Hard disagree. Tyranny is interesting but an obvious rush job, and it’s like 95% combat, all the time.
Pillars is a much better RPG in terms of variety, character customization, NPCs, itemization, quests, everything. Especially with the White March stuff.
Also the Tyranny DLC is trash.
Like @kerzain I always play the hero - at least the first playthrough. Generally if I do a second playthrough as evil I give up early. I just don’t like being bad.
It’s been a while since I played either, but Tyranny is at least trying to do something different with the RPG hero formula. It reminded me of Sorcerer King - the Rivals standalone expansion is very underrated - which tried to similarly make you a minion of the bad guy to change up the 4X formula.
In Tyranny forcing the player out of the standard good - or maybe good / evil choice paradigm - you’re forced to make some hard decisions with real moral ambiguity. I found it uncomfortable at times, but there was redemption in finding the not-quite-so-bad-choices available. There was satisfaction in taking down some of the really evil characters. And there was some glimmer of good in that for me. Tyranny has stuck with me and I’ve toyed with the idea of going back to it and trying some different choices through the game.
PoE1 was fine as a throwback. Using skills was annoying. The party moved too slowly. There was way too much dialog, especially with the Kickstarter backers stupid inner thoughts. I gave up about 2/3rds of the way through on reading any of it and just powered through the fights to the end. Much less memorable - I have no recollection of the story at all!
So to me Tyranny succeeded in crafting a different experience that I remember. I’m not sure I liked being a bad guy but I enjoyed the experience looking back. PoE1 was junk food.
Full disclosure: I worked on Sorcerer King’s Metarealm feature while at Stardock.
Complaining about too much dialog means you’re just a fucking hateable philistine. Also the kickstart idiot NPCs are entirely optional. Just stop frobbing them. What the hell is wrong with you?
Tyranny is silly. I enjoyed it. But is is silly, and super shallow. All paths are obvious and also lead to lots of just combat no matter what. If you want a CRPG that handles an evil route with actual deft hands…make no mistake: Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer.
No contest.
I didn’t have my main NWN2 save game anymore, so I had to create characters from scratch for Mask of the Betrayer. And you fight a boss early on who does something that I just couldn’t win against. I think it was stunning my party? I can’t remember anymore. But I tried with a couple of characters, but could never get past that opening boss in Mask.
The complaint I’ve seen about POE is that every character dumps lore all the time. It’s not written as if they’re characters in a world, but as if they’re lore-dispensers.
Tyranny also had the “hot-links” in conversations that you could hover over and the game would show you the lore about the person or place. It would even show how you reacted in your prior dealings with an NPC. If that wasn’t cool enough, during a dialog with Voices of Nerat he began talking to you telepathically through the hot-link system! It was so cool.
Tyranny also has the best spell system I’ve ever seen where instead of learning spells you find spell “components” that let you alter the effects of spells to make them more powerful, with a higher stat requirement. Building custom spells out of components was awesome.
Tyranny may also have more branching paths than any RPG I’ve ever played. It’s not just that it has five or so different endings, it’s the about the many different paths you can take through the game. It’s incredibly varied for such a story rich RPG.
In short, it’s awesome and way better than PoE1.
Tyranny is 95% combat all the way through, which makes it a lesser RPG automatically. It’s shallow. Join one of the two main factions, join the resistance, join the chaos assassin guy…It just determines who you fight on each map.
I suppose Tyranny can be the Icewind Dale to Pillar’s Baldur’s Gate.
Your conclusion might be correct if your presumption was correct.
(It’s not.)
Sweet, I’ve wanted to try both of those.
The combat is kinda bad, though, so maybe he just felt like it was longer ;)
I mean, the customization of your party and spells is great, but then you fight the same three enemies in almost every encounter. They were generally not allowed to use the spell system because of the game’s lore and rather than design a replacement system they just didn’t bother.
I’m with you. Especially since the combat in Tyranny seemed like it was against the same limited types of enemies. I enjoyed Tyranny enough and don’t think it is a mistake to play it, but I enjoyed Pillars much more.
And you’re wrong and your parents are wrong.
You fight for one of the two bad factions against the free people and each other. You join the free people to fight against the invaders. Or you just fight everyone. Each map must be cleared of an opposing force. This is the game, in nutshell.
It’s fine, but firmly at the bottom of the list in terms of similar CRPGs.
EGS will be repeating last year’s batch of one free game per day, except expanded to 15 games:
Starts today.
Thanks for the heads up. The free mystery game apparently unlocks 2 minutes from now. Let’s see what we get.
Edit: And it’s Cities: Skylines.
Haven’t played it before. Nice.
I asked the good people of Qt3 about Cities: Skylines a long time ago, and the answers led me to classify the game under “Not for me”.
But hey, for free? Game++.
It’s worth playing once to play around with optimizing traffic. I had fun with that aspect. It’s also cool to watch the city come to life for a while, but there wasn’t really any pushback so it ended up being more of an artistic city painter. I haven’t heard that any of the DLC changed that.
Cities: Skylines is one of those ‘a mile wide and an inch deep’ games.
$10 EPIC coupon is also back after you claimed the free game, although it expires on 1/7 :(.
Thinking about using that coupon for “Immortals fenyx rising”, $30 is tempting. Also, question: if I buy this on EPIC, do I need to run both EPIC and UBI launcher to run the game?
Yes, I believe you do. At least that’s how it worked when I bought EA’s Star Wars Squadrons. EA’s Origin gave me access to the game, but first it had to confirm with Epic that I had access to the game. Which made sense to me once I returned the game because it ran horribly on my ancient PC. If there wasn’t a check from Epic, EA Origin would have no way of knowing that I no longer had access to the game on Epic.
no, you register it on ubisoft/uplay and then never have to open the epic store to run it.
