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Eternity POE1, Tyranny, or both? (or neither)

Do you like POE1, Tyranny, both, or neither?

  • I like POE1 and dislike Tyranny

  • I like Tyranny and dislike POE1

  • I like both

  • I dislike both


Results are only viewable after voting.

lophiaspis

Arbiter
Joined
Oct 24, 2012
Messages
379
POE1 and Tyranny are comparable in their mixed reputation on this forum. But it seems they attract and repel different types of players. A player that loved POE might consider Tyranny complete trash. A player that thought POE was insufferably bland would see Tyranny's worldbuilding as the second coming. I am curious about the nature of this division, so I made this poll to search for a pattern.
 
Self-Ejected

Lilura

RPG Codex Dragon Lady
Joined
Feb 13, 2013
Messages
5,274
They are neo-Renaissance RPGs; thus, they pale in comparison to Renaissance RPGs. Ergo, it's a bit hard to be impressed.
 

hell bovine

Arcane
Joined
Sep 9, 2013
Messages
2,711
Location
Secret Level
I'd rate them both mediocre, with boring combat. (I really liked the spell building system in Tyranny; unfortunately it was wasted on that game.)
 

Azalin

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 16, 2011
Messages
7,304
I am midway through Tyranny right now so I don't have the full picture but I prefer it to PoE,I wouldn't say I hate Pillars though especially after the patches and the expansions
 

Martyr

Arcane
Joined
Jan 28, 2018
Messages
1,096
Location
Bavaria
imo Pillars is bland, generic and mediocre but I found Tyranny to be very enjoyable; I even finished it twice but I couldn't bring myself to finish Pillars even once.
 

deama

Prophet
Joined
May 13, 2013
Messages
4,352
Location
UK
I never managed to finish Pillars (I stopped after about 10-15 hours) cause it was just so boring and nothing much to it? I also hated the story, I hated mostly everything about it actually.

Tyranny on the other hand had a nice story that had a surprising about of C&C. The combat was less bad and the spell creation thing was kinda neat. I wouldn't put Tyranny on my "must play RPGs", but unlike Pillars, Tyranny had stuff going for it.
 

Shackleton

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Dec 29, 2011
Messages
1,301
Location
Knackers Yard
Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture
I was the reverse tbh, I finished Pillars once and am currently going through again with a Monk. Tyranny I got about 20 hours in and got fed up with the fact I appeared to be turning into a boy scout despite the premise of 'time to be evil'. The enemy variety, or lack of it, was also a factor in turning me off.

I quite liked the Tyranny systems compared to Pillars, but I didn't think the game attached was as good.
 

2house2fly

Magister
Joined
Apr 10, 2013
Messages
1,877
Pillars Of Eternity is better, Tyranny is cooler. Both are worth a play and both are better with the DLC, but Tyranny feels more like it needs the DLC
 

Kyl Von Kull

The Night Tripper
Patron
Joined
Jun 15, 2017
Messages
3,152
Location
Jamrock District
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
They’re both flawed in very different ways.

Tyranny is much better at being an RPG in the dialogue heavy tradition of Obsidian or old BioWare; it has great worldbuilding, good writing (YMMV), and some terrific C&C, but the combat is forgettable at best and character progression is meh. If you play RPGs mainly for the combat or the systems, it’s not for you. That said, I think Tyranny very much knows what it does best and focuses on giving the player a lot of that. The game’s flaws would be far more forgivable if they’d had the resources to finish the damn ending. A storyfag game can get away with shit combat, it can’t get away with a botched and truncated third act. Even so, I replayed it immediately upon completion because I’m addicted to RPG reactivity and it absolutely scratches that itch.

I thought Pillars 3.0 was okay, but it’s almost the inverse of Tyranny: it has really good character progression and build variety, okay combat, but aside from MCA’s characters the story and the writing mostly get in the way.

Unlike Tyranny, though, Pillars devotes way too much effort to things it does poorly. Pillars could’ve been a damn good spiritual successor to Icewind Dale 2, but obviously that’s not the game people were clamoring for. It’s like the guy who made IWD2 tried to shoehorn a lot of dialogue and side quests and story into a title that plays more like a party based dungeon crawl. Oh wait, that’s exactly what happened.

Tyranny feels unfinished—one big gripe with the game is that there’s not enough of it. Pillars feels schizophrenic from a design perspective. It tries too hard to appease both storyfags and combatfags but ends up satisfying neither.

I’ll say this: Sawyer seems to have learned his lesson because Deadfire is a hell of a lot tighter. They added some high quality exploration, which is something the original Pillars really lacked, the writing is a lot less verbose, the combat has much better encounter design (far fewer trash mobs), there’s a lot of flexibility in the quests, and the faction system has genuine depth to it (at least this is my impression about a dozen hours in). The writing is definitely worse, but there’s a lot less of it and Sawyer isn’t using the great gobs of text as a crutch to tell the story.
 

DeepOcean

Arcane
Joined
Nov 8, 2012
Messages
7,394
Imagine you did a pact with the devil and you asked a RPG with good C&C and another with a good character system.

As on all tales, we got what we wished for but not on the way we wanted.

Tyranny is a RPG with good C&C BUT... the characters and the setting are really meh so you do not care about anything you are deciding.

PoE has a good character system BUT... the encounter design and combat pacing are so awful that actually using all those talents and abilities is painful.
 

SausageInYourFace

Angelic Reinforcement
Patron
Joined
Dec 28, 2013
Messages
3,858
Location
In your face
Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Bubbles In Memoria A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit. Pathfinder: Wrath
I like both but PoE a lot and Tyranny just barely. The combat was boring as hell, atmosphere, world building, c&c etc. warrant a playthrough however. I would play on normal or even easy next time though, to blitz through the shitty combat.
 
Unwanted

Micormic

Unwanted
Joined
Mar 25, 2009
Messages
939
I didn't like POE at all, thought it was bland and trash, not the biggest fan of obsidian to begin with.


Tyranny seemed like a feminist games so I never bought/never will buy it. Not to mention obsidian, with the exception of F:NV make trash games I wasn't planning on buying it anyways.
 

fobia

Guest
My dislike for Tyranny is mostly disappointment.
All the talk about reactivty, choice and consequences etc. made it so much more bitter to see how the game turned out in the end.
I played it on release and the game felt rushed as hell. I read that it got better and certain paths were upgraded through updates, but I never got around to try it again.
Spell mechanics were quite interesting, but so OP in comparison to other classes, it made no sense to build any character as a non-caster.
 

Sòren

Arcane
Joined
Aug 18, 2009
Messages
2,350
i tried restarting POE 1 today since a lot of people kept saying how decent it is gameplay-wise with all the patches the followed (finished it a few months after release) and i bought the dlcs some day, i don't remember when i did that tbh and i don't even know why - they must have been greatly reduced. however i can't overcome myself to actually play that game up to that point, the writing is just so annoying from the very beginning and i know that there isn't much content to look forward to in the maingame. i hate that game now, but it's probably okayish during your first playthrough.
 

2house2fly

Magister
Joined
Apr 10, 2013
Messages
1,877
My dislike for Tyranny is mostly disappointment.
All the talk about reactivty, choice and consequences etc. made it so much more bitter to see how the game turned out in the end.
I played it on release and the game felt rushed as hell. I read that it got better and certain paths were upgraded through updates, but I never got around to try it again.
Spell mechanics were quite interesting, but so OP in comparison to other classes, it made no sense to build any character as a non-caster.
I'll bet Chris Avellone's revelation that developers on Tyranny were shifted over to Pillars of Eternity caused a lot of things to suddenly make sense
 
Joined
Nov 8, 2007
Messages
6,207
Location
The island of misfit mascots
None of the Kickstarter "WOOO TOTAL INTELLECTUAL FREEDOM" RPGs have turned out particularly good. Not one.

  1. True. But all far better than anything else then, now or during the lost decade-ish beforehand - except for the "Deus Ex hybrid genre" games (I'm including FO:NV at the rpg end of that genre, but not FO3 despite same engine because it doesn't have the immersive sim aspect), and the near-disappearance of that genre after VtMB never made sense on ANY metric, so a market correction was inevitable.
  2. It's exactly what you'd expect given that the biggest ones are still low budget by industry standards, backers wanted full games (hence cuts to scope of mechanics instead, and I doubt the reverse would be feasible anyway), and it became very clear that players will NOT subsidise developers through the trial and error process of creating any truly revolutionary additions to the genre (eg Dead State's attempt at making a game where the plot events, world NPCs, factions, recruitable characters and changes to the setting are governed by passage of time, instead of waiting for the player to progress to the 'right' spot in the game - it's so insanely massive a departure from how crpgs are designed that there's no template for how to deal with the inevitable masses of buggy/broken triggers, or to know what works for a game plot told in that fashion, or how to mitigate the frustrations of players who can't progress past the appearance of the first and easiest hostile faction (contrast with AoD, where the developer could still rely on the traditional player-triggers-the-game-events choice structure to tell players why their speech-mercantile character dies whenever he doesn't actively avoid provoking fights) and the only way to fix those things would be by making a series of similarly flawed games, in competition against others doing the same thing, and working out the parts - otherwise it's like expecting Greenberg and Garriot to make FO in 1981 by giving them the technology but no knowledge of how the genre progressed from 1981-1997).

I wouldn't call that disappointing. If players don't want go fund mini-games or learning experiences (and why would they?), why would anyone expect anything more than the game equivalent of a cover band?

If 1 of the big Kickstarters makes a 'good' game in the old-style on their 3rd or 4th attempt, then it's batting ahead of the normal product development process – and that's taking into account that they are only relearning older methods using current technology. Otherwise, it would be "if they make a good game after they and a bunch of other companies spend 16 years competing and learning from each other on the way".

It's also why the Deus Ex genre revival was always much more likely to happen, and why there is more chance of a radical reinvigoration coming from a "small and bounded by commercial restraints" AoD-type of project than kickstarter (though both were better then the mainstream industry alternatives at the time – that doesn't preclude the curren market structures leading back to good crpgs, but it's the absence of any timely path to that end that both are trying to either address or exploit. Exploitation is the more promising method, because capitalism et cetera).

Kickstarter has already made a worthwhile contribution by giving developers a subsidised experiment in how far steam and other online distribution let you go without your financier having to also be your publisher. That only needed to be a once-off demonstration, and while publisher-financiers aren't going away, it's swung their bargaining power a lot further in favour of the developer, though less than the developer-publishers like Interplay had during the golden era.
 
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KK1001

Arbiter
Joined
Mar 30, 2015
Messages
621
Assuming PoE 3 gets made, the entire trilogy might have a game's worth of good content. But overall it is competent, not entirely bland, and inoffensive. No new boundaries are pushed, and both the world design and mechanics feel like 60% towards something good.

Compared to Tides of Numenera and Wasteland 2 though it feels pretty good.
 

draug

Novice
Joined
Jul 7, 2017
Messages
15
In my opinion both are fine. I played POE1 before I had played any of the infinity engine games and rather enjoyed it. Coming back to it now that I've played the other games in the genre I find I agree with a lot of the criticisms that get laid upon it. Still would say its a good game though.

Tyranny on the other hand I played over my Christmas break and liked it quite a bit. Seemed to be a much more focused and interesting version of POE. I think I just really liked the concept of playing through an evil campaign.
 

deama

Prophet
Joined
May 13, 2013
Messages
4,352
Location
UK

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