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Game News Tyranny Dev Diary #1: The Vision for Tyranny

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Tags: Brian Heins; Obsidian Entertainment; Tyranny

The Tyranny website has received its first update since the game was announced last month, a dev diary blog update by project director Brian Heins. It's a general statement about the game's vision and the role played by the player character. There's not really any new information here, but it's a start:

This is the first of several developer diaries for our new RPG Tyranny! We’ll be releasing information frequently until the game ships. We’re going to try to keep these updates packed with information and give you details on Tyranny’s game systems, lore, and art in future updates. For this first dev diary, I wanted to talk a bit about the vision for Tyranny.

When we started working on Tyranny, there were several things we wanted to accomplish: make a game that builds on the technology being created for Pillars of Eternity, make the player feel important to the world from the beginning of the game, and focus on choice and reactivity in our quests and systems.

We knew going in that we had a solid foundation to build on from the Pillars team. This meant we didn’t have to worry about things like ‘how will we create areas?’ or ‘how does inventory work?’ Instead, we were able to focus our efforts on building the world and updating the RPG rules for the changes we wanted to make. This allowed us to do a lot with a small team early in development.

A lot of RPGs start you out as the weak or inexperienced character who becomes more important and influential over time. This parallels how your character grows in strength and power as they gain levels, so it’s a structure that works well for RPGs. For Tyranny, we wanted to play with that concept. Does the player need to start off weak in order to feel more powerful later in the game? We decided to make the player important from the very beginning of the game, from the very first interaction with an NPC.

We didn’t want you to be the ‘errand girl of Evil’. If you were just a grunt or a lackey, your ability to influence or change the world would be limited, and your responsibility for the fact that evil won would be reduced.

This required us to design our quests and content to reinforce this at every turn. We didn’t want you being approached by random NPCs asking you to rescue their cat from a tree. Your choices shape nations, and the quests had to reflect that.

Many RPGs are great at letting you be the hero, the beacon of strength and hope for a world facing imminent destruction. They’re not always great at the opposite side of that coin. I am disappointed when I play games where the “evil” choice requires me to act like a psychopath, murdering everyone in front of me. Sometimes that’s fun, but it’s very limiting when it’s the only option. Especially when the game punishes me for making those decisions.

With Tyranny we wanted to create a more nuanced evil. One where the choices players make aren’t so obviously black and white. We wanted to make a game where players were free to take the evil path as far as they want to go, and feel powerful and rewarded for it. Ultimately, RPGs are about the choices players make. With Tyranny we wanted to focus our efforts on making the world react to player choices – both in game systems and in dialogue. By now you’ve probably seen interviews where we talked about your ability to shape the world during character creation, and the alliances you can form during gameplay. These all come out of that goal – making Tyranny a highly reactive game that you can play multiple times. Each time seeing how the world changes as you make different choices.

So that’s the vision for Tyranny: a highly reactive world that you helped the evil Overlord conquer. That’s the setup, it’s up to you to decide how the story plays out.

In our next update, I’ll provide some details about some of the basic game systems.
There have been a couple of Tyranny interviews recently as well, such at this one at GameWatcher, but there's not much new information there either. It seems that Paradox are keeping the game in a low profile until Stellaris and Hearts of Iron IV are released. So it is with publishers. But at least that tells us the game definitely isn't coming out until the second half of the year.
 
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We didn’t want you being approached by random NPCs asking you to rescue their cat from

where the choices players make aren’t so obviously black and white

These are the signs of incline.
But the sad thing is the dev team is always talking about the setting and the world.they didn't say anything about improvements on the PoE engine's combat :(
 

stony3k

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If they are really able to implement good C&C, then hopefully we will be able to ignore or bypass combat entirely
 

Shadenuat

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I think every RPG developer likes to promise C&C and not black and white choices (muh grehh morality so popular nowadays) always in their first or second announcement about the game, like there is a plan with boxes to check.

I wonder why no RPG developer just outright states "it would be linear and choices mostly cosmetic with endgame slides but god our story and combat would actually be great"

There is really no reason to promise C&C because it's such a complicated and consuming game element that before you do it you don't know if it actually would be good. The only way is to think up some sort of systemic ways you'll do it and then maybe tell players that, but developers rarely do that either.
 

Gremius

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I am disappointed when I play games where the “evil” choice requires me to act like a psychopath, murdering everyone in front of me. Sometimes that’s fun, but it’s very limiting when it’s the only option. Especially when the game punishes me for making those decisions.

With Tyranny we wanted to create a more nuanced evil. One where the choices players make aren’t so obviously black and white.

Incline!
 

Kaivokz

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Looking forward to this.

We didn’t want you being approached by random NPCs asking you to rescue their cat from

where the choices players make aren’t so obviously black and white

These are the signs of incline.
But the sad thing is the dev team is always talking about the setting and the world.they didn't say anything about improvements on the PoE engine's combat :(

Pillars has a really solid (RTwP) engine. If you didn't enjoy the combat in PoE and have any tolerance for RTwP, you probably didn't like the game's rule-set rather than its engine. He did mention this, even if he didn't give details:

We knew going in that we had a solid foundation to build on from the Pillars team. This meant ... we were able to focus our efforts on building the world and updating the RPG rules for the changes we wanted to make.

If you meant they didn't announce that they're making it turn-based, well... yeah.
:greatjob:
 

Feyd Rautha

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But the sad thing is the dev team is always talking about the setting and the world.they didn't say anything about improvements on the PoE engine's combat :(
Can't you read?

Obsidian said:
This is the first of several developer diaries for our new RPG Tyranny! We’ll be releasing information frequently until the game ships. We’re going to try to keep these updates packed with information and give you details on Tyranny’s game systems, lore, and art in future updates. For this first dev diary, I wanted to talk a bit about the vision for Tyranny.
This is just the first of several dev diary entries. Surely they will talk about combat later on.
 

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There's something strange about this thing that just makes it sound like a fucking drag that fails to raise much intrigue at all despite the neat concept and promises of heavy reactivity.
 

stony3k

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I fear this is because Obsidian has gone from Bugsidian where they made flawed and buggy but interesting games to Balancidium where they make technically better but balanced and boring games.
 

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There's something strange about this thing that just makes it sound like a fucking drag that fails to raise much intrigue at all despite the neat concept and promises of heavy reactivity.

And that's why publishers are shaky about launching new IPs. "Why should I give a fuck?" is a question that can be hard to answer before people have already played a game in the universe and become invested in it.
 
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I fear this is because Obsidian has gone from Bugsidian where they made flawed and buggy but interesting games to Balancidium where they make technically better but balanced and boring games.

PoE still has a ton of bugs.
 

stony3k

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PoE still has a ton of bugs.
Not at the Kotor 2 level. They've improved a lot in that area. It's just that they now seem scared to take risks, which is why I'm only mildly interested in Tyranny, even though I love some of what they're saying
 

Trashos

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They wanted to say: "In Tyranny, combat has been designed to be enjoyable by retarded teenage kids."

But then they changed the wording to be in agreement with modern marketing practices.
 

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There's something strange about this thing that just makes it sound like a fucking drag that fails to raise much intrigue at all despite the neat concept and promises of heavy reactivity.

And that's why publishers are shaky about launching new IPs. "Why should I give a fuck?" is a question that can be hard to answer before people have already played a game in the universe and become invested in it.
Very little is known about the game so far. We know the intentions but not specific details.

It's focused on C&C, which is good, but combat is unavoidable which is bad. It's RTwP which is very bad. Combat screens look like action RPG, which isn't good. Evil won, which is nice, but there are no details. You are a powerful dude, not some underling, which is interesting, BUT in a game with unavoidable combat it might mean that you're a local Commander Shepard who kicks ass and chews gum. In fact, it's unclear how you'd "shape nations". Hopefully not by enslaving them with necromancy.

Mainly, is it a niche game for grognards or is it a mainstream-ish game? They said they want to attract wider audience, which is never a good thing. Not that there is anything wrong with a wider audience, but in order to attract it, you have to make concessions to make sure them wider audience dudes can get into it in the first place.

Anyway, cautiously optimistic.
 

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And that's why publishers are shaky about launching new IPs. "Why should I give a fuck?" is a question that can be hard to answer before people have already played a game in the universe and become invested in it.

Dunno if it being a safe-bet sequel to something would've changed my mind; it's likely it could've been even worse that way, to be honest. And it looks like they're already playing it on the safer side of things riding on PoE's success. I think they probably should've taken a riskier route by striving further away from it, but that's just me.

I don't find the proposed universe and what it entails very interesting. We'll see what it turns into.
 
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Infinitron

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There's something strange about this thing that just makes it sound like a fucking drag that fails to raise much intrigue at all despite the neat concept and promises of heavy reactivity.

And that's why publishers are shaky about launching new IPs. "Why should I give a fuck?" is a question that can be hard to answer before people have already played a game in the universe and become invested in it.
Very little is known about the game so far. We know the intentions but not specific details.

It's focused on C&C, which is good, but combat is unavoidable which is bad. It's RTwP which is very bad. Combat screens look like action RPG, which isn't good. Evil won, which is nice, but there are no details. You are a powerful dude, not some underling, which is interesting, BUT in a game with unavoidable combat it might mean that you're a local Commander Shepard who kicks ass and chews gum. In fact, it's unclear how you'd "shape nations". Hopefully not by enslaving them with necromancy.

Mainly, is it a niche game for grognards or is it a mainstream-ish game? They said they want to attract wider audience, which is never a good thing. Not that there is anything wrong with a wider audience, but in order to attract it, you have to make concessions to make sure them wider audience dudes can get into it in the first place.

Anyway, cautiously optimistic.

On the contrary, I think the issue is that there are too many details, but not satisfying details.

See, they have to explain how this isn't your typical fantasy RPG. So they drop all these overarching lore details. Kyros, Archons, Fatebinders, and the player's role in all that. The rough framework of a plot begins to form in your mind, but without the proper context and juicy details that make it engaging. That makes the game seem hollow, uninteresting.

But if it had just been released out of the blue without you knowing anything about it beforehand, it could seem incredible. An RPG with a premise that's totally different.
 
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mutonizer

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An RPG with a premise that's totally different.

A game premise means shit past these first 30 seconds or the intro movie if you can't deliver on proper mechanics and whatnot throughout the entire game, especially in a RPG, unless you're going full narrative/adventure game or something, which I doubt is their intent.
You don't "play" a game premise, that's just the marketing bullshit equivalent "feeling fresh" for a soap commercial, but for video games. What you play is the minute by minute actual act of playing, menus, game mechanics, combat system, character system and whatnot.
...And on that front, they don't have much yet and what they have isn't really making me optimistic...
 

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No shit, but we're talking about pre-release impressions now.

IMO, the combat/RTwP stuff isn't incredibly important. This is a concept game. If you played 100 hours of Dragon Age, you can probably play 20 hours of whatever this will be.
 
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mutonizer

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This is a concept game
I agree, but since they won't be able to deliver on their premise either. Anyway...it's all bullshit until the product's on the table. Only way to judge really.

And I got a lot more than 100 hours of DA:O :)
 

Trashos

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No shit, but we're talking about pre-release impressions now.

IMO, the combat/RTwP stuff isn't incredibly important. This is a concept game. If you played 100 hours of Dragon Age, you can play 20 hours of whatever this will be.

I can see the headlines:

TYRANNY
Good enough for 20 hrs.
 

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