Interview Matt Chat 453: Brian Heins on Tyranny

[Infinitron]

Tags: Brian Heins; Matt Barton; Obsidian Entertainment; The Outer Worlds; Tyranny

Matt Barton has finally uploaded the next episode of his interview with Obsidian designer Brian Heins. It starts out with some more discussion about The Outer Worlds, regarding the advantages of creating a relatively small game, before moving on as expected to Tyranny. In response to a question contributed by none other than George Ziets, Brian describes the origins of the game's setting, which was originally created by Chris Avellone and then further fleshed out by Brian, Matt MacLean and the other leads. It continued to evolve over the course of the game's development, including for example the concept of the Archons being powered by belief. There are some confessions, too. Brian admits that Tyranny's combat was poorly balanced and that its ending was rushed, which happened because he realized partway through development that the game was too linear and that its story had to be revised.

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Other topics discussed in this episode include Brian's love of working with concept artists, his thoughts on combatless RPGs, and Tyranny's take on evil. It sounds like the topic of next week's episode is going to be South Park: The Stick of Truth.

 

[SausageInYourFace]

Tyranny's combat was bland as all hell but the setting and the story was pretty cool, actually. It is a bit of a shame it sold so poorly that we will probably never get a sequel.

 

[turkishronin]

Tyranny needed more enemy variety than combat balance. There's only two kinds of enemies: generic human fighters and spooky ghosts

 

[Lady_Error]

I like Tyranny. And not surprisingly, the best ideas in it seem to have come from Avellone.

 

[Lilliput McHammersmith]

Tyranny's combat was bland as all hell but the setting and the story was pretty cool, actually. It is a bit of a shame it sold so poorly that we will probably never get a sequel.

I liked the Magic system, it was unique for an isometric cRPG, but yes the enemy variety was lacking.

Also the companion system was really really cool. So actually I have to disagree with you, I really enjoyed the combat, even if it lacked some of the insanity and depth of BG2. It was different.

 

[luj1]

Tranny is one of the worst turds I have ever played (but at least its an RPG unlike The Cuck Worlds)

- based on PoE ruleset (a proven wreck)
- you fight literally 2 or 3 enemies
- zero encounter design, linear combat slog
- fake choices
- not great writing (better than PoE)
- annoying mandatory companions
- small maps, nothing to explore
- RTwP

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[vortex]

Did anybody ask about Tyranny II and why should Owlcats make it?

 

[Lilliput McHammersmith]

Tranny is one of the worst turds I have ever played (but at least its an RPG unlike The Cuck Worlds)

- based on PoE ruleset (a proven wreck)
- you fight literally 2 or 3 enemies
- zero encounter design, linear combat slog
- fake choices
- not great writing (better than PoE)
- annoying mandatory companions
- small maps, nothing to explore
- RTwP

While I certainly see your criticisms of the game, and I think most are valid, I think that the choice simulator you go through at the beginning has a pretty decent impact on the rest of the game. I do think it was rushed out the door long before it was ready and would have benefited from a more robust rule system.

I also really enjoyed the story, even if the companions were not my favorite of all time. I did really like Barik and the Scribe guy. The music is also top notch.

But yes, after playing KOTC2, I can admit that perhaps Pillars has more flaws than I originally thought. KOTC 2's ruleset is much much better than Pillars.

 

[Thac0]

Did anybody ask about Tyranny II and why should Owlcats make it?

Game bombed pretty hard, while the world is cool there is not much more to milk there.

I enjoyed the game, short and concise, good factions, some characters were cool (the antagonists and faction leaders particularily), it invented the hyperlinked lore dumps in rpg text, which is a really cool tech that cuts down on retarded POE style exposition dumps a lot, good magic system, cool setting. RTWP and fake choices are absolutely heavy downsides.

I wish more people would copy the hyperlink stuff. Tyranny relied on it maybe a bit too heavily, but the tech is really good in theory and can lead to a much smoother early game when you are still easing into the world. A game that throws you into a hypercomplicated world like Malazan while using those hyperlinks would be highly interesting. Seems like that tech was only picked up by strategy games and tactical games.

 

[HeatEXTEND]

God bless tyranny, made me realize I do still enjoy cRPGs, just not the shitty ones that made up the so called "revival". When a game is so shit you just go "Wait a minute.....it's not me?! It's these stupid piece of shit cRPGs! I STILL LIKE cRPGS". Bless obsidian.

I liked the Magic system

Lame shit, would have been cool if you could freely apply all the modifiers across spells. It's total blue balls.

 

[Kalin]

Why are you posting this shit? It's embarrassing. Just forget it, let it go.

 

[Zariusz]

Combat was boring af and every time i started battle i felt tired. Setting was interesting, though i was disapointed when descriptions said that this was end of bronze age setting and it really wasnt. I liked Lantry and Barik.

 

[luj1]

Why are you posting this shit? It's embarrassing. Just forget it, let it go.

You realize you are talking to Infinitron? Whenever an (ex)Obsidian employee somewhere farts we will know about it

 

[Roguey]

After the balance patches I wouldn't call it poorly balanced, there was just too much of it. Should have only been a few combat encounters per map max. The pacing was just fine at the start of act 1 and became less so over time.

rape fueled faction?

That was Matt MacLean. Avellone would have balked at the rape references in Tyranny, it's even more edgy than Cook-Cook.

 

[Darkozric]

Great, another shitty obsidian video that nobody asked for, yay!

 

[Hobo Elf]

Might have enjoyed Tyranny more if they let me make my own party. As usual, the premades are annoying with poor and uninteresting writing. Every single one of them. The only virtue of the game were the CGI backgrounds.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Infinitron]

Reminder:

The RPG Codex has some traditions. One of these is posting every Matt Barton interview that's minimally relevant to our interests. He's a friend of this website.

After the balance patches I wouldn't call it poorly balanced, there was just too much of it.

Brian meant "balanced" in a more general sense, including the number of encounters. Not just Sawyerian number-tuning.

I like Tyranny. And not surprisingly, the best ideas in it seem to have come from Avellone.

This could be true, but we don't know that for sure. This game has quite a long history: https://kotaku.com/tyranny-emerged-from-the-game-that-nearly-sank-obsidian-1767592617

“The story of Tyranny’s origins go pretty far back. We pitched a project called Fury in 2006 that was based in a world that had been laid waste by a magical apocalypse. From there, we started thinking more about the idea, and started pitching a game called Defiance in 2009. Defiance is where we really embraced the idea of making a game in a world where evil already won.”

“Move ahead a couple of years, and we did take some of the ideas from Defiance along with some new ones and pitched a new game called Stormlands. This pitch became the Xbox One launch game we were working on. However, that game was more like Fury when it came to it being about playing in a world after a magical apocalypse.”

“After that game had been cancelled, we returned to the ideas we had come up with for Defiance. We began building a more in-depth world around the idea along with thinking how could we really let the player understand that evil won the war. That spawned the thought about letting the player take part in the conquering of the world itself as a part of character creation.”

Obsidian developers who have been interviewed about it have been kind of inconsistent about this. Some of them (like Feargus) say that Tyranny was an evolution of those previous projects, while others have said it really had nothing to do with them. It would be fun if they released all of their design documents someday so we could see for ourselves how it evolved over time, and who created what.

 

[Van-d-all]

Game bombed pretty hard, while the world is cool there is not much more to milk there.

And the setting, being virtually the best thing in the game is already a Black Company knock-off...

 

[taxalot]

When is Cleve coming to Matt Chat ?

I'm still waiting.

 

[Thac0]

Game bombed pretty hard, while the world is cool there is not much more to milk there.

And the setting, being virtually the best thing in the game is already a Black Company knock-off...

I have yet to read Black Company, but as long as it is inspired by, and not copied from without understanding, I generally see no problem with that. Great artists steal and improve.

 

[Roguey]

I wonder if as native you got any idea where is root of that

I'd guess that it's just more entertaining when people go crazy instead of remaining calm.

 

[jac8awol]

Tranny was pretty awful but if this thread gets people talking about Malazan and Black Company stuff I will gladly give this thread 2 thumbs up.

 

[Roguey]

Oh, by the way, I've now watched the video and saw that it was Felipe who asked if they considered making Tyranny without combat. Fuck off, disco commie.