Preview Tyranny Spellcrafting and Dungeon Crawl Stream

[Infinitron]

Tags: Brian Heins; Mikey Dowling; Nick Carver; Obsidian Entertainment; Paradox Interactive; Tyranny

Obsidian broadcasted some Tyranny gameplay on Paradox's Twitch channel yesterday, in a livestream hosted by game director Brian Heins, systems designer Nick Carver and community manager Mikey Dowling. The stream was pretty much an extended look at what game journalists (including our own Bubbles and JarlFrank) got to see at Gamescom last month. After fiddling with the spellcrafting system a bit, Brian, Nick and Mikey embarked on a lengthy crawl into the Oldwalls dungeon, fighting numerous Banes, collecting various artifacts and solving minor puzzles. Unlike Gamescom however, they were playing the game on Hard difficulty, which led to several companion knockouts during the harder battles and a total party wipe against the dungeon's final boss. Paradox uploaded a video of the stream to their YouTube channel today, so you can see for yourself:

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As they played the game, Brian answered various questions from Twitch chat. Unfortunately there's still no answer to the most important question of when the release date is, but he did say they're doing another stream in two weeks, so maybe it won't be long now.

 

[Nihiliste]

Too drunk to evaluate the gameplay but skipping through the environments look pretty bad. Not very atmospheric.

 

[duanth123]

Look out! A pack of magebane!
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That's what we call them!
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Be careful, Warden! This one spawns adds!
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At a horrifying pace!
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Goddamnit/fuck/shit, get out of my way , I'm about to use my dagger whirlwind ability of 5.6 second recuperation period! That I practiced on small woodland creatures! Heeya!
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There's no friendly fire
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It detracts from the player experience of doing as much dps as possible.
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We should have never solved the ancient mystery of this dungeon by putting that conspicuous stone in that obvious grooved stone hole
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[Aenra]

Have said it before, but fuck it..

--cheap--

Cheap when you use the specific character selection visual as if that's how your audience will feel the connection to BG et al., because here's that fucking horrid circle again, cheap when you go for the same stylistic approach and assets (albeit hued/toned a touch differently) over and over again, cheap when apparently at least your concept of innovation/pushing your studio forward is.. what? Slightly more modern inventory images/UI symbols? And cheap because when you're so fucking tight up the arse to be unable to go for something other than what you've been regurgitating for so many years? You are in d-e-c-l-i-n-e.
Am deeply sorry to see this shit. After their previous shit. Even more when apparently there's still an audience for copy-clones of the same 'ole. Honestly sorry as in spirit at least, this company had it. Once.

Irrelevant and rhetorical; do they have an in-house pancake store? An in-house burger joint maybe? You skin those two baby whales on the couch, you could feed a couple of villages for a month.

 

[Darkzone]

Overload on "awesome power and effects".
I will still try it out, but it certainly will be not a good game, at least for me.

 

[mutonizer]

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Cooldown & Status Effect, the cRPG

I just do not understand...

 

[BlackGoat]

Looks like Diablo 3 with all the floating numbers and spell effects. What an eyesore.

 

[Fever]

I like that when equipping a new weapon, the mage says "this will be FUN". Ah, the forbidden word: Sawyer should be the one voicing him for extra edginess.

As for the game itself, I'm glad they didn't use KS, EA or any of that shit, and I'm cautiously optimistic about the outcome.

Even if I ended up not liking Tyranny, I'm still pleased we are getting more isometric RPGs. Can't discuss the narrative nor the story yet, but the art department (camera, environment, graphics, music) DOES recall PoE a lot. That is a positive thing in my book, but I understand that many prestigious codexians might think otherwise, because clearly "pushing a studio forward" must mean to follow the Dragon Age/Fallout route.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

MiKey MoonShine O_O 1 day ago
Really impressive actually, I especially like the look of the spell system. I initially thought it might limit the amount of truly unique spells you could do but this does not seem to be the case.
5 upvotes

Galantirr 2 days ago
It has a very "Pillars of Eternity" feel to it - A good thing!
15 upvotes

TargusSirius 1 day ago
Tyranny looks great guys! Obsidian is probably one of the best rpg makers out there!
4 upvotes

StylesisTNA 1 day ago
You had me with the AJ Styles shirt.

:kwafuckyeah:

 

[DeepOcean]

"Awesome, he used fire rain on the white spirits."

Spirits barely lost a single tick of life.

"Hey, look to our awesome purple fart debuff cloud."

Enemies die a bit less slowly than the glacial pace they were dying before.

Now we have cooldows because we learned popamole is what sells from Pillars of Eternity.

Proceed to reuse the same powers over and over and over gain on every single fight.

"Look how our dungeon is awesome! Stairs move now."

Proceed on half an hour of clicking on enemies to die, walking on empty halls and "solve" "puzzles" that would bore a third grader. Diablo had more personality.

You know, I long the days where it didn't took the entire damage output of the party, 30 seconds of relentless pounding to take one trash enemy down.

I long the day where you could kill Kangaxx and all the dragons of Baldur's Gate 2 on half the time it took for killing a bane, they are really fearsome creatures.

Can't wait for the super hardcore Paths of Damn difficulty where enemies will die even slowly.

"Evil won, guys!"

Sure Obsidian, I can see that with my own eyes.

 

[Bubbles]

Big, flashy abilities + cooldown based system + no friendly fire seems like a losing combination. Unless the final game has far fewer filler battles than the demo, I think it's going to feel quite monotonous.

At least in Pillars you could burn through trash mob groups with rest spam.

 

[Roguey]

You know, I long the days where it didn't took the entire damage output of the party, 30 seconds of relentless pounding to take one trash enemy down.

Yeah, instead it took 30 seconds of relentless missing.

 

[DeepOcean]

You know, I long the days where it didn't took the entire damage output of the party, 30 seconds of relentless pounding to take one trash enemy down.

Yeah, instead it took 30 seconds of relentless missing.

I couldn't disagree more, sure, you missed more on the BGs and glance more on this game, but that is irrelevant because unless your characters were really really awful on purpose, regular fights wouldn't take this long, most enemies with exception of a few selected fights would go down quick, this is painfully long, unless Obsidian, for some weird reason, used a really under leveled party for the presentation, otherwise this is close to unplayable on hard if that is how long an average fight will take. I mean, four characters pounding on some trash mob shouldn't take that long at all. You kill quick or you die quick, there is no point in wasting the player time. Fuck, those fights are taking longer than most PoE fights on PotD, if that makes you less butthurt.

 

[hilfazer]

Big, flashy abilities + cooldown based system + no friendly fire seems like a losing combination. Unless the final game has far fewer filler battles than the demo, I think it's going to feel quite monotonous.

At least in Pillars you could burn through trash mob groups with rest spam.

Perhaps lack of Josh Sawyer is not that good.
Who would have guessed.


OTOH spellcrafting system looks interesting and it is this kind of thing that could easily be butchered with balancing.

 

[Excidium II]

OTOH spellcrafting system looks interesting and it is this kind of thing that could easily be butchered with balancing.

Au contraire, without good balance it's just gonna end up like spellcraftng in two turds 2 where nothing beats just pew pew elemental bolts.

 

[vivec]

Looks like an MMO.

 

[Roguey]

I couldn't disagree more, sure, you missed more on the BGs and glance more on this game, but that is irrelevant because unless your characters were really really awful on purpose, regular fights wouldn't take this long, most enemies with exception of a few selected fights would go down quick, this is painfully long, unless Obsidian, for some weird reason, used a really under leveled party for the presentation, otherwise this is close to unplayable on hard if that is how long an average fight will take. I mean, four characters pounding on some trash mob shouldn't take that long at all. You kill quick or you die quick, there is no point in wasting the player time. Fuck, those fights are taking longer than most PoE fights on PotD, if that makes you less butthurt.

Battles that are resolved in seconds aren't tactical.

Tyranny's supposed to be something like 20 hours, so your preference would make it more like 10.

 

[vivec]

Yeah, instead it took 30 seconds of relentless missing.

Obsidian, evolving bad games to the next level. Worse.

 

[Bubbles]

Battles that are resolved in seconds aren't tactical.

I'd say the outcome of most PoE encounters is determined in the first 3-4 seconds of battle. If your disabling AoE hits, you're usually golden.

 

[Haba]

Why do they bother making dungeons if all they can come up with is a boring grey maze where you fight boring trash mobs?

 

[Bubbles]

RPG needs to have dungeons.

 

[Johannes]

I couldn't disagree more, sure, you missed more on the BGs and glance more on this game, but that is irrelevant because unless your characters were really really awful on purpose, regular fights wouldn't take this long, most enemies with exception of a few selected fights would go down quick, this is painfully long, unless Obsidian, for some weird reason, used a really under leveled party for the presentation, otherwise this is close to unplayable on hard if that is how long an average fight will take. I mean, four characters pounding on some trash mob shouldn't take that long at all. You kill quick or you die quick, there is no point in wasting the player time. Fuck, those fights are taking longer than most PoE fights on PotD, if that makes you less butthurt.

Battles that are resolved in seconds aren't tactical.

Tyranny's supposed to be something like 20 hours, so your preference would make it more like 10.

If there's content worth 10 hours of good gameplay it should be 10 hours, not 20.

Fights that consist of repeatedly spamming the same abilities without thinking aren't tactical.

 

[Bubbles]

Fights that consist of repeatedly spamming the same abilities without thinking aren't tactical.

The AI will fight those battles for you, so you can go and do something else for the duration. Seems a sensible compromise.

 

[Johannes]

 

[hpstg]

The more they reveal about the game, the more



it looks.

The original pitch (with some reservations of how "kewl" the "evil has won" bullshit was supposed to sound), had a lot of merit. The more I see of it the less hope I have that it will even try to offset some of the bad design choices with some character. I can't believe that there is no "high profile" RPG title release for this year, that I'm actually eager to at least try. WTF happened.