The Technomancer Gamescom Preview

The Technomancer was introduced to us by CEO and founder of Spiders, Jehanne Rousseau.

The Technomancer is taking place two centuries after the first people came from Earth to settle on Mars and One century and 30 years after a huge cataclysm caused Mars to be disconnected from Earth. Since that moment the settlers on Mars were completely isolated and, as they do not have any natural resources on Mars, they are re-using the existing materials, such as wood, plastics and metal as good and bad as it goes, but as part of the technology is lost they can't repair all of the items anymore. Life is not easy on Mars.

The political power on Mars is in the hands of a few corporations, each of them with their own philosophy and who are continuously in conflict with each other. Water is one of the resources that are hard to find on mars and the company responsible for the distribution is in control now.
One of them is Ophir(?) and is inspired by the Soviet Union, including their own version of the KGB. At the beginning they have the idea to provide water to everyone, but later on they changed their opinion into providing only water to those who worked hard for them. In this corporation people are named after their jobs. All the soldiers for example are called Ward, like John Ward or Sam Ward, and the scientists are called Seekers. People are defined by the way they are useful to the company.

At the start of the game you are a young guy who will become a full-fledged Technomancer after one more mission. You were born into the very lowest class of the society and to become a Technomancer from someone of that birth is somewhat exceptional. A doctor found out, when you were just a child, that you were gifted with Technomancy, a rare gift by which they can produce more electricity using their own body than normal people can. And by using special gloves they can create special effects, using that energy, in a fight.
The Technomancers are the elite force of the army, with not too many members as it is a rare gift. Next to fighting in the war, an important goal for this elite force is to protect all objects, technology and knowledge that came from Earth as that planet is considered to be a lost paradise now and they religiously protect these items, which are referred to as relics.

In the mission they showed us, the dome which holds the relics from Earth is being attacked by scavengers who wants to steal the relics. Together with your captain you will go into the dome, which makes you a full-fledged Technomancer when you survive, and prevent that from happening.
In combat there are three different combat styles that can be combined with Technomancy. The Warrior style provides you with a two-handed staff that can do a lot of damage, but is relatively slow, there is a Rogue style in which you can use a large knife and a gun for ranged attacks. You are faster with the knife than with the staff, but do less damage. The last style is the Guardian style in which you use a shield and a mace. Again doing less damage than using a staff, but you do have extra protection. You can switch between styles at any time, even during combat, so you can use the best style depending on the opponent you encounter.

The skills you can use are defined by the selected skills in the skill tree with active and passive skills. There is a skill tree for Technomancer and each of the 3 different combat styles.
There are two other ways to customize your character. One is by its attributes, which are fairly standard: strength, constitution, agility and power (for your Technomancy abilities).
And then there are talents. These are social skills that can be used inside the environments or with NPCs. Here you find talents such as Charisma or Science, which is used for healing, creating drugs or even when communicating with for example a doctor that will provide you with some specific dialog options. In total there are six talents.
Lastly you change the appearance of your character by equipping him with a selection of the many costumes and items. Each item you can equip can be improved by crafting an improved version of it using equipment you find or that is dropped.

In the tutorial part you will need to fight, but later on in the game you will be able to solve many of the quests without fighting, like by sneaking, convincing people to not attack you and help you or in another way as most of the quests can be solved in many different ways. You will gain experience in either way; combat or by using your talents to avoid combat. Additional experience can be gained by not killing anyone during your quest, so not killing anyone can be just as rewarding (from the point of view of gaining experience points).
What you choose to do, will have an impact on the story itself. Later in the game you will have to align yourself with one of the six different factions. Depending on your choices some of these factions will not be available to you anymore for an alliance. If you like to kill everything you see, a more peaceful factions will not want to align with you for example.

During your first mission you will learn the secret of the Technomancers, which is that Technomancy comes from a mutation, so all Technomancers are mutants, which isn't likely to go down well with the Mars population when they would know that. One of your tasks will be to hide that secret from others, including the secret service branch of the company you work for. This will play an important part in the story.
Another task that is set upon you is to find a way to contact Earth again as it is believed that Earth can help the Technomancers.

You can recruit a total of 5 companions in the game and you have only a maximum of two of them with you at any given time. Your companions can be equipped with costumes and items as well. There are some social interactions between your companions leading to the possibility of them fighting or even killing each other. Each of them has a story and they are all linked to you in one way or the other. There are also companion specific quests that will teach you more about that companion.

The game world is not an open world, but you can always go back to the places you have visited before, where new quests will open up after a while. Depending on your choices these places might have changed and the availability of quests will change as well.

The Technomancer is to be released at the beginning of next year on PS4, Xbox One, PC and Steam Box.

Check out the video below to get an idea of what I was shown at Gamescom.