, you either need a click to move system (which would fit better with the combat style) or a full blown mouselook lock with an "activate" key for interaction and inventory similar to Morrowind.

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Someone on their boards already asked that the Q key(look) be made into a toggle switch, and it sounds like it may be implemented. (I will be VERY glad of that as well, but for now I just hold down the right mouse button...)

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I also found it to be over sensitive. Even after setting the mouse sensitivity down I had problems with not doing 360s on stairs or even getting up them without falling off.

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Same here, sort of. At first I found it to be too sluggish so I tried increasing mouse sensitivity, but in the end ended up right back at the default setting.

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Inventory movement was a pain and the first time I got a shield the darn thing just wouldn't go quietly into my inventory... instead decided to plop around in the marco panel and handily erase all the preset ones. Now some of this could be user error but I really don't want to be looting a corpse when I'm being attacked nor do I want to be stuck holding a shield that just won't drop or equip while under attack.

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I had the exact same problem at first, and messed up two of my default macros, just like you did. The macros may be gotten back from the macro menu IIRC, and the inventory system DOES grow on you after using it for a while. I agree that it is still not the best implementation compared to morrowind, for example, but it is by the same token infinitely better than Gothic II's. (The invenotry slots DO highlight, but they don't highlight enough IMO, and it seems like you have to have the item in just the right spot for a click to release it into an inventory slot. It takes time, just like the BC3000AD games.)

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Now Im not usually a big fan of graphics but the torque engine if I remeber right is the same one used in Tribes 2 and last I ran that i could run at full res with no slowdown. Not so with this, I well night have to run on the lowest graphic setting and resolution just to get acceptable framerates... in menus. Could be a driver or vid card issue, I don't know but whatever it was the impression of the game doesn't get bonus points for 2d menu slowdowns.

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Yes it was used for Tribes 2, and says as much on the Garage Games product info page if you go look at it. IMO the slowdowns are from the extensive use of Python(a good chunk of the game is implemented in Python), SQLite engine(not sure about this one, but I'm sure that it adds overhead, but I'd have to actually dl and test it out to verify it v. something like a XML based system, or just plain text files with my own "formatting"...), and the game uses OpenGL, which on nVidia cards may be a problem as IIRC nVidia doesn't have that great of an OpenGL implementation. (Additionally, I've got a GF2 and with current drivers it apparently doesn't support 5 OpenGL functions. This can be seen by looking in your log files in the Minions of Mirt directories... This might also have something to do with my branchless/leafless trees...)

I wish that in the SP game that they'd just save a snapshot of a zones state when you exit out, that way loading the game & zone again would be MUCH faster, as it algorithmically populates zones when loading.

Network problems: After a brain fart the other night, and a test of my Windows box, and an OSX notebook on my network, I found that plain HTTP transfer COULD sustain ~4.4kBps xfer, and ftp at ~2kBps(against two different sites, not comprehensive but good enough I think for here) which is pretty good all things considered. This leads me to believe that my poor patching performance(download of manifest plus patched files) is the fault of a) the prairie games patch engine(subversion based I believe) or Prairie games server performance because of either poor configuration or being overloaded. Personally I'm inclined to believe case a with a dash of case b.

This leaves me only with my branchless/leafless trees, but I grabbed detonator 81.87 drivers and will try those eventually, although I am leery of it breaking things as everything else works perfectly right now...

[cutterjohn]

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the control setup is very nasty, you either need a click to move system (which would fit better with the combat style) or a full blown mouselook lock with an "activate" key for interaction and inventory similar to Morrowind.

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Someone on their boards already asked that the Q key(look) be made into a toggle switch, and it sounds like it may be implemented. (I will be VERY glad of that as well, but for now I just hold down the right mouse button...)

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* The Mouse Look key is now a toggle. You no longer have to hold the key down.

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Heh, it was actually implemented the other day for the test 1/4/06 patch, but you must own the game and request the test patch.

[cutterjohn]

Ok, last set of commentary for a while, I think:

@Eclipse: The mouselook toggle is now in the

v1.01 patch available for everyone(1/6/06).

Worked around my network problem by moving the dialout machine to ethernet(wired) when updating MoM, and when I've played online so far. (i.e. this means that I am a) having a problem with my wireless bridge, or linux(powerpc) wireless drivers which I'll look into at some other time, if I ever do).

Most likely going to spring for cable modem again(I hate the cable company, but no DSL here) at least for a while, which will extend the length of time before hardware upgrading somewhat.

Lastly, I fixed some of my video problems by updating to nVidia's 81.83 det drivers, and, maybe, by upping my video quality setting from pure performance. (I'm way too lazy to go reset video quality and check as I made both changes at the same time. Video quality looks a little better at that setting, however, I am now worried about the games that I made the switch for as I haven't tried anything other than MoM since doing this. Lack of time.)

More commentary on MoM itself:

My performance is MUCH better when playing online as the remote server handles MUCH more of the workload, so Eclipse, you may be better off trying online only unless you already did so with the demo. (There have been no SP optimizations in a while from what I gather from the patchlogs, and SP on my machine does lag the GUI. Alternatively, you could probably, if you have an extra good enough machine, run a dedicated server on one machine and play from the client on another. I have yet to determine if the server, for some reason or other, requires the min spec GPU, or what a server only spec machine would be for 1(or VERY few players) would be.)

Release status: I'm still weaving on this as the zones seem fairly empty right now. Other have also recently posted regarding this on the MoM forums as well. The good point of empty zones is that there is alot of room for potential player expansion, although as mentioned in the MoM posts it does make the world/zones feel somewhat empty at the moment.

Caveat: I've had limited playing time, and both my SP & MP players are only c. lvl 5/6 at the moment, which is fine as with dwarven class restrictions(which I checked), I am thinking of abandoning my preferred race/class(fantasy game character IOW) for one(elf or human) that can multi to more preferred classes... sigh...

@Shohashi: BTW spellcasting is pretty kickin' at my current levels at the moment. (I've ended up with SP: Ranger, Cleric, Thief, and Wizard party of characters and the wizard and cleric destroy undead from a distance. Against non-evil/undead the cleric buffs, and the wiz deals fairly good damage at a distance often killing or severely weakening even significantly more powerful foes, although the latest patch has made it somewhat more difficult... MP I still only have my warrior, and cleric, but now may end up adding a wizard as I have difficulty ATM of finding similar level(low) players, and players that are on when I can be...)

In the end, I'm going to go with the statement that this game is worth the $25, and likely worth the eventual $29.99 to most people who enjoy RPGs and MMORPGs, but, again, try the demo first...