Might & Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven

The Ironfist Dynasty is tottering on the brink of ruin. As endless calamities plague the Kingdom of Enroth, the King is missing and the Queen absent. The evil cultists of Baa plot to usurp the young Prince Nicolai who is too young to manage the affairs of the kingdom. Fear grips the land and the people wonder if their sovereign has lost divine favour and, with it, The Mandate of Heaven. The enemies are at the gate and only extraordinary heroes can stem the tide of darkness. Will you measure up? Or, more to the point, will the game?

New World Computing's, Might and Magic franchise has a long and prestigious history in the field of fantasy role playing games. Might and Magic VI, The Mandate of Heaven is the latest in the series with Might and Magic VII and Heroes of Might and Magic III currently under production. The games are published by 3DO.

The Mandate of Heaven is a game of tremendous scope. Heroes attempting to right the kingdom's equilibrium will find themselves venturing deep in dungeon caverns, high on mountain temples, at forest shrines, under the city sewers and in the highest courts and councils of the land. There are a myriad of temples, dungeons, cities and wilderness areas to explore and over 50 quests to follow, which will take you years of virtual time and hundreds of actual hours to complete. Characters will advance approximately 100 levels over the course of saving the kingdom. Magical items and artefacts are also in abundance. The world of Enroth is truly fantastic.

Excellent Character Development

Character development is what is best about this game. Difficult decisions and compromises must be made in deciding on character classes, skills and advancement. Each character in your party of four must declare sex and class. There are six standard character classes available: Knights, Clerics, Sorcerers, Paladins, Archers and Druids. A character's class grants abilities and limitations, but it is the individual skills learned throughout the game, which truly make the characters unique. Skill points are gained with level advancement and can be placed on any skill that the character has learned. Aside from the skills in which each class is trained, others can be learned from teachers in the various towns and cities. Further, those with skill can learn expert or master status by seeking out renowned teachers. Character development never degenerates to monotonous addition of hit points and skills. There are always difficult decisions to be made and teachers to be sought out in order to improve the abilities of your characters.

Interface

Now for the interface: Might and Magic VI, The Mandate of Heaven is set in a 3-Dimensional first person perspective. Mapping the areas you explore is neatly accomplished by the automap function and the game keeps a set of general notes on the quests that your party has undertaken as well as information that they have learned. Each character has an animated head from which a simple glance will indicate the character's status, be it good, drunk, insane, asleep, poisoned, dead or otherwise. The combined first person perspective and automap make navigating the world a snap and visually impressive. The obvious Hot buttons make party and character management very simple and easy to learn. If anything, the interface is too simple. Each spell caster is only able to pre-set a single spell which results in numerous trips, thumbing through the spell book which would not be necessary if you were able to pre-set three spells. It would also be nice if the interface were customizable, which it is not.

The 3-D, first person perspective makes for a graphically appealing and more immersive game. Minor whining which you may hear about some of the jagged and unimaginative graphics aside, the game looks very nice. It is excellent to be able, from the first person perspective, to feel the height of the mountains, or to look down on the monsters below as you fly over them. Falling off a cliff may cause your own heart to skip a beat. The creature animations and the sound effects are also well done and though it is true that by current 3D standards, the game is dated, it is still good and has low system requirements, which has always been important to the RPG genre.

Real Time or Turn Based Combat?

When combat rolls along, and it will, you can leave the game in real time or toggle to turn based mode. This is a really nice try, but it doesn't quite work as well as it could. The turn-based system is impeccable. Any action a character makes takes a certain amount of time and each combatant simply goes in order of who is ready first to make the next action. It is the real time combat, which leaves a little to be desired.

The idea of Quake II style deathmatches with hordes of goblins or dragons is very appealing, but, as implemented in The Mandate of Heaven, real time combat is less than satisfying. The trouble is simple: during combat, before you can attack an enemy, you must select that enemy with the mouse. When the enemies are zigzagging across your view, it can be difficult to do so. You can not lead an enemy or fire to where you expect him or her to go. You must select them with the mouse and then click, much as in Diablo. The problem is that everything moves rapidly and it is very frustrating to be pounding on your mouse button and have your character doing nothing. The problem is alleviated somewhat if you want to let the beasties run up and duke it out toe to toe, but in this game, magic and ranged weapons are an essential part of combat. In fact, the game is skewed towards the magic using classes. The best party for this game might very well be four spell casters and no Knights or Paladins. In any case, spells and ranged weapons are near impossible to use in real time. Further, if you need to thumb through your spell book, all the time the enemies keep moving and so, chances are, by the time you've readied that fireball, the enemy is too close to use it. Ability to fire at unselected targets and having three pre-set spells might have made the real time combat fun. As it stands, that is not the case. Still, the real time combat is not a complete loss. There are times when you can use it to greatly speed up the game, such as when your high level characters get into it with a group of enemies far beneath them. You can just hammer on the mouse button until everything around you is dead and never stop moving.

Questing

So, the game/role playing system is superlative and the interface and graphics are good enough. These things are important, but the heart of RPGs is the questing. Early games tended to lead players by the nose through a very linear, step by step, round peg in round hole, square peg in square peg sort of process. Recent games such as Daggerfall or Fallout have attempted to break from that mode and to allow more linear freedom in how the adventure unfolds. Online role playing is a similar attempt. In Ultima Online for example, the world is there and to the player the decision of what to do and where to do it. The Mandate of Heaven sets out, in this spirit, to be free roaming and non-linear. Having learned the lesson of Daggerfall and the online games however, the creators of Might and Magic VI realise that questing is important. Players don't want to feel like they are being drug by the nose through the flaming hoops, but even worse, is to be left bored in a world with no quest to peak your interest and draw you into the adventure. Great role playing games draw upon the power of the archetypal myths.

Might and Magic VI, The Mandate of Heaven attempts to balance all of these concerns by creating a world where quests are easy to find but for the most part unrelated. Only about twenty percent of the quests are central to the main goal of saving the kingdom. The others are diversionary or essential only in that by completing them, your characters will acquire the experience and arsenal necessary to complete the central quest. Again, it is a nice try but doesn't quite work. There are two main reasons why The Mandate of Heaven fails to be the last word in fantasy role playing games. First of all, the scope of the game is too large for it to be non-linear. Over the course of this game, your characters will advance approximately 100 levels. Quests that are challenging to characters with one hundred, or fifty or even ten levels of experience are much too difficult for beginning characters. Until your characters reach fiftieth level or so, they are limited to only a couple of small quests at a time. Any of the other quests are more than your characters can handle. However much it purports to be so, moving from one short quest to the next is not non-linear. Sure, once your characters are powerful enough, the game becomes non-linear, but for most of the game, your party is forced to follow a nearly set order of adventures, or to die biting off more than they can chew. The scope is simply too large for the game to be actually non-linear as it claims.

This is where the interface also fails. In short order, your party will have contracted very many quests. As you choose which ones to pursue and in which order, you will, obviously forget some of the details of the others. You can not rely on the automatic note keeping for even though it will keep a list of current quests, it will not remember important details like who gave you the quest or where the quest is located. Also, as you travel throughout the cities, you will encounter teachers to whom you will want to return. Ten hours later, just try and remember where the teacher of fire magic expertise resides. Even simple things like the shipping and stagecoach schedules can be inordinately frustrating. There is no reason why the auto notes shouldn't track such information. As it is, many of the play hours are not actually spent working on the quests, they are wasted retracing your steps, trying to remember where to find what you are looking for. These are very frustrating hours and the experience would be greatly improved by better notes.

Further, this parade of short quests is like watching a freight train go by. Most all of the quests are very slight variations on the Little Red Riding Hood theme: My loved one/basket of goodies is in the clutches of the evil monsters. Please play the woodsman and rescue it for me. Almost every dungeon climaxes in at least one battle between your four adventurers and a room/forest full of monsters. It gets a little monotonous.

As for the ultimate quest, the saving of the kingdom, because it is actually a small number of separate quests, it seemed to me anti-climactic. The finale is one more variation on the same boxcar theme of quests and by the time my party reached the ultimate quest, defeating the enemies was a piece of cake whereas until then, many of the quests had proven very difficult and had been capped with great murderous hordes of monsters that I had difficulty slaying. In the end, I was more interested to go back and find some more good artefacts and magical items which I suspected I had missed than I was in the skimpy little cut scene which announced the completion of the game. Not to mention that the final quest is buggy. Until I downloaded the version 1.1 patch, the game repeatedly crashed in the final dungeon (other than this one area, the game is very bug free and well play tested). I never got drawn into the central quest. All of which to say is that Might and Magic VI is more engaging for its system of character development than it is for the actual story and adventure. The world is engaging. The quests are not.

That said, Might and Magic VI The Mandate of Heaven is still a very good game. You may, like me have some quibbles with the philosophy of the game, it's interface or whatever, but you will never, never say that you didn't get your money's worth.

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