Vapourware The Mandate - LOL DEAD

[Jaesun]

I eagerly await my MAN Date <3

 

[Lhynn]

I eagerly await my MAN Date <3

Cool, heard this and grimoire are releasing on the same week.

 

[Bubbles]

Another update came out just one day later:

Greetings all,

I'm Donna aka Danicia, your new Community Manager! I've popped in here and there on chat and such, and wanted to make a formal introduction to all of you. First, if you haven't seen it yet, I posted Kickstarter Update #58 yesterday and created a forum thread for it which you can ask specific questions. I've already started getting questions in the chat about my role and what attracted me to the project. (Thanks to Sugeng Raharjo!) So, here's a bit about me!

I'm a huge gamer, from video games to tabletop games, and also miniatures wargaming. I've been working in Community Management for nine years, working on both large and small projects. I've spent time working on Guild Wars 2, Pirates of the Burning Sea, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising, and all manner of games from what used to be Sony Online Entertainment (now Daybreak). While I am a huge Star Wars geek, my favorite games to work on have been the smaller ones. I love working with indie development and small studios; they attract very passionate and involved players.

Playing Warmachine at Lock & Load Gamefest

In my spare time, I am a tabletop nerd, leading many groups locally to Seattle, teaching people how to play analog games. I founded my own games convention, called OrcaCon. I'm about to start playing in a new Journeyman's League for Warmachine/Hordes, as a new ruleset just came out. My main Warcaster is Magnus, the Traitor, and I like poking fun at serious color schemes.

If you want to know more, feel free to ask anything here or you can follow me at http://about.me/Danicia if you like to bribe your CM, I'm not into candy or sweets. I'm a big beer geek. I hope that you can all recommend your favorites from your country, and I'll do my best to try them all and tweet about it.

Let's get to know each other. Drop by this thread to say hello!

User Experience Survey
Our UX (User Experience) Designer wants to know more about you and created a survey for backers and potential players. If you have a few moments, we would appreciate it! Go to The Mandate Questionnaire. Thank you!

Cheers,

Donna

 

[Mustawd]

Plays Warmachine? +1

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

What is it with video game industry and these women with weirdass hair.

 

[Mustawd]

To distract from their weird ass faces?

 

[Alienman]

A common theme for almost all the companies she have worked for have failed with their games. The only game standing is Guild Wars 2. And her hair color tells me she is part of a cult

Oh and OrcaCon that she have founded:

OrcaCon 2017’s theme is Race & Accessibility in Tabletop Games

When we say that OrcaCon is inclusive, we mean it.

Our goal is to make the convention a truly warm, inviting, and most importantly safe space for everyone—gamers, families, members of the LGBT community, old, young, and everything in between. We take security and anti-harassment policies very seriously to ensure safety and respect for everyone at the show. Rest assured that you can let your Geek Flag fly at OrcaCon.

So good luck with the game.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Lol I fucking knew it as soon as I saw the picture.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

You know that amuses me. All this whining how it's hard for a female to get a job in the tech industry.

Well here's a thought - for starters, how about not announce with your hair color that you'll be a nightmare to work with. Because if I can pick up on it, you can bet the recruiters picked up on it years ago. Show up to the interview looking like this - oh you're one of those, there's the door.

 

[Tom Selleck]

It's so difficult for women to work in the tech industry that every single studio and project has multiple fat dangerhairs on staff and in pictures.

 

[Irenaeus]

If I knew my money would go to this Pink-haired Orca,

 

[Bubbles]

Hello all!

You might not have seen it on the main website, but I put up a poll about Gamescom and PAX West. We won't be showing the game at either show, but we are interested in whether or not you'd be up for a meet up!

http://www.mandategame.com/forum/gamescompax-west-poll

We should interpret this as a sign that Perihelion are being more financially responsible and are focussing their resources on developing a complete video gaming experience. It also means that we won't get any new footage or a new Gamescom demo this year, but I wouldn't read anything into that.

 

[Kem0sabe]

Fat ugly lesbian community manager... It's practically a trope.

 

[Bubbles]

HUGE NEWS

Hello everyone! My name is Iain and I’m the Design Director for The Mandate. I joined the project back in May - you might remember that Michael mentioned some new people in his last producer’s letter - and I’m very excited to help bring this fantastic universe to life. [...]

When I joined the project, I spent a long time reading all that I could about the game, I went through the Kickstarter page and the website, looked through all of our documentation and tried to understand what was happening in the development process. I could see how much potential there was in the game and that there were many exciting possibilities that we could explore as a team. However there were also some big disconnects between the way that we were working and the result that we wanted to produce. On top of that, we had a lot of different conflicts between the expectations of our community. We talked about this in the team and worked through the problems with some experts and, eventually came to the conclusion that we needed a new approach to building The Mandate.

So, as well as introducing myself, I’m also introducing the vision for the game to you. We know that you’ve been waiting a long time for something from us, and our plan is to deliver something soon. We aren’t going to take another three years to build a whole new game. We expect that we will launch Early Access in early 2017. You’ll get a roadmap of our new plan and a more detailed overview of the new game vision in the next couple of updates, then we’ll be answering some of your specific questions once you’ve all had a chance to read those.

As you can probably imagine, some things are going to be different. The scope of the game has become more focused and we’ve had to take a long, hard look at our feature list. We’ve been collecting feedback from the forums, Kickstarter comments, and other sources to understand what you wanted from the game and we’ve distilled that down into a set of core principles. There’ll be a longer article in next week’s update giving you more detail, but for now, I can tell you a little about what to expect.

Firstly, most Early Access games are basic, bare-bones affairs that will be built on and polished until the final release. Ours is no different. The game that we will release in the new year will not be the full game, but it will be a playable slice of the final product. We’ll have exploration, combat, the opening arcs of the story, customisation and the opportunity to discover our universe. It’s also going to be a single-player experience. We looked hard at what you told us that you wanted and a strong story was one of the most commonly discussed features. We want to do that right and we want to give you an amazing adventure. That can be done best in a single-player environment. We haven’t ruled out the possibility of specific co-op content in the future but we aren’t going to develop any for Early Access.

The story won’t be the only content in The Mandate, you also told us that you wanted an interesting sandbox to play in and so we are building a game that rewards exploration and discovery as well.

Once we have launched the Early Access version, we’ll be adding new features, new content and polishing the game based on the feedback from our players - from you. We expect that we’ll be pushing out updates to the game every couple of weeks once we are live so there will always be new things to explore and new adventures to find. As we get closer to Early Access, we will release another roadmap describing our plans for after the launch.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1964463742/the-mandate/posts/1644740

PARTY TIME

 

[Kem0sabe]

Looks that they were indeed too ambitious for their own good. There are going to be huge cuts to that feature list, and the game's scope.

 

[Trash]

Probably for the better. It started to sound like a disjointed mess and another prime example of feature creep.

 

[Irenaeus]

Yeah, I hope this Iian has a good taste in games and cuts the bad parts leaving the goodies. The original scope of this game spelled vapourware, hope they can pull it together and make something not as grandiose, but at least a fun game. Not super optimistic, though.

Overpromised, underdelivered and behind the schedule.

 

[Bubbles]

Looks that they were indeed too ambitious for their own good. There are going to be huge cuts to that feature list, and the game's scope.

Well, they had a strong argument that they could do everything they promised:

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.”

Maybe the real problem is that they actually raised 700k. Those stretch goals might have added another 5 years to their timeline.

 

[Zombra]

Probably for the better. It started to sound like a disjointed mess and another prime example of feature creep.

It sounded like a disjointed mess and feature creep poster project from day one, but we dared to dream. Hopefully it'll still be cool. Nice to see they're still on track to make anything at all frankly.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Might even release before Grimwah.

 

[Zombra]

Update #63

Sep 6 2016

The Mandate Producer's Letter #2

Hi guys,

two weeks ago was Gamescom and it was super nice meeting some of you. Unfortunately, I was still busy during the afternoon but I really want to thank Mr. Seeker for his commitment and his engagement in the community – he took the time to meet Josef and Iain at Gamescom. In the evening we had a nice dinner with some more members, which we really enjoyed (despite some hard questions). Thank you for coming and thank you for the good conversations

I am using Netflix. I mostly watch TV series but sometimes I get interested in a movie and start watching it. My usual behaviour is that after a while I stop the movie, go to Wikipedia and just read the synopsis. I know that this is a stupid behaviour but I seem unable to stop doing that. That’s part of my/our problem right now when it comes to features or even more intricate story and lore for the mandate.

I know that you want the information and to be honest we also want to tell you much, much more about our game and why we are excited to do it and what cool feature we are working on right now.

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. Also of course, in the past this behaviour led us to talk about things that we really loved but later figured out wouldn’t fit the vision or that it wouldn’t be possible to include for technical reasons.

That’s why we decided to do the following:

When it comes to features, we will talk about it in more detail only if we are sure that’s where we want to go and that we can deliver.

When it comes to story and lore, we are now incorporating the updates as part of the game’s narrative, as you will see when the first instalment of our web comic is uploaded next week. It will not be directly related to the player’s story but it will give you a feeling about the universe; and as it progresses will reveal some of the key players and cabals in the Mandate universe.

During our meetup and also when reading the forums however, I see a lot of questions which are more high-level and asking about the general direction of the game.

Before I talk about what’s coming next I want to answer a few of them.

We have had some questions concerning story driven vs. sandbox RPG. We are building a single player, story driven roleplaying game with a fair amount of sandbox elements. If anything the roleplay elements in the game have increased, as well as the meaning and importance of the story. When we reviewed what we had back in April, we saw a huge lack of player motivation and we decided that it is absolutely necessary to give you guys a personal reason to be out there.

Also we wanted to give the crew/officers a big boost. They won’t just be cannon fodder that you assign a name to and give you a tactical advantage in combat (basically a bunch of Redshirts if you think in Star Trek terms). We want you to be able to interact with the crew, to learn about their motivations, fears and points of view and if they trust you enough they might ask you for help, this means crew related missions. It is about forming a team out of a bunch of cutthroats

What can you expect in terms of “Sandbox”? Now, this is a huge word to begin with and everyone has a different definition in their head. In our game, what we describe as sandbox elements is, in my opinion, best described as player freedom. The changes concerning the universe are also tied to the player interaction, which means for example if you attack Romanov ships (which you can do) – they won’t like you and at some point hunt you. We want you to be able to be a trader or a pirate or just roam the galaxy killing pirates – if you like you could do just that in the game – for hours. When it comes to exploring you can find loot of course – but there will also be lore, trigger events and encounters to discover on the way.
There also will be resource extraction and some crafting elements. You are going to need resources to buy upgrades for your ship.

Boarding Combat
Later during EA we want to have ground combat/boarding combat. As explained above, right now, I don’t want to talk about it in any detail, but it will work similar to space combat.

Co-Op
From a technical point of view, we have the option to do coop but since that is not the focus of the game we aren’t planning to do it unless there is a huge demand for it and we don’t have any other priorities.

Clusters
During our GamesCom meetup there have been some questions regarding the fringe clusters and how they are different from the “storyclusters”. I think here is some confusion – probably caused by me. The correct answer would be – there is no difference. From a world building point of view we have the core worlds, where the political force is relatively strong – based on the faction who owns these clusters and we have the outer edge of the Mandate universe. That’s what we call Fringe Clusters; everything can happen here. It is a defacto lawless space. Houses might fight a secret (or not so secret) war with each other over these clusters. There will be a fair amount of cutthroats and pirates in these clusters as well. But of course they are officially claimed by someone. This is the edge of the Mandate space and a part of the main story will also happen in the fringe clusters. From a game design perspective, the fringe clusters will have a larger amount of sandbox elements.

Below you’ll find the roadmap, which describes how we want to move along until January. We are also planning some internal test and feedback rounds around November with some of you. This feedback will help us to fine-tune our systems and of course also somewhat depending on this feedback we will decide how to prioritize future elements of the game and when exactly we will start with Early Access.

(to enlarge https://www.mandategame.com/sites/default/files/roadmap.jpg )
Finally, I should also let you know that our Community Manager, Donna has left us for personal reasons. These aren’t related to the project and we are very sad to see her go. We wish her all the best in her future, and we hope that she’ll be able to return at some point. In the meantime, community updates will be the responsibility of Josef (Burian on the forums) until we find a replacement for Donna.

Cheers,

Michael

 

[Bubbles]

Jun 28 2016

Greetings all,

I'm Donna aka Danicia, your new Community Manager!

Sep 6 2016

Finally, I should also let you know that our Community Manager, Donna has left us for personal reasons.

Ouch.

I am using Netflix. I mostly watch TV series but sometimes I get interested in a movie and start watching it. My usual behaviour is that after a while I stop the movie, go to Wikipedia and just read the synopsis. I know that this is a stupid behaviour but I seem unable to stop doing that. That’s part of my/our problem right now when it comes to features or even more intricate story and lore for the mandate.

I know that you want the information and to be honest we also want to tell you much, much more about our game and why we are excited to do it and what cool feature we are working on right now.

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. Also of course, in the past this behaviour led us to talk about things that we really loved but later figured out wouldn’t fit the vision or that it wouldn’t be possible to include for technical reasons.

That’s why we decided to do the following:

When it comes to features, we will talk about it in more detail only if we are sure that’s where we want to go and that we can deliver.

I wonder what percentage of the original Kickstarter pitch is still part of their plans at this point. I bet there's gonna be a surprise twist!

 

[Zorba the Hutt]

Impressive concentration of warning signs for one update

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Donna left to have a bowel surgery.

 

[anus_pounder]

It’s also going to be a single-player experience

Ok. This got me interested.