The Mandate Gamescom Preview

A game, where I was apparently the first backer for on Kickstarter, and for which I had some excitement was The Mandate. The session started with the presenters asking if anyone played Sid Meier's Pirates, Assassin Creed: Black Flag or Mount & Blade. These are the games that they relate to the game. Especially the first two. They were also inspired by Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica and Firefly. Shows that focus on the crew and on the ship. Whatever happens to the ship happens to the crew.
They feel that the spaceship games nowadays have gone to one of two camps. They focus on the ship or they focus on the crew. They took care to mention that there is nothing wrong with either approach, but with The Mandate they want to focus on both aspects. In essence they are making Sid Meier's Pirates in space. You take your ship through space where you interact with all the different factions that exist in The Mandate.

In the below image you can find the essential game flow, with the game divided in two main modes. The adventure mode has you scouting around, interacting with different NPC's and exploring space. In combat mode there is ship-to ship combat, boarding combat and away missions.

The Mandate is set 1500 years in the future, in which there is no light and dark side. There only are shades of grey. In this game people can do the right thing for the wrong reasons or vice versa. It is all about choice and consequences, you can play an evil role, a good role or anything in between. You can trade slaves for example, but there will be repercussions when interacting with some factions as they disapprove of that, but other factions are not like this. There are a total of 8 faction in the game.

• The Mandate is the organisation that is in charge and is formed of 5 factions:
  • The Romanovs feel they are the leaders of humanity. All emperors have been Romanovs.
  • The Arkwrights are the most powerful and prosperous civilization in the galaxy and feel they should rule instead of the Romanovs
  • The Europans try to build the perfect society using technology and are great diplomats
  • The Black Eagles have the toughest, best trained, and most determined fighters in the galaxy
  • The Osmani are cyborgs who have no need to impose their convictions onto others
• The Rebels are a loose collection of groups united by their desire to free themselves from The Mandate
• The Pirates operate outside the law and because of that see themselves as free people
• The Interstellar Free Trade League is an association of free colonies and independent traders, seeing themselves as champions of freedom

The character creation is not accomplished by making some selections in a UI but they take you through a 'choose your own adventure' mini-game in which you are presented with a bunch of situations and where you have to make a choice. At the end of the mini-game your character's attributes will be generated, but there are also some long term effects. If you are fine with bombarding civilians in order to get something to start the game with, that is not something a faction like the Black Eagles or Romanovs would like, so you probably would align more with the rebels, the pirates or the Arkwrights. Also, if you help someone in the mini game, that character is likely to be your allie later on in the game. If you however don't help that character he or she is likely to be your enemy later on.

The premise of the game is that you are a court-martialed, disgraced space-ship captain, who happens to be given the opportunity to take control of a ship again. In the game you can figure out if you were guilty or not and if you were framed and by who. This will lead to you having the option for revenge or redemption. There is a longer story behind this. If you are interested, you can check it out on their website.

As a captain, you have quite a few crew members. You can't interact with everyone individually, so the way you interact with your crew is through your officers. The short-term goal of the captain is to upgrade the officers and provide them with skills. The better your officers are, the better your ship will work. The officers should reach a level where you can give them their own ships and starbases. Your officers will also provide advice to you on the actions to take when you encounter others in space. After all, you can't have all the skills that are available, so you have to rely on your officers as they are specialists in some areas where you are not.
When your crew dies, you can have funeral sessions for them and put their name on a wall of fame as these sort of things boost the morale of the crew (not the dying, but the ceremony).

Each ship is divided in three sections; front, middle and back. Each of these sections can be updated. Depending on how you mix these upgrades, you can get up to 36 different variations.
With the 8 factions you can join and each of them having 6 different ships and with 36 variations for each ship, there is a promise for lot of variety in ships out there.
A starbase will offer support for a ship. This is the place to repair your ships, upgrade them and gather your resources. When you take over an enemy ship or star base, you are not going to manage that base or ship yourself, but you give it to one of your officers. In that way you don't have to micro-manage them yourself and you can build your own fleet.

The star system you play in does not wait for you. The factions in the game are going about their own business with their ships that are occasionally also attacked by pirates. If you do nothing, life will go on without you, so you better join. In the game there will be legendary captains, who will be upgrading their ships like you will and they also take on missions from the factions. These might be your allies or opponents.

In ship combat, you start with ship-to-ship combat. That can be just your ship, but if you have given your officers ships of their own, they can join you in the fight. When you have destroyed the shield of an opposing ship, a boarding party can be sent to it and the game will shift to boarding combat.
In boarding combat you will have a number of squads under your command, in the demo there were eight. You can give these squads orders to go to certain places on the ship and in the UI the feedback from the AI from each of the squads will be visible. The AI of the squad will take them forward and use the available cover in the ship to get to their new position.

One of the backers of The Mandate is a retired US Air Force Colonel and he volunteered to help them out as a military consultant. They also read the many manuals that are out there on close quarter combat. They pointed out that this effort was visible in how the squads moved. They are moving intelligently and are splitting themselves up in sub-teams. When they are closing in on a corridor to the right, a few members of the squad will stop and defend the back of the squad, others will go to the other wall and take position there, whereas the ones in the front move slowly to the corridor and take a peek in it, to verify the area is clear. This can be seen in the video below.
To accomplish this they have made an AI that is state-of-the-art in their opinion, but it is also still in development. Besides that, others in the game use the same UI.

The game supports a 6 player co-op mode in space combat. The adventure mode you can only play alone. In space combat you can invite some friends who can help you with the space combat and the boarding combat. At the moment when one of those six goes into boarding combat the squads are all under the control of that person and you will have to find another ship to board or wait. It is however still being investigated if command of the squads can be shared or taken over. The boarding and space combat happens in real-time, so you could be in boarding combat and your friends could be still fighting other ships.
They will feature a picture-in-picture mode, so you can always see what happens with the others when you are in boarding combat and if needed adapt your commands based on that.
When you are active in boarding combat you are actually taking over the role of a platoon leader. Each squad is managed by a AI squad leader and above that is this platoon leader. In the game you will be able to take it even one step up and be able to play as a company commander as which you command multiple platoons, each of which can board a ship. And on an even higher level you can act as the captain, basically giving commands to the company commanders and all these orders will trickle down to the platoons and squads, managed by the AI. Depending on what you want to do in space combat you can decide to be hands-off or hands-on.

The game promises quite a lot and so do the developers. They want to create an interesting crew gameplay. They want you to role-play the captain and the officers. They want you to manage your ships and its crew. They want to offer exciting ship-to-ship combat and also interesting boarding combat with multiple squads. And they want you to do away missions, of which nothing was told.
That is a lot for Perihelion Interactive to chew on and also sounds like something you need a big team for to accomplish it, bigger than the team Perihelion migt have now. If they get this to work The Mandate will be a great game. However if they have bitten of more than they can chew, it might end up as a game with just a lot of promise but little substance. It is impossible to say with just the gameplay that was available, so we will have to wait until the beta version arrives to see if the scheduled release date of spring 2016 can be reached.

The good thing is that it is a PC only game, so they don't have to spend time on porting it.