Vapourware The Mandate - LOL DEAD

[Bubbles]

Finally bothered to look up the CV of the new Design Director:

Design

Bullet Run (2012) (Game Design)

Marketing
Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (2008) (Marketing & Communication)

Customer/Technical Support
Dark Age of Camelot: Darkness Rising (2005) (Support of the Game)

Other
Dark Age of Camelot: Catacombs (2004) (Editorial Dept)

http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,350672/

And afterwards:

Senior Game Designer
Persha Studia (Wargaming.net)
May 2015 – March 2016 (11 months)Kyiv, Ukraine
Initially hired to work on an unannounced project for PC and current gen consoles. Later switched to World of Warplanes with a brief to redesign the new player experience. Responsible for concepting, prototyping and producing features. Made redundant after a general reorganisation in the studio.

Game Designer
eRepublik Labs Limited
June 2013 – October 2014 (1 year 5 months)Madrid Area, Spain
Designing a new range of strategy games for iOS and other mobile platforms.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/requiel

I guess his year at eRepublik is the most encouraging thing on those lists.

 

[DeepOcean]

Unfortunately, this is somewhat counterproductive since after all we want to surprise you and give you the experience we think you will enjoy when playing the game.

"Hey, half the features are missing and the other half is dumb down, surprise, surprise!

 

[Bubbles]

They just had a big update about their new "vision" in a Q&A thread on their forums.

Hello!

Sorry for the delay, but as already mentioned above, we had a really busy time and tasks that had to be done, before we could focus more on your questions.

Our designers sat together to answer most of the questions on the list. Unfortunately not every question could be answered – some of them were quite subjective or others were simply too specific, to be answered right now (meaning: we need to figure it out ourselves first).

On a side note: We are posting a Kickstarter Update soon and this Q&A will be part of it. On the one hand we considered postponing the answers to this thread again, but on the other hand we want to stick to our word and give you the answers today, so here we gooooooo:


Are we going to see you guys play the pre-alpha on Youtube/Twitch?
Possibly

As you hit each stage will you release video/image details of what has been achieved based on the roadmap you have released?
We expect to be releasing a lot of video and screenshots of our progress as we get closer to final production quality.

Will we have 3D movement in space combat?
No, Combat takes place on a 2d plane.

Will the crew be made up of individual NPCs grouped into squads (for enlisted to ease management) and single officers?
The crew that you interact with are your officers. These are individuals with their own backstories, personalities and skills.

Will a trait system along with a stat system be applied to all NPCs or just focused on key individuals in the game?
The trait system is currently designed to work with the officers on the ship. Other NPCs traits will be displayed through their dialogue and interactions.

Will light craft be a weapon system option for equipping a carrier configured ship for space combat?
Yes, you will have multiple choices for your carrier configuration. Even ships that aren't designed as carriers can have attendant drones.

How much of the enemies spawn wholly randomly in the world, and how many spawn from points influenced by outside forces (The spread of territory or the gradual increase of stats associated with regions of space). IE: Do pirates spawn as a function of time, or do pirates spawn because Spaceport A has had corruption go up in that area, due to a lack of protected shipments of ore traveling between it and Spaceport B.
Mission-based enemies spawn as a script depending on the mission. When it comes to other enemies, the AI spawner will spawn things in regions depending on the general situation there and the players level. There is also supposed to be an upper limit to this levelling, based on the player level or player progression in the story.

Will NPC crews be randomly generated, from officers to enlisted? So, is there a fixed number of officers (This is kind of specifically what I'm asking about) in the game world or do they generate randomly.
There is a fixed number of starting and potentially hirable officers in the game. All the officers are hand-crafted, not randomly generated.

Will NPC Officers have their storylines generated or will officer storylines be hard coded per individual officer? So if officers are fixed in number, or even if they are not fixed in number, how will quests and storylines be assigned to officers in the game world?
Both. Officers have specific content attached to them as part of their background, but there are also randomly generated story elements that will be based on traits that you might encounter in different places each time you play through the game.

Will there be a fixed officer type of NPC, or can you promote people from Enlisted to NCO to CO, and that NPC will grow, gaining story and background as you advance them?
Officers are a fixed type. You can hire new ones in certain circumstances and you can shuffle officers between bridge stations.

Are resources for crafting collected by placing items [stations] or managing existing items [stations]? This is to say, if I were to need iron, do I find an area (I'd bet a planet or an asteroid field) in which there is iron present, then drop a station down in that area. From then on collecting iron from that station (Or linking it to another station where the goods will be dropped off)? Or, will I upgrade captured stations, planets, etc. with iron mines that will then produce iron?
Resources are currently collected with your ship using a module fitted for that purpose. It's an active ability and not a passive stream of free resources.

How will our fleets work if they are still included in the game. To what extent are they autonomous or require manual control?
You will control one ship and possibly a number of smaller vessels such as drones or fighter-craft. These will be entirely ordered and controlled by the player.

Will you be using the questions from the old Q&A question request thread? I honestly cannot remember what happened with that.
Most of the questions in that thread were answered there. Any that weren't might still be included in either this or a later edition of the Q&A.

What kinds of exploration can be expected? Dead civilizations, new life, strange worlds?
Answering this question in detail would possibly entail some spoilers. Let me instead state that the Mandate is not science fiction like Star Wars or Star Trek where alien races are all over the place. Humanity is the only thing we know about. However - there are certainly dead civilizations and strange worlds to discover, and life on exo-planets are not only human; the wildlife on certain planets are certainly spoken about. That said, we don't populate these worlds with encounters featuring these things. Instead, we speak about them in encounters and in lore so that we can flesh out the universe. So you won't be fighting Mega-Rats on Saturn-VII, for instance.

Is there an interesting set of non-mini-game mechanics specific to discovery of resources, life, and structures?
Currently we have no mini-games planned for discoveries of this kind. The player may scan stellar objects such as stars, planets, starbases and so on, but this is a general mechanic of the game rather than a mini-game dedicated to exploration.

Station docking will be complete for September, will ships have airlock ports on the port side for embarking into stations?
No. Station docking gives you access to an interface where you can manage various tasks. You aren't in an FPS view here.

Are the observation decks still in and useful?
No - while we consider ships to have observation decks and they may be referred to for events that take place there, you yourself do not interact with or visit the observation deck in any capacity.

The missions seem to so far involve only closed sets of text. Will we have missions which involve text>action>text>exploration>text and so on?
We are attempting to make missions in such a way that they make use of any other mechanics we have available in the game. As such, they will encompass combat, exploration, dialogues, puzzle solving, getting items, stealth, and so forth.

In regard to beautification, what qualities, such as realism or cartoonishness, are being aimed for in regard to ship rendering? Will it be more important that the ships pop from the screen, or have realistic sun based illumination and hard shadows?
We're aiming for a realistic but cinematic feel. We want the ships to look and feel like real ships but we're going to make sure that they look cool and are nicely lit at the same time.

The next two questions relate to the earlier asked question:
How much of the enemies spawn wholy randomly in the world, and how many spawn from points influenced by outside forces (The spread of territory or the gradual increase of stats associated with regions of space). IE: Do pirates spawn as a function of time, or do pirates spawn because Spaceport A has had corruption go up in that area, due to a lack of protected shipments of ore traveling between it and Spaceport B.
1. To add to this, it was previously mentioned that the leaders of factions will be like the human player, an individual outside the game who has to follow the player rules and mechanics. Is this still part of the game?
2. If so, without counting as a player level AI, will independent NPC pirate fleets also be bound to player mechanics for things such as resource gathering, ship construction, and crew collection?
It depends a bit with what you mean by Faction Leaders. For the most part (but not always), faction leaders are not touched by the player as combat encounters. However - there are plenty of high-ranking individuals inside of the factions that will feature as part of the world - as an example, high-ranking captains amongst the Arkwrights will routinely patrol the Arkwright territories to protect them from intruders. These fleets will likely do some AI rule-bending in terms of how they behave, but as a general rule, they won't break the rules. We won't have AI fleets teleport around or suddenly become invincible, etc. Pirates will also feature in the game, and their AI behavior is slightly different from Faction AI. Pirates are definitely tied to the player experience in that you can encounter and defeat them. As far as specifics on this (for instance about ship construction), we will have to see.

My concept characters have Russian names (and Turkish, French, German, etc.), and to be immersive they all have true Russian patronymic middle names. Will there be support for this? What about Cyrillic script (The Russian Alphabet)?
We don't have middle-names, but we have support for first names and family names. We need to check for the Cyrillic, this is not guaranteed.

Is the mission and dialog system seen as entertaining enough to stand alone as a game?
This is difficult to answer because it's a matter of preference. Let me tell you how the dialogues and the system works. Firstly, the dialogues are non-linear and branching. You as the player get to make choices and where applicable, these choices will matter both for the story and the game ending. The Dialogue system itself could in theory be viewed as a stand-alone game, but the player will need to do actions in between dialogues. The game features quite a lot of dialogues and dialogue options. There are mission-briefings, dialogues that happen during specific missions, debriefings. There are events, which also feature the dialogue system to a great extent. If you are flying around space, you may for instance, encounter a derelict ship as an event. This event is a dialogue with choices, where you as the player get to decide on how to approach the derelict, if you want to board it, scrap it or leave it alone. A great deal of events have already been written, quite a lot of them being unique in nature and we want the dialogues to be entertaining as well as informative. For those who do not like sifting through a lot of dialogue, we try to put in convenient "skip" options but in general, we try to make the dialogues as exhaustive as they need/ought to be.

Is surveying of planets, moons, asteroids and anything else, part of the game?
Yes. This is how resources are gathered.

Is planetary surveying performed through the mission system or its own set of mechanics?
It is based on the capabilities of your ship. You don't need a specific mission.

Is surveying seen more as a single function, more useful than fun, or a game in itself?
It's a single function. It's not intended to be a main element of gameplay.

Will terrain or ship design have a greater influence in derterming where players position ships relative to each other?
Both. Terrain will limit your possibilities and provide new ones, your ship fit will determine the engagement range and your best arc.

Will armor and shield protection be equal in all directions for ships and infantry?
Yes.

Will missiles accelerate over time with no hard capped speed limit?
No.

Will missiles lead their targets, rather than tail them?
Gunnery in general leads the target.

Officers get their own GUI in November, what is this interface for?
This is for managing them. You can compare them, spend skill points, read their backstory, etc.

Is simultaneous space battle/boarding as was envisioned from the start even feasible? I'm sure it is possible but from a gameplay and computing load it seems a huge problem.
After evaluating this, it is very unlikely we will do simultaneous boarding and space combat.

December and January have feedback integration, are these expected to be the only points where developement might slow down, or speed up, before Early Access?
Depending on the Feedback, it might slow down the production time. But there can always be external factors that might slow down / Speed up development as well which we could not take into account before, e.g. requests from the Publisher, technical issues, etc.

How influential will Kickstarter backer feedback be?
It's already been very influential on the way that we've been designing the game. It continues to be one of the main points of reference for our work.

How influential will Early Access feedback be?
We want to make the game that our players want to play. Feedback from Early Access will be vital for planning our priorities for updates and changes.

http://www.mandategame.com/comment/12188#comment-12188

So, in addition to removing co-op, you no longer control a fleet, ship combat has been changed from full 3D to a 2D plane, you can't fully explore your own ship anymore, and simultaneous boarding and ship-to-ship combat is out.

Wonder how many more cuts there will be.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Stellar Tactics is fine enough thanks.

 

[veevoir]

> you no longer control a fleet

So.. they axed the main feature of the game. Nice

 

[Kem0sabe]

> you no longer control a fleet

So.. they axed the main feature of the game. Nice

They axed or cut back most of what was promised during the KS. These fuckers are just another example of why crowd funding needs to burst and go away... Almost every developer over promises to get donations and then fails to deliver with no consequences...

 

[Shackleton]

Question conspicuous by its absence, (not that they'd answer it anyway):

"How much money is left?"

Somehow I doubt much. It always had a whiff of vapour about it, but now it's starting to resemble 'That Which Sleeps'.

 

[Fry]

This is my biggest Kickstarter regret. Glad I only gave them the minimum.

 

[Zorba the Hutt]

At this point they need to bring Derek Smart on board as a closer

 

[Bubbles]

Question conspicuous by its absence, (not that they'd answer it anyway):

"How much money is left?"

Somehow I doubt much. It always had a whiff of vapour about it, but now it's starting to resemble 'That Which Sleeps'.

They can't even describe half of their advertised core gameplay systems yet, and the game is scheduled to launch into EA in 3 months. They're surely out of money.

 

[Alienman]

Has disaster written all over it.

 

[Jaesun]

> you no longer control a fleet

So.. they axed the main feature of the game. Nice

They axed or cut back most of what was promised during the KS. These fuckers are just another example of why crowd funding needs to burst and go away... Almost every developer over promises to get donations and then fails to deliver with no consequences...

Completely disagree. A large part of Kickstarter has very inexperienced people attempting to make a game, but have no idea the costs and time involved to make a game. They over promise and then finally realize they don't have the budget or time to implement most of what they wanted to achieve. However, there have been numerous projects that did come out just fine (Lords of Xulima, PoE, Primordia, Shadowrun etc...).

When you are considering backing an inexperienced group of people proposing their first time game, unless they have a working vertical slice, showing most of the core systems of the game, I would recommend staying far far away from it, and spend your money elsewhere.

 

[Bubbles]

When you are considering backing an inexperienced group of people proposing their first time game..

Good points, but irrelevant to this thread.

Reminder:

We are economically efficient, utilizing resources (such as your pledge money) in the best ways possible. We do contingency planning and set aside buffer time to have a reserve. We have funded the prototype so far with side-income and by working late nights.

Our staff understands our budget limitations and the implications for roadmaps and scheduling. We will only hire for position X when it is necessary -not before, and since we have access to a large network of game industry professionals this simplifies the recruitment process. Because we have a clear focus we do not need to give people a task to do merely because they are sitting around. This would be inefficient and wasteful. We will not have Day1 DLCs for the Mandate, and our focus is on delivering the best possible experience at launch to everybody who buys the game. Proper content updates and expansion packs will be planned before launch but developed after based on input from the community, particularly the Kickstarter donors who are our bosses.

Our team has half a century of game development experience between us, including major MMOs. This is a much smaller project than an MMO, which traditionally demands very capable content production tools. We are taking our combined knowledge and experience to setup and structure efficient workflows and production pipelines. This includes decoupling dependencies between art, code and design to minimize the amount of wait-time and avoid blockers.

To summarize: we have the necessary know-how, experience and technology, and our overhead is minimal. The Mandate is the love child of some very experienced game developers who all want to see this project succeed. We are doing smart things with smart technology and will pick the right tools for the job to optimize the work-load and streamline our production pipelines and workflows. This allows us to produce content in modular blocks which is more efficient and allows us to reuse, thereby saving time.

So could everyone and their grandma make The Mandate for $500,000? Probably not. Can we? Hell yes we can.

Remember: One rule, no quarter. With efficiency, a driven vision, and a careful understanding of what made traditional strategy games and RPGs so great, The Mandate will delve deep into mechanics of old, iterating and improving on them, ultimately delivering a vast and unique RPG experience.

 

[Jaesun]

When you are considering backing an inexperienced group of people proposing their first time game..[cut out the part where I mention a working prototype vertical slice]

Good points, but irrelevant to this thread.

As I stated, these guys were new, and did not have a working vertical slice prototype showing all of the core systems working, and thus I did not touch this with a 100 foot pole. They can promise and explain their design philosophy and their development roadmap all they want, but unless I can actually play a working prototype they are not getting my money.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

Has disaster written all over it.

It always had.

 

[Lhynn]

The Man Date, biting more than they can chew since 2013.

 

[Jimmious]

So could everyone and their grandma make The Mandate for $500,000? Probably not. Can we? Hell yes we can. Can we do it as we promise? Not really.

 

[Saduj]

Granted, they don't have any of my money. But how can anyone be that upset over cut features? I thought the consensus was "If they deliver on half of this, we'll be lucky" when this was first proposed.

 

[Bubbles]

Granted, they don't have any of my money. But how can anyone be that upset over cut features? I thought the consensus was "If they deliver on half of this, we'll be lucky" when this was first proposed.

I don't think most people believed them, but now the devs actually have to explain all of the cutbacks to their most rabid fans. It's a bigger payoff than the actual release will be.

 

[Saduj]

The final release will be a boarding party simulator where you play the role of a marine lieutenant in command of a small squad of randomly generated recruits.

 

[Jaesun]

As long as the boarding party guys are cute, sounds fine to me...

 

[Norfleet]

[Completely disagree. A large part of Kickstarter has very inexperienced people attempting to make a game, but have no idea the costs and time involved to make a game. They over promise and then finally realize they don't have the budget or time to implement most of what they wanted to achieve. However, there have been numerous projects that did come out just fine (Lords of Xulima, PoE, Primordia, Shadowrun etc...).

Yes, but remember: Since your examples don't represent problems we have to deal with, we can ignore them as being irrelevant to our concerns. If it doesn't pose any threat to you, why is it even relevant?

 

[Zanzoken]

Nice to see the Molyneux school of salesmanship is alive and well. I hope they do another Kickstarter promising to bring all the old features back.

 

[Jaesun]

[Completely disagree. A large part of Kickstarter has very inexperienced people attempting to make a game, but have no idea the costs and time involved to make a game. They over promise and then finally realize they don't have the budget or time to implement most of what they wanted to achieve. However, there have been numerous projects that did come out just fine (Lords of Xulima, PoE, Primordia, Shadowrun etc...).

Yes, but remember: Since your examples don't represent problems we have to deal with, we can ignore them as being irrelevant to our concerns. If it doesn't pose any threat to you, why is it even relevant?

Lords of Xulima and Primordia (one of the best Adventure games in recent times) are better examples, of unknown and new developers.

Kem0sabe's blanket statement that we do NOT get any games of any redeemable quality is just completely false.

 

[Beowulf]

The final release will be a boarding party simulator where you play the role of a marine lieutenant in command of a small squad of randomly generated recruits.

That actually might be close to what we'll be offered. Since the only somewhat working part they were able to show was the boarding combat.

They mighy just build the pitiful rest around that.

But hey, the main theme was nice.