Might and Magic 6: The Mandate of Heaven

Picture this, readers: the year is 1998. Clinton has been impeached, NASA just found evidence of frozen water in the soil of the moon with the Lunar Prospector, a bunch of countries decided to collectively outlaw human cloning, Hugo Chavez is elected as the Venezuelan president, a stacked line up of major Hollywood movies debut (seriously, 1998 was a strangely amazing year in Hollywood), Russia enters into a long term financial crisis, a little game called Half-Life launches to moderate acclaim, and Google is just founded by two PhD students in California. But none of that truly matters in this article. Why? Because Might and Magic 6: The Mandate of Heaven just came out, and that's what this is about.

Oh yeah, it’s gaming time.​

Many may not remember this once highly regarded series of fantasy role-playing games, or they may remember it more from the tactical turn-based strategy game spinoff franchise, Heroes of Might and Magic, or the more recent (and now cult favourite classic) Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. But back in the pre-mid aughts, it was a juggernaut of fantasy RPG series.

Developed by New World Computing and published by 3DO, the Might and Magic series started back in the ancient days of 1986. Originally debuting on the Apple II computer, the first game in the series, Might and Magic Book One: The Secret of the Inner Sanctum started off the franchise with a hit, and they kept coming. After numerous ports to contemporary platforms of the time (including a much improved NES version), this game launched the whole franchise. Featuring a large open world, class based character creation and traditional fantasy elements and tropes, the games saw players journeying their party of six characters in a rudimentary first person perspective across various towns, areas and more specifically, crawling through dank dungeons and battling various fantasy creatures through a turn based text interface as per the usual method at the time.

Characters could be elves, humans, gnomes, dwarves and half-orcs and pick from one of six classes which affect their abilities and stats; they could be rough and tough Knights, support focused Clerics, sneaky Robbers, powerful Sorcerers (changed to Wizards in the NES port), Paladins who combine the abilities of the Knight and Cleric, and ranged focused Archers who combine some abilities of the Knight with those of the Sorcerer. If you’re in the ‘D&D trope’ knowhow, you may think those classes and races are almost directly taken from the tabletop game, and you’d probably be right. Looking back it's easy to say its fantasy elements were derivative, but to that I say ‘don't fix what ain’t broke’. Besides, back in the dark ages of the mid and late 80s those ‘derivative’ elements were almost brand new, and almost every one of Might and Magic’s competitors were themselves inspired by the burgeoning Dungeons and Dragons which itself is a combination of various early fantasy stories and elements. But all that is beside the point, because as mentioned earlier, this article is about one thing: Might and Magic godamn 6.

I love this game. That probably goes without saying since I'm writing an article about it, but I had to get it out of the way. As a young millennial, I was but the age of 6 when this game came out, and was much too busy attempting to mash my way through Street Fighter 2’s arcade mode on the SNES. But flash forward 4 or so years to when I first discovered my dad's collection of PC games, one of the first things I discovered was this game among others. But this one stuck: I still hear the New Sorpigal town music in my head to this day, and it may have driven me slightly mad over the years. I played this game as much as I could as I was not a particularly cool 10 year-old.

Might and Magic 6 is notable in the series timeline not just for being my personal favourite, but for also the fact that it is the first in the series to feature fully 3D modeled environments and open free movement exploration. In previous games, you wouldn't progress through the world freely by walking through the environment. Instead you would progress in essentially a slide show, choosing which direction you wish to go from the screen you're currently on; the game would then transition to the next screen to create the illusion of travel. But utilizing the cutting edge technology of 1998 PCs, The Mandate of Heaven rendered its environment and various assets in all three dimensions. Not everything is rendered this way, as NPC models, trees and enemies are done with two dimensional sprites instead, having been created with 3D modeling software then scanned into the game as sprites. Gone are the slideshow transitions of the earlier games, replaced with contemporary arrow key movement and strafing letting you see the beauty of the world, texture seams and all.

Nothing like a good old texture seam.​

But the change in perspective and movement isn’t the only improvement the game brought, as numerous other game mechanics and systems were changed as well. The other biggest change is with the new ‘skill’ system and how it affects the character classes, with the number of player characters being reduced from six to only four. Skills are specific abilities characters can learn, chosen at both character creation and through training paid for in game. This covers secondary abilities such as ‘Disarm Trap’ letting a character neutralize a boobytrapped treasure chest (of which there are many), and also covers the use of weapons, armour and spells; ‘Sword’, ‘Plate Mail’ and ‘Fire Magic’ are skills for example, and without knowing those skills a character cannot use swords, wear plate armour or cast elemental fire magic. These skills are baked into the class system, with certain classes only being able to learn certain skills. A Sorcerer is the only class capable of learning every elemental spell skill, but they can only learn the Leather armour skill for defence and use only Daggers or the Staff weapon skills. Likewise, the Knight is capable of learning and therefore wielding every type of weapon in the game from the spear to the axe and can wear every type of armour, but they cannot of course learn any magic skills. An important part of the game is creating an ideal party, and an important part of that is making sure that your choice of character classes can cover a wide variety of skills; by having a character with the ‘Identify Item’ skill you can avoid having to pay merchants to identify your magical loot and save money, and you never want to be without the ‘Disarm Trap’ skill. Trust me.

In addition, skills have ‘levels’; character’s can become experts and masters in a skill once they reach 4 and 8 points in it respectively. Skill points are gained whenever a character levels up after getting enough experience by killing monsters or completing quests (again, ‘don’t fix what ain’t broke'). These increased levels improve the skill in some way, such as expert Sword granting increased attack speed and master granting the ability to use a sword in a character's second hand, letting them dual wield weapons for increased effectiveness. There are no restrictions on which classes can learn what levels in these skills; as long as a class can learn Mace, they can master it. This would be changed in the sequel to this game, but that’s an article for another day.

The classes themselves are more or less unchanged from the earlier games outside of the new skill system. There is still the Knight, Cleric, Sorcerer, Archer and Paladin but gone is the Robber class or really any ‘thief’ themed class. Instead it’s been replaced with the Druid who combines the spellcasting abilities of the Cleric and the Sorcerer, making them very versatile spellcasters at the expense of poor weapon and armour skills.

Also something to account for when making your party is the balance between the magical skills and the weapon skills. Magic gets exponentially stronger the more points put into it, as you need to be an expert or master level in the respective skill to learn the truly powerful spells. This is opposed by the more straightforward weapon skills which start out stronger than magic and do still get improved with points of course, but not to quite the same extent as the magical skills. It's one thing to be able to wield two swords as a master of Sword skill, it's another to be able to explode an entire room in fire as a master Fire mage or cast such important spells as Power Cure with Body magic or Town Portal with Water magic. You only have four character slots to work with, so some decisions have to be made. Do you go with two Knights to give your party some early game beef with their high hit point totals? Or do you take two Sorcerer's of different magical skills to plan around a significant power increase once they become higher level in their magical skills, and hope they don't get knocked out too often.

All these elements combined creates a game system that is easy enough to understand but yet offers just enough mechanical depth to sink into.

Speaking of characters being knocked out, of note is the difficulty of the game. The game can be hard when you're first getting a handle on its mechanics and without knowing which areas suit your current level, with monsters being plentiful and in some cases very powerful. I'm looking at you, Maddening Eye.

These godamn eyeballs, dude. He’s pretty adorable though.​

Enemies can deal a lot of damage to underprepared parties, and the game doesn't have signposts hanging around new areas telling you what level range it's meant for. In some cases they even have special abilities, such as the various types of Liches being able to remove any beneficial buffs you currently have active by casting Dispel Magic on you. With some perseverance the game is surmountable, however, but it just may take some getting used to and some dedication. And using plenty of saves and abusing the rest mechanic as much as possible, as luckily you can save your game at any point (even in the middle of combat!).

Luckily, death is not an overly punishing outcome. Characters get knocked out when they are reduced to zero HP and simply healing them of enough HP to bring them back up to at least 1 will make them pop back into consciousness again. If a character takes too much negative HP however, they may be killed; but thanks to the wondrous power of 'magic can do it', they can be revived for a fee at temples in the major cities or by characters who are skilled enough in Spirit magic. Always remember your Clerics! It's not a cowardly move to run from a fight early on with only your beefcake Knight conscious and head back to town so you can rest in the inn or revive your dead Sorcerer at the temple. Even if every character in your party dies, you will be able to keep playing; you simply loose all your current gold and respawn back at the town of New Sorpigal which isn't an overly daunting punishment.

Just watch out for 'Eradication', that's deader than dead (somehow). That's an effect caused by some end game enemies that instantly eradicates a character, requiring the different Spirit magic spell of Resurrection or going to a single specific temple and paying a lot of money to reverse.

Combat itself is also something that benefited from the technological wonders of 1998. Now you have the option of using turn-based battles by hitting a button or simply running the fight in real time. Turn-based mode functions more or less the same as you’d expect, with your characters being able to make their attacks based on their Speed stat and recovery and trading off with the monsters in sequential turns. Of note however is that you cannot move when in turn-based mode save for turning on the spot; but the monsters still can, however. The advantage of running the fights in real time is that you can move and attack at the same time using the free movement system, performing strafing attacks like the game is an FPS. This is where the interaction between the two modes comes into play, and why the turn-based mode is activated by pressing a button; if you want to move, you hit the button again to unpause the game, run to where you want to be then go back into turn-based mode. It becomes almost second nature once you get a handle on it as your characters strafe around the various dungeons, pausing to unleash a barrage of arrows and Incinerates before dashing away again.

Author's tip: you move much slower when walking backwards, too slow to gain distance on monsters.​

You've maybe been wondering about the storyline of the game, and why there's been no mention of it until now. It's not that the storyline is bad, and in fact the ongoing storyline of the Might and Magic series is surprisingly dense. Potential controversial opinion coming in: the storyline for this game is more or less just ‘there’, and that's entirely okay. You play as four adventures trained by the wizard Falagar to essentially fix the land of Enroth which has been left in varying degrees of chaos by wars and events of the previous games. Honestly, I recommend just going with it. You don't need knowledge of previous games to follow what's happening, and you're essentially just travelling around the various towns and cities performing quests for their leaders to get the story going. Luckily, there is an NPC named the Oracle you can find in one of the early areas, Castle Ironfist, that can give you a hint on what to do next.

The storyline does have its moments, but is overall not integral to the experience. A late game twist that leads to some interesting combat encounters (and a new weapon type!) particularly stands out and should be experienced to be believed. Something I think deserves to be mentioned is the game can actually be pretty funny and entertaining at times without being distractingly a comedy, from the way shopkeepers will call you out if you enter into a shop without spending any gold on anything to some of the dialogue producing at least a minor chuckle. Some of the quests can also be lighthearted while still being a serious fantasy game, such as the leader and promoter of Druids roping you into fixing the prices of grain for her to earn some extra hustle on the side.

All these various separate elements come together to form, in what of course is my opinion considering I’m writing all this, the perfectly charming and replayable RPG. There are issues with the game as nothing is perfect, including a few particularly bad bugs with things such as dual wielding weapon attack rolls, but looking at the ‘whole picture’ more than makes up for its shortcomings. The game just oozes that early 3D energy, and it’s filled with adventuring essence. Nothing beats that moment when you first learn the Fly spell, and you begin zooming around the strangely square based ground geometry towards plundering a dungeon full of evil dwarves or those godamn Flying Eyes before you head back to town to train up to the next level.

Seriously, the only good floating eyeball is a dead one.​

I highly recommend this game for any fan of retro PC fantasy RPGs. In fact, I recommend the whole trilogy this game fits into with Might and Magic 6 through 8 as all three were produced around the same time and use the same game engine.

Before this article closes out, there is something else I feel should be mentioned: the ‘hack’ scene for this game as well as for Might and Magic 7 and 8. There is a fairly decent mod scene for these three games and I’d highly recommend the various patches by Grayface over at Might and Magic – Sergey "GrayFace" Rozhenko Homepage. Included is a comprehensive series of patches for things such as mouselook support, high-res patching to make the game look much better on modern systems and various bug fixes.

Another mod of note is something much greater and much more expansive, which is the Might and Magic Merge Mod (Might and Magic 6, 7, 8 merge based on mm8 engine. [upd. 05.11.2023] - The Heroes Round Table (celestialheavens.com). This massive mod essentially uses the improved engine from Might and Magic 8 to recreate both 6 and 7. This creates a near seamless experience, combining elements and items from all three games and letting you use one party to clear all three games. This mod is fantastic, combining bug fixes and improved visuals to Might and Magic 6 specifically (true wide-screen support!) but I wouldn’t recommend it for a first time playthrough; the game is changed in numerous ways, and I highly recommend a ‘vanilla’ playthrough first to experience what the base game offers before adding in some extra spice in the form of the new classes, items, spells and skills taken from the later titles. I cannot stress just how big this mod is however, involving new scripting and clever workarounds.

And there you have it; Might and Magic 6: The Mandate of Heaven. The sequel, For Blood and Honour, came with several expansions to the gameplay systems including changes previously mentioned to the skill system and even a party morality decision in the storyline, complete with different class progression for good and evil characters! Will that game be next? Only time will tell…

That article will probably come soon, yes.