I'd like to have some spoiler-free, or at least spoiler-properly-tagged (the "insert" menu is where it is hiding) discussion of this game, since it looks incredibly promising, even beyond the draw of being a solid isometric RPG.
Go ahead, you lucky bastards, rub the salt in the wounds of a poor sod with no gaming PC.
I was interested in getting this, but have opted to steer clear for now after hearing one or two discouraging things about it and reflecting on my experience with PoE.
Basically: It feels like Obsidian retreat deep into their safe zone with their Unity efforts and don't bother challenging their weaknesses (incredibly dry lore dumps, incredibly dry character dumps, essentially treating the immediate audience as beta testers) because they feel they're catering to a core audience that want or don't mind that kind of shit. PoE did in the event become the quality game it always suggested it could be, but not until months and months after release.
I'm also dismayed by the fact they've apparently made the ending a big cliffhanger with the story clearly unfinished. Deus Ex already did that to me this year and I'm not taking it again.
I beat it. Thoroughly enjoyed it. Clocked about 16 hours for a reasonably complete playthrough on Normal.
I'd definitely say it wasn't as good as Pillars of Eternity, but it brings some new and good things to the table (the ways the Factions pay with and against each other is a big step up from PoE, and really is the game's showstealer; the way you can make your own spells is real cool if you put the time into it). The combat's what you expect from these kinds of games: it's a little crisper and more refined from what PoE's was at launch, but ultimately is the same pause-and-play formula that's been working for those devs since Baldur's Gate. The companion characters were well fleshed out, but lacked depth in what you could really do with them (as far as I'm aware, there's no companion quests or romance arcs in the game).
The world was pretty much exactly what you'd expect from the trailers: it's not your standard Medieval Western European Fantasy, but rather is very much so rooted in the bronze age, with some very overt Roman vs. Barbarian analogues. Contrary to what the game bills as "Evil has already won!!!" as the setting's premise, the reality is that "Normal post-conquest shit" has already won -- with one possible exception, none of the game's major factions come across as actually overbearingly evil (despite one being led by THE OVERLORD), so much as... doing exactly what period empires did. The first act opens with the PC moving along a road lined with the corpses of political enemies who've been staked up, which in modernity seems awful... but then you remember the Appian Way. It's the evil of the mundane. Which is, thankfully, a much more interesting concept to explore than working for Literally Sauron would have been. Weaving a story around what amounts of ancient colonialism (the Overlord's legions by and large really do believe they're spreading the Light of Rome Peace of Kyros across the world -- and to an extent, they're not wrong), and giving the player the power to interpret and execute the laws of the "evil" empire, makes for a very cool narrative space the writers are able to explore. And they do a good job with it.
My biggest complaint, as Nonesuch indicated, is that there's really... no ending, really. I'm not sure if this was a case of content being hacked out for the expansion pack, or if the devs just ran out of budget/time or what, but there is a huge narrative cliffhanger at the end that desperately needs to be filled.
Unlike Pillars of Eternity, where the expansions went back and added meat to the middle-game after delivering a very satisfying end-game, Tyranny just sort of peters outs in its final act. There isn't even a final boss fight -- at least in my playthrough. I can see where there could have been, and there might be one in other players' games, but my Final Act was about 20 minutes of going to the various faction heads (all of whom I had maxed out Favor with) and saying hello.
The designers sure left themselves a lot of room to maneuver for a sequel or expansion, but the end of Tyranny really can't stand alone, which is a bummer.
The game's also really fucking short. My playthrough was less than half as long as my first run in Pillars of Eternity (30-40 hours). Thankfully, through, the game really does offer a lot of replayability -- and I don't mean the usual "see all the slightly different things you could have said to Bob the Merchant!!!" like in a lot of RPGs. Unlike your standard BioWare fare, Tyranny offers you a real and serious ability to alter the state of play in the setting, which can have tremendous repercussions...
...if you can figure out how to get off the Agent of the Empire track that the game puts up the illusion of being the entirety of its campaign. I straight up missed out on the ability to shrug the yoke of the empire in my first playthrough, and pretty much put myself on an inescapable railroad through the endgame. On playthrough 2, though, I'm taking the time to really, really try, and did indeed find a way to go full on rebel without a cause.
Overall, I'd give it an 8/10. Very solid writing and worldbuilding, held back by Dat Ending Tho and combat dredged out of 1998.
Contrary to what the game bills as "Evil has already won!!!" as the setting's premise, the reality is that "Normal post-conquest shit" has already won -- with one possible exception, none of the game's major factions come across as actually overbearingly evil (despite one being led by THE OVERLORD), so much as... doing exactly what period empires did. The first act opens with the PC moving along a road lined with the corpses of political enemies who've been staked up, which in modernity seems awful... but then you remember the Appian Way. It's the evil of the mundane. Which is, thankfully, a much more interesting concept to explore than working for Literally Sauron would have been. Weaving a story around what amounts of ancient colonialism (the Overlord's legions by and large really do believe they're spreading the Light of Rome Peace of Kyros across the world -- and to an extent, they're not wrong), and giving the player the power to interpret and execute the laws of the "evil" empire, makes for a very cool narrative space the writers are able to explore. And they do a good job with it.
Yeah, the shift from the 'medieval' really caught me off-guard when I watched several character generation/Conquest videos. The 'iron clad' description of the Elite Legion being much more meaningful that you initially give it credit really puts the things in perspective.
I'm also interested in whether or not they go deep into exploring the differences that having a buttload of magic plopped right into the middle of all this makes. I mean, the normal practices of the bronze-age empires is one thing, and literal Biblical Plagues is another.
So all those new bells and whistles like interrupt chances, lots of cooldown based abilities and, in case of Tyranny, inter-character combos failed to make the game more dynamic in your opinion? Is the companion AI any good?
Won't be a problem for me anyhow, I'm one of the weirdos that plays BG with all of auto-pause options enabled.
Yeah, they definitely do some interesting things with the Edicts mechanic, especially towards the end. Even at the beginning, though, they're really some of the biggest story drivers.
Regarding combat: I would definitely never describe PoE/Tyranny combat as dynamic, no. Having actual companion AI (versus PoE, which didn't have any at launch!) removes a lot of tedium from combat, since you can let your companions do their own thing. But ultimately you'll still be pausing every few seconds to target abilities (and Tyranny is real anal about targeting -- most abilities, even AoEs, have to be dropped on a specific creature), use consumables, and have your mages run away from fighters. I'm not saying the combat's bad by any means, but it really is just the same old same old from Infinity Engine games with some new bells and whistles.
The one thing I will say for the Cooldown-based abilities is that it prevents the god-awful Rest spamming from Infinity Engine games or Pillars of Eternity. So it makes adventuring more dynamic, I suppose.
A bit of both. You have to perservere through a lot of text-walls of fantasy mumbo jumbo to get a proper sense of what's going on in PoE. I mean, I am massively gay for lore - I love background detail, I love games that bother to provide context and think about why a grand spectacle is being played out rather than being in it for the spectacle itself, the latter of which is sadly the case for almost all games. But it has to be presented in a way that will resonate with the player - they have to be able to see how it affects the world around them and characters they care about. PoE has absolutely oodles of stuff which is essentially several lectures, and it drops most of your party on you all at once, without you being able to get much of a sense of what makes each tick. It was overwhelming and gave the sense of a dev team who were less interested in telling you a story and more in telling you a history, all at once. It made me respect Bioware a tiny bit more in terms of character development and pacing.
