Tyranny's conquest mode is one of the worst openings to a game I've seen. It drowns you in a sea of lore and backstory and asks you to make decicions about factions you've never met and places you've never been to, much less have any reason to care about. It's like the people working on the game were so obsessed with their stated goal of having 'choice and consequence' that they pursued it as some abstract goal of itself, without any effort to engage or involve the player.
And all throughout the conquest mode, your character is depicted as a mighty general responsible for turning the tides of war.
Then you start the game and you're level 1 and with nothing on you but the clothes on your back.
Have you seen the history creator in Deadfire? It contains almost no information on each choice whatsoever. You’re just making a bunch of random decisions with zero context if you never played the first game. Compared to that, Conquest (which is skippable if you hate it) looks pretty damn good.
I disagree, though. The intro narration tells you all you need to know about the two factions for the purpose of conquest mode. And you don’t need to care about them or the places you’re destroying. The point is to give your character a backstory. How much lore do you really need to make a decision like “negotiate with the enemy queen or kill her,” or “enslave the captured wizards or kill them.” It’s like a much more thorough way of picking your alignment in D&D.
If Tyranny had given you more information up front, I imagine people would be shitting all over it for opening with a massive loredump—is that what you want?
You could start the game at level 10 with fancier looking weapons, but that would still effectively be level 1.
Anyway, I think everything at the start of Tyranny is better than the start of Deadfire, although admittedly that’s not saying much. Conquest is superior to walking slowly through the underworld and taking to Berath. The beginning of Tyranny where you start in the middle of a fight and dive right into the core conflict is better than Port Maje where you spend hours learning the ropes on a starter island where you only get major exposure to a single faction. The first map of Tyranny is much more fun as a tutorial than the shipwreck on the beach map in Deadfire. And “defeat the enemy or we all die in a week,” is a better hook than “I’m chasing a giant statue.”
Deadfire does become a lot better than Tyranny once you get to Neketaka—there’s no equivalent in Tyranny. The quest design is way better where it’s not bugged. But I do feel like Tyranny with Deadfire’s quest design, and Deadfire’s big capital city, and Deadfire’s character building/combat would have been a truly great game. Or, conversely, Deadfire but with Tyranny’s setting, tone, branching narrative, and cartoonishly grimdark characters.