Review RPG Codex Review: Tyranny - Kyros Demands Better

[Prime Junta]

I guess DA:O's combat starts out like what you described, but it becomes incoherent in the late game as you gain tons of abilities you don't really need, your stats inflate into the high double digits, and you discover the power of mage spam

Likely. I started replaying it a bit now. It's holding up well so far, but I've only done one of the treaty missions (mage circle).

I do remember being really bored towards the end of the game and ultimately never quite finished it. The last event of note I remember was making Loghain a Grey Warden, quit shortly after that.

 

[Tigranes]

Making comparisons to other games is a rhetorical disaster on the Codex, because (1) you now have to explain exactly how you assess that other game to serve as point of comparison, and (2) they will then disagree and you will just be arguing about the other game.

Tyranny combat is shit, but rest assured if I said it's worse than POE someone will jump in and go HAHAHA NO POE SUX SO BAD (even if they agree that Tyranny is even worse).

 

[Average Manatee]

Was holding off on giving PoE a 2nd go to see if Tyranny would be better. Looks like I'll be shopping for the White March this Christmas.

What is wrong with Obsidian exactly? Are the slavishly focused on appeasing some dumb focus test group's sense of what the hardest difficulty levels should be like? Is there some 'creative' nitwit who insists on starting from scratch on every game's mechanics? Is everything just being rushed and incomplete?

 

[agris]

and you discover the power of mage spam

don't get us started on how you can play a mage while the templars are prosecuting them and working with you simultaneously.

 

[Kev Inkline]

and you discover the power of mage spam

don't get us started on how you can play a mage while the templars are prosecuting them and working with you simultaneously.

Or that no one cares for your forbidden skills in bloodmagic in the first place.

 

[agris]

and you discover the power of mage spam

don't get us started on how you can play a mage while the templars are prosecuting them and working with you simultaneously.

Or that no one cares for your forbidden skills in bloodmagic in the first place.

that's entirely incongruous with the templar plot thread, a major plot in the game. you interact with them regularly, cast (blood)magic in front of them, etc. Remember the arcane regulatory body in BG2? It was at least thematically consistent. all pretensions of giving a shit were dropped in DA:O.

 

[Delterius]

that's entirely incongruous with the templar plot thread, a major plot in the game. you interact with them regularly, cast (blood)magic in front of them, etc. Remember the arcane regulatory body in BG2? It was at least thematically consistent. all pretensions of giving a shit were dropped in DA:O.

Being a Mage in itself wasn't a problem in DA:O. Grey Wardens are supposed to be edgelords and above the common law. What a lot of people don't know is that there was a check where Wynne and the Templars confront you about your (potential) Blood Magic, forcing you to kill both the circle mages and the templars. Since Wynne would also turn on you if you decided to kill the surviving mages, the designers felt that there were too many possible ways to lose her and that was Bad for some reason. One popular mod restores the scene.

DAO is like the poster-child for bad encounter design. Soooo mind-nubbing boring.

DA:O has its moments. Some monsters are interesting enough and for what its worth, enemy humans could once in a blue moon become a pain. There's nothing like 4 archers behind a barricade spamming Scattershot. The engine itself was, at least, more functional than most RTwP offerings since the IE games. The series could have gone up from there by expanding the beastiary and nerfing the fuck out of magic. But instead it went sideways by trying to turn into some pseudo-Action. A waste but, in the end, we got served by better devs.

 

[imweasel]

What is wrong with Obsidian exactly?

Hmmm. Donuts, soft drinks, triple cheese whoppers and developers en masse that say "wuts dat?" when somebody mentions the Baldur's Gate Trilogy.

Oh, and a so called "design director" that hates BGT.

 

[Average Manatee]

What is wrong with Obsidian exactly?

Hmmm. Donuts, soft drinks, triple cheese whoppers and developers en masse that say "wuts dat?" when somebody mentions the Baldur's Gate Trilogy.

Oh, and a so called "design director" that hates BGT.

I don't demand the game be BG3, just that it have half-decent combat and encounters. Not even being on the level of DA:O is pretty sad.

 

[Crescent Hawk]

Its an okay review. The game is good.

However the system is dogshit, how can you make heavy armor so meaningless.

 

[Roguey]

(Reminder: You can sleep undead in DAO)

False.

http://dragonage.wikia.com/wiki/Immunity

The Sleep Effect can be caused by the Sleep spell.

The following creatures are immune: Golem, Broodmother, Broodmother Tentacle, Arcane Horror, Wisp, Abomination, Revenant, Rage Demon, Corpse, Shade, Ash Wraith, Witherfang, Wild Sylvan, Skeleton, Pride Demon, Archdemon, Grand Oak.

DA:O had a ton of great encounters imo. Also a significant amount of trash.

(the "but the system breaks after x levels" is pretty much the norm in RPGs, so one that doesn't would be exceptional)

 

[Ninjerk]

Tagline should be: "The Game That Broke Bubbles"

 

[Shilandra]

Question. After a few playthroughs I noticed that the bane's connection to gravelight is never really expounded upon.

Like, if a metal rod spends enough time around bane it can become "banetouched" and start dealing out gravelight damage. But at the same time, the bane absolutely hate gravelight. It does extra damage to them, drains extra health from them and even scares the shit out of them in the case of one of Eb's abilities. So they have some sort of gravelight power but at the same time are repulsed by the stuff.

Considering gravelights inherent connection to terratus grave (the always visible tide locked moon) and the bane's inherent connection to the old walls that seems like a matter really worth Notice and discussion. But I don't recall eb or lantry ever talking about it.

For all the other lore speculations characters talk about in this game it seems like a missed opportunity

 

[Prime Junta]

Question. After a few playthroughs I noticed that the bane's connection to gravelight is never really expounded upon.

The Bane and the Oldwalls in general were left mysterious. Either the writers don't know themselves or they left it intentionally vague. The Oldwall dungeons are so utterly generic that it suggests the former; if they did have something in mind I would've expected to find some hints there.

 

[Xzylvador]

This thread is becoming too tl;dr for what appears to be a bad to mediocre game I might pick up for 5$ after the Enhanced Directors Special Super Deluxe Complete Edition is released and patched.
Could someone point me to the 'What happened to Bubbles?!' thread instead? Bound to be much more interesting and contain much more drama.

 

[Prime Junta]

Could someone point me to the 'What happened to Bubbles?!' thread instead? Bound to be much more interesting and contain much more drama.

ur welcome

 

[Suicidal]

I haven't played Tyranny yet but people saying it has worse combat than DA:O is worrisome and I find it hard to believe. I fucking hate RTwP combat, I've yet to play an RPG with RTwP combat that would make me go "damn, that is some good fighting right here". I hated the combat in PoE, I hated the combat in Neverwinter games and I hated the combat in the old IE games (the only reason I find games like Baldur's Gate 2 not as bad in that regard is that they actually have interesting combat encounters against powerful enemies that force you to do things differently, especially in the expansion and Watcher's Keep dungeon).

But Dragon Age Origins currently holds the shit-dripping trophy for worst RTwP combat I have ever suffered through because almost every single encounter in that game is defeated using the same tactic. Well, two tactics actually - one for bosses and one for trash mobs.

When I fought bosses all I did was cycle through my crowd control spells like Cone of Cold, Crushing Prison (or however it was called) to keep the enemy almost permanently stunned for some time, and when everything was on CD I just tanked with my tank and healed with my healers. When the tank was low health I used force field on him and by the time it would end my heal spells and mana would recover (I had two mages use the spell that recovers mana for othercharacters on each other). The process was the same for nearly every boss enemy except for a very few that summoned shit at my casters' feet (like the giant abomination with tentacles).

When I fought trash mobs I just ran into the middle of them with my tank, used force field on him and then cast a few AoE damage over time spells at his location and waited till everyone died.

The only encounters that gave me trouble where those that spawned lots of enemies behind my back when the fight started, so I usually had to hide behind some corner first and then repeat the above procedure.

I also was playing on the hardest difficulty for whatever reason so every boss fight took ages to go through.

It was just so mind-numbingly boring, like I was filling the same check list each battle and apart from a few exceptions I never felt like I was in any danger. I remember fighting one of the revenants in a tiny room and it just kept slashing at my force-fielded tank doing 0 damage and the rest of my party was just pelting it with autoattacks standing almost next to him and it never occurred to him to switch targets.

 

[Prime Junta]

Suicidal Don't play Tyranny. You'll hate it even more.

In re DA:O (and Tyranny), IMO the combat gets worse at higher difficulties. Hitpoint bloat makes the fights drag on and strongly pushes you towards cheese tactics like you described. By modern standards it's plenty challenging even at Normal.

 

[Suicidal]

Suicidal Don't play Tyranny. You'll hate it even more.

In re DA:O (and Tyranny), IMO the combat gets worse at higher difficulties. Hitpoint bloat makes the fights drag on and strongly pushes you towards cheese tactics like you described. By modern standards it's plenty challenging even at Normal.

I still want to give it a try. I saw a short stream of a guy playing it (that guy literally hates almost every game and the only RPGs he likes are the old Fallouts and New Vegas so he's practically a codexer) and the game looked like it could be interesting just for the conversations and roleplaying a complete douchebag. Plus that streamer was really enjoying it, which was surprising. I'll probably get it on a sale.

About Dragon Age being challenging for modern standards, well that depends on which modern standards you are talking about. Compared to degenerate shit like Oblivion and Fallout 4, well maybe it is. But recently I've been playing a lot of modern turn based dungeon crawlers that actually require you to think and use strategy and are not afraid of giving you the middle finger every once in a while and DA:O doesn't even begin to compare to that level of challenge. Even Pillars of Eternity on the highest difficulty was a lot more challenging (but not necessarily much better because fuck RTwP).

 

[Prime Junta]

I still want to give it a try. I saw a short stream of a guy playing it (that guy literally hates almost every game and the only RPGs he likes are the old Fallouts and New Vegas so he's practically a codexer) and the game looked like it could be interesting just for the conversations and roleplaying a complete douchebag. Plus that streamer was really enjoying it, which was surprising. I'll probably get it on a sale.

It is worth a spin for that, for sure. Just set your gameplay expectations very low. The best I can say about that is that it's boring-bad, not frustrating-bad, and that at lower difficulties it doesn't take long to get through them.

I found DA:O on Normal to be much harder than Pillars on Normal (which is really easy actually if you can be arsed to do anything more than select-all and auto-attack). The problem is that, like Tyranny, (and unlike Pillars) it doesn't get all that much harder when you turn up the difficulty level, the fights just take longer.

 

[Israfael]

DA:O had a better system than PoE/Tyranny in my opinion, especially in QoL department (AI editor and better hotbars), but the difficulty curve was reversed - the hardest fight, as far as i remember, was that huge ogre (or whatever it's called) in the tower where you have to light the signal, everything else was a faceroll (apart from dragon encounter in the place where you take the arthas sacred urn, but it's optional). What's hilarious, same is true for Tyranny, although if you don't take the area effect spells, it's somewhat challenging in the oldwalls and some other places.

 

[Fenix]

I remember how I played DAO - it was so boring I abandoned it at point where you met some little dinosaurus in some forgettable tonnels - I could not stand it any more, combat, incredibly enraging camera - I almost threw my monitor in a window because I was SO enraged by camera lol. Generic world, feminism, loredumps in encyclopedia, boring talks with boring characters...
That was awful....

 

[Q]

In DA:O i was just using that sigils that deny moving through - in doors or tight spaces. And then cast some aoe in room, like that storm of the century if i managed to do combo. And that's how I won most fights. Boring.

 

[Grunker]

"RPGs can be cheesed" - RPG Codex Newsdesk, December 2016

 

[Shadenuat]

I remember fighting one of the revenants in a tiny room and it just kept slashing at my force-fielded tank doing 0 damage and the rest of my party was just pelting it with autoattacks standing almost next to him

DA:O had unintended features that developers missed on, which players like codexers being unforgiving and lazy fucks exploited the hell out, obviously. OTOH that's what playtesters are supposed to get their pay for, no?

http://dragonage.wikia.com/wiki/Force_Field

The spell is actually supposed to clear all threat drawn by a force-fielded party member, but the script supposed to do that doesn't work.

http://www.nexusmods.com/dragonage/mods/1601/?

Tweak - Force Field Reduces Threat
Creatures that cannot attack their target due to being out of range or not having line of sight reduces threat on that target by 75%. This tweaks applies the same reduction if the target has a Force Field.

I sometimes just wonder who and how playtests combat in RPGs. Remember Slicken in PoE? I mean, being a playtester you would at least try 1st level spells.