Obsidian and Paradox announce Tyranny, an Isometric RPG

He does fine in heavy armor. If nothing else a good shield and heavy chest armor will bump him his ability to live quite a bit.

Ok, i’ve played more and got the hang of things. Similar to POE, there is just a point early in the game on POTD where you have to exploit line of sight to split packs. Once i got stronger magic though, i started to be able to hold my own more.

I think heavy armor is worth using on casters. If you do, they can actually survive the mob rather well. Otherwise, not so much. Remember, the enemy will FREQUENTLY abandon everything to mob your casters no matter what tank you have. So i say, unless the caster has a REALLY good talent that specify requires not using heavy armor, go for it. Focus on strong, slow spells.

Balance is questionable. There are some characters i’d like to use, but i can’t simply because their skills are terrible. The chanter’ish class in this game sucks, big time. I’m not sure what they did to it since i liked the class in POE. So far this is the only class i find impossible to use. Other ones are just worse but still viable.

The spell schools are also not balanced. Do not take atrophy as a starting school. If you’re going magic, i STRONGLY STRONGLY STRONGLY recommend frost and possibly fire as a secondary. These seem like the strongest offensive schools by a noticeable amount. I haven’t seen much use in most of the CC focused spells either. There are a few good looking ones, but frost/fire actually do good damage AND have CC.

Because you can only take four people total (including yourself), everyone needs to pull their weight, so you can’t have crappy classes (on POTD). You need a tank and you need a healer. I haven’t beaten the game yet, but so far there is a character for each of these roles that seems head and shoulders better than other companions. Thus you will be using both of these guys, assuming your player is not one of those roles. that leaves you with only one up in the air slot.

I really hope they do a balance pass in their next patch.

Also, i’ve noticed that the further i get in the game, the longer load times are. They were quite fast early in the game, but now they are actually kind of long.

I’m playing on normal and completely disabled auto pause towards the end of act 1. For some reason my tank started performing really well after a few levels and the healer (Lantry) stopped dying. Honestly couldn’t tell you why but it’s a night and day difference.

For me loading times have been incredibly long from the get-go. Plus, even on windowed the game will often hang if I alt-tab to something else, so I’m forced to sit for a couple minutes while it loads, and even then it often hangs and I have to force-close the game and restart.

Enjoying the Black Company vibe very much, but like others, I’m not a huge fan of the combat. I can’t find the right assortment of pause conditions. I want to keep it flowing without letting characters auto-attack uselessly. The pathfinding is crap; characters will stand/vibrate in place just out of reach of a target or take absurdly long routes to their destination. I don’t mind that the AI goes right for the healer though. It’s what I do, and working out how to deal with that is part of the fun.

I devoured the game in two days. That comes as quite a shock since something like Baldur’s Gate II would have lasted weeks. I do not know what the Black Company is so I can not attest to similarities to what ever that may be.

I like what Obsidian did in this one. It felt like a very well packaged experience. I liked the combat better than POE as I think the systems were more easily understood and there was much less of it. There were precious few side quests and therefore I felt like I was always moving forward in the game. The game world was grounded and I felt the story was not as weird as it was in POE where I struggled to understand what was going on. I also like the ability to replay the game and have a very different experience. At 24 hours long you probably need to play it twice just to get your money’s worth.

I miss having a strong attachment to well written NPCs and the story ends quite abruptly. I think there is going to be some howling when Tyranny Part II comes out for another $45 just to finish an obviously half-told story, While Tyranny is not going to be considered a classic because there is no real emotional attachment to the game world the overall experience is quite positive.

Ok, i know this must be easy but damn I can’t find it. How do I changed party members. I’m in the spire and the person is there (but hard to see).

In the spire section I have a hide and a scroll. What do they do or how do I use them? I only have the one spire.

Thanks

The only way that I’ve found is to walk up to a companion that’s not currently in the party and have them rejoin via dialogue.

Anyone else not a fan of so many good items being available through merchants? Already annoyed me in Pillars but it seems to be even worse here.

I broke down and bought this. So far I’m very much enjoying the overall vibe of the game and it’s definitely not shy about making you do evil things to start with, which is nice. I’m so used to even games that are pitched as being about being the bad guy actually offering a pretty blatant good/evil binary (see Overlord, for example), and the way Tyranny was pitched early on made it sound like “okay, yes, you’re working for the evil conqueror but you can totes be a moral person trapped into harm mitigation because you simply aren’t strong enough to break free of his tyranny”. Which, okay, I’m guessing you probably can be later - especially since every faction (including the guys you’re fighting to start) can have a favorable rep for you. But as far as I can tell there are no choices in Conquest that remotely cast you as benevolent, and you are very much written as being a willing, even excited participant in enacting Kyros’ will early on in the game proper.

I can see people being put off by that, for sure, since some of you weirdos never play evil in RPGs regardless, but for someone like me that will generally go with the evil route as my default playthrough, it’s great. (Or the closest thing offered - except in games where the morality -isn’t- binary, where for some reason I always default to trying to make as many people happy as possible and go with the people I actually sympathize with. Go figure.)

That said, the combat seems even less appealing than Pillars, and I think partly it’s the classless approach to character building. The only thing I liked about Pillars’ combat was the very distinct roles and mechanics of the various classes and that’s not present here. Spell building is kinda cool though.

I never go evil because I not only feel bad, but the game almost always punishes you for it. I am assuming Tyranny does no such thing so I am going lawful evil and greatly enjoying it.

That hasn’t been all that true since the late 90s. Thankfully. I would never play Baldur’s Gate as evil for that reason, but most later Bioware and Obsidian games are basically agnostic as to your moral choices in terms of rewards, challenge and content access.

I am still only in Act 1. I have restarted twice because that’s what I do in games that have PCs with either a lot of class choices or a classless system like we have here.

The game is growing on me. Initially I was hesitant because I pretty much never role play the bad guy side when there is a choice and in this game you start as a bad guy. But working through it…I started to sympathize with the bad guys. The game does a good job of conveying that the bad guys are just regular joes trying to do their jobs. That said, I am finding it easier to sympathize with the Disfavored, who very much give off the Black Company vibe other people have mentioned, as opposed the Chorus who have a pretty metal survival of the fittest vibe.

Again though, still just in Act 1 and based on the story so far I can see the game opening up more and allowing for aligning with the ‘rebels’, giving a semblance of playing for the good guys.

I still think the combat is weak, much like it was in POE. I do like how the party members have custom talent trees. I think they especially did a good job with the first NPC where the story and the talent trees she has allow for an NPC that can complement you regardless of how you build your PC.

Hm, I was going to wait until Christmas sale for this one, but if this is the case I might wait a bit longer. Game length really is a key factor towards NPC attachment. I attempted a replay of BG2 a few years ago and I realized that the characters are pretty poorly written. Nonetheless I retain a fondness for them, because I spent 150+ hours of my life cursing their pathfinding. Mask of the Betrayer on the other hand, was well done, interesting and articulate, but I don’t have the same feelings for it that I do for other RPGs solely because of the length.

I am totally in the other camp. Love that it won’t take so long to finish. My time is limited, nowadays I would never see the end of BG2!

Thanks! This is working :)

My main started out knowing shock and frost, ad has since learned a number of new schools.
I - think- at one point he could cast heal spells, but now if I craft one and assign it to him (which shows he meets the lore requirement) it doesn’t show up on the hot keys- an empty slot is there instead. And the same is happening when I give him spells based on the sigil of emotion. Is this a bug or am I doing something wrong or?

Ok. Now I’m interested. I struggle a little bit with the PoE combat. But this could get me to buy a ticket. Do you actually manage a mercenary company? Or do you guys just mean the setting evokes TBC?

She is the Darkness.

Not to go too off topic, but so many folks mention The Black Company (which I keep meaning to read) and I am about 100 pages into a fantastic book called The Red Knight which seems very Black Company/Malazan-esque. I think of it often while playing Tyranny, actually, in terms of the writing style. Has anyone else read this, or the Traitor Son Cycle (I think it’s called)? I’m freaking loving it so far!

Oh wow this book looks very cool I read some amazon reviews and I am in. Is this the best one to start with?

I hope so - it’s what I started with! It’s book 1 so I think it’s probably the right book. What drew me to it was this passage from a “best Fantasy 2016 - so far!” type of article on some web page where I was researching some good Fantasy I may have missed.

It’s always a little disheartening to see some folks here that are already done. Just the difference in pace between me and them, I mean. For Witcher 3, I’m glad I didn’t let that stop me. It was disheartening in that case too, but I just buckled down and kept playing every day. And a few months later, I caught up with those folks. But there is just something about being that far behind that’s just “Oh man, I’ll never catch up with these folks, here, I’ll play this other action game instead, that will make me feel better”.