Addendum: I played it again, this time on the rebel path and have additional thoughts.
There's plenty of text, but fewer text walls
There are still too many text walls, which is particularly noticeable on a replay. Some of it is my fault, but it's also the game's fault because it hides things that modify favor/wrath and loyalty/fear in non-critical nodes which encourages exploring them. Baldur's Gate had the right idea long ago by putting all text about the
lore in books that lore chumps can dive into to their heart's content while keeping actual dialogue free of non-pertinent history/civics lessons.
I played as a woman this time and noticed that there are far too many playersexual NPCs at the beginning of the game who give you the same flirtatious lines they give male characters. I believe Obsidian should have done a pass to make some of the women straight and some of the men exclusively interested in women (having guys flirt with guys without explicit prompting doesn't end well as Bioware found out with Anders).
C&C and narrative reactivity, while certainly there, wasn't as impressive as I thought it would be. For example, you're presented with the option to betray the rebels after getting on their good side
However I don't doubt that Eb runs away after you select attack given that the scenario plays out more or less the same (with palette-swapped enemies), even down to the boss fight in the hall. Felt contrived, like they were too afraid of having you undercut their narrative with an anticlimax. If you're really into going through this with different builds I suppose it's nice that you can read extremely different dialogue at least four times.
I traveled with Verse, Kills-in-Shadow, and Sirin this time around. Warmed up to Verse, remain neutral-positive about KiS, and I still dislike Sirin, but only because of her personality, not because she's poorly written with the exception of one particular poorly-worded sentence in what's otherwise quality banter:
And on the subject of of Robert Land's writing, I'm reasonably confident he's the one who dropped this Monty Python reference. My second choice would be Kirsch. There's no way Starks could have done it (though I'm confident she wrote the cheerily-annoying Acacia whose text walls I didn't bother to screencap).
Of course MacLean dropped a Dredd reference that I skipped out on the first time around since my character said No to drugs.
I also noticed quite a few more weird dialogue bugs in act 3 this time around. I guess the rebel path wasn't tested nearly as well as the disfavored. I personally blame their hack QA lead.
I played on normal this time, and while less demanding, there were few points where I could cruise all the way on autopilot. The spell customization was indeed fun to mess around with, though the cooldown system meant there was a lot of rote repetition (start nearly every fight with 2-eventually-3 rimespikes as an alpha strike, then just go down the list until everything's on cooldown). I've come to the conclusion that the PoE/Tyranny style of frequently having enemies with mixed armor types is actually annoying, and it should be more like D&D where it occurs less frequently.
I was able to go through the entire thing without being concerned too much about strategic character-building/pre-buffing up until the Bleden Mark/Tunon one-two punch. Those tough sponges required my all. When Tunon was near-death, he cast some sort of insta-kill spell on all my party members, which made for a rather tense and
epic stand-off (though I suppose that player-punch could screw some builds/players and they'd have to do both fights all over again
).
I don't plan to revisit Tyranny any time in the near-future, but if I ever do pick it up again, I'll likely play it on storytime just to check out Voices-of-Nerat's/Bleden Mark's paths. While fun in doses, I've had my fill of its combat. Tyranny would be better if it were 15 hours or so like Alpha Protocol, South Park, and Dungeon Siege III since it really doesn't have enough of interest to support its abbreviated-by-RPG-standards 25-40 hour playing time. Blame it on Feargus for raiding its budget to finish Pillars of Eternity.
