Obsidian and Paradox announce Tyranny, an Isometric RPG

Games
341

Am I playing the same game you guys are? There was nothing in the Taking the Outer Valley quest about capturing Pelox Florian, and after reviewing my chat window thrice I see that Fake Limp mentioned it once, almost in passing. But now I’m total failure because I didn’t capture him?

Later, when choosing who to lead the assault, I chose the Scarlet Chorus, because I generally agree with Graven Ashe and enjoy the idea of Chorus’ corpses forming a giant ramp, seeing as how they’re all murderous assholes. NOPE. I am now a life-long enemy of the Disfavored. Wut? And as Fatebinder of Turon, what gives him the authority make me an enemy? Making me an enemy effectively makes him an enemy of Turon – his superior, if I understand it correctly.

This is just dumb.

342

I don’t think you missed anything. You upgraded the spires and started projects? I belive you need power near the end.

343

Yea, you can get locked into a “faction” too quickly without realizing it. The whole thing with declaring you an enemy gets somewhat explained at the end. Or rather why it is tolerated.

344

I have done 1.75 play-throughs of this game. The first time I sided with the disfavored and ended up getting Turon on my side along with Graven Ash.

Then I decided to try a rebel play-through to see what changed. You know what did? Almost nothing. I am fighting the same factions in the same place, only that I can also count the disfavored as enemy. I do have less quests and thus story available this play-through. It really pisses me off that I can’t make any meaningful choices. I never get an option to make friends with rebel groups. The dialog options are just the same and the factions treat exactly the same way as the did before. In short, it seems that your choices do not really matter at all.

345

I’ve played disfavored and rebel and the differences are pretty stark in my play through. In the Stalwart area I was fighting the Disfavored and the Scarlet Chorus while doing a Rebel play through, and the Rebels while doing a disfavored play through. Seems pretty stark to have a choice in act one determine whether I am defending a fort or assaulting a fort in act two.

346

How do you get on the rebel’s side? I have never had an option for that. My choices for the rebels have always been Die or Die. I mean there are times when it does give me the option of letting someone go (happened like twice), but that has never made a difference. Every rebel faction I faced in my first play through, I am facing again, as enemies.

347

In Act 1 if you are lenient towards the rebels and let as many of them live as possible you’ll get a message asking you to meet with them. When you meet with them you can choose to recruit/side with/use the rebels or to go back to the other factions or murder the rebel leaders as they’ve gathered to meet you.

348

As I said, I never got those choices. I made every friendly choice the game would give me, which was only one, to allow the the leader NPC to live in the conflict just before the tower assault. Every other time, my choices were only death (with regards to rebels). I mean there was the one guy who I tricked by saying he his men could go free (which they did), but he could use a poison dagger to kill an archon. My only other choice with him, was death.

349

Unless we go through choice by choice I’m sure what you are looking for but those options exist.

350

Do you mean trying to avoid killing various groups of NPCs by taking different routes? The nameless ones you fight? None of them with dialog choices, the groups of “guards” or whatever you normally fight through?

351

I believe there are four ways to end Act 1, siding with one of the Archons, co opting/siding with the Rebels, and the anarchy path were you piss everyone off. Not positive.

352

Picked this up thanks to the Deadfire thread and after some quickly Googling decided to go with a 2-handed (duelist) light armor build, basically a melee dps class. Any thoughts/opinions on this build or builds in general? I’m playing on the default Normal difficulty, so probably hard to go too terribly wrong.

353

This is true, but players shouldn’t be left scratching their heads asking WTF happened. I never felt railroaded like this in games like Fallout, maybe because there were multiple smaller plots going on at the same time as opposed to one strong central plot, or because they had a more “hands off” approach to players.

354

Enjoying this so far. I thought the AI was going to be the thing that helped me feel a bit more comfortable with the combat, but I decided to turn it off. It felt like I wasn’t really needed and I wasn’t getting to know the skills of my characters. Maybe once I am more comfortable with it I will turn it back on.

One thing that bothers me, and I don’t see anyone else mentioning it, so I must be over-thinking it: Why doesn’t it show everyone’s magic skills? Going off the magic screen, everyone has all the magic Control skills, they just aren’t listed. On the character/magic screens it only shows the magic skills the character specialize in. For instance, I have Control Vigor listed, but nothing else under magic. If I go to the magic screen, any character can cast any spell if they have high enough Lore, but I don’t know the value of everyone’s Control skills to see if it’s even worth it. I want to see what everyone’s control skills are, but it seem there is no way to do so. Even on the spell creation screen, once I pick a Sigil, it only shows the control strength for that Sigil for my main character. I can’t see Verse’s Control Illusion skill, it just shows me if she can cast it.Hopefully made sense.

Edit: Apparently magic skills show up on your character sheet after used on a character other than themselves in battle.

355

Finally finished. It was very good. As I said above I accidently allied myself with the Chorus, but then later when the Voices killed someone I didn’t want him to I told him to fuck off and went rogue, ultimately allying with no one. The ultimate ending I received was not particularly good. I didn’t even get to the Blade Grave to end the Edict there. Alas.

For a game with so many choices, it was frustrating to not be allowed a few more. I’m sorry I had to kill Graven Ashe, Barik, but the game really did not give me a choice. Which is kind of dumb.

I sort of wanted to ally with the rebels when the game started, I think – I mean, I didn’t know a whole lot about them versus the Chorus and Disfavored. But if you make the wrong decision in the first five minutes of the game, that option is off the table. Which is also kind of dumb.

I’d like to play it again. I really like the spell system and how you add traits to spells that unfortunately pushed the lore requirement through the roof. I used Landry and despite buying a couple of his Lore talents, it never got high enough to do anything really spectacular. A replay with a main who was a spell caster and allied with the rebels sounds fun, but, dammit there’s too much other stuff to play too.

356

Yikes, please use spoiler tags!

357

Paradox CEO Fred Wester drops a truth bomb. Tyranny came in “just under” Paradox’s sales projections, and Wester has a theory about that.

[quote]
“The game’s really solid, it still has a lot of interest,” Wester expands. “A lot of people are still on the fence to buy it. I think we will see a long tail on that game with people coming in and playing later on as well. But it didn’t really meet the expectations we set for it initially, no.”[/quote]

[quote]
“Obsidian did a great job of capitalising on the timing of Kickstarter and the wave of nostalgia for these type of titles,” goes his hypothesis. “We’ve seen that most of the titles after Pillars of Eternity, if you look at Wasteland, Torment - they haven’t been anywhere near that kind of success. So maybe it’s that a lot of nostalgia fed into the initial bubble and that’s why. These games have a market, but it’s never gonna be that peak [again].”

Jorjani draws a parallel to revivalist point-and-click adventure games and the initial warmth for a fondly remembered genre.

“But once people started playing them, they were like, ‘I kind of know why they aren’t prevalent anymore,’” he says. “This form of gameplay isn’t really working in today’s environment.”[/quote]

Also, although everyone at Paradox and Obsidian say they want to work together again, they acknowledge there were some difficulties.

[quote]
Jorjani does volunteer, however, that the two companies have had their “fair share of headbutting” over the course of their working relationship. It sounds as if Stockholm and California came together with a certain amount of chafing.

“I think there are slight cultural differences in how we work,” he theorises. “Sweden is consensus-driven, we try to have very flat hierarchies. It comes back to a lot of different factors but, at least at Paradox, we push a lot of major decisions down to people in the organisation. Not every company works that way. Some companies are not as comfortable with decisions being taken at that level, so they’re pushed upwards. We end up with this weird situation where we can’t have our CEO involved in every discussion.”[/quote]

358

Tyranny wasn’t marketed particularly well. Paradox didn’t do their jobs.

It also didn’t directly appeal to nostalgia in the same way.

359

I didn’t think it was lack of advertising, but that word got out fairly quickly that it was a text heavy game. A lot of people don’t want that kind of game, as can be seem in the Steam reviews (IIRC, haven’t read the reviews in months). It made me hesitant to buy the game, even though I really enjoyed it once I did buy it.

360

Agreed. I don’t know who dropped the ball, but Tyranny just seemed to pop out with very little marketing. I didn’t even know about it until a month before launch.

That said, I think Wester is also right in general. The Obsidian/BioWare Infinity Engine text-heavy style RPG is only going to ever sell to a small audience. You can be profitable with that concept, but in this day and age, you have to keep costs modest, or make the majority of your sales on the group of buyers willing to pay for the game’s development up-front.