Tyranny + Bastard's Wound Expansion Thread

[Bubbles]

Enemy types, absolutely. Encounter design? Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Well, you haven't actually played the game yet. If Trias's prison were ported over into Tyranny, it would be the best dungeon in the game.

 

[Lhynn]

Even Torment's combat was better

I am somewhat skeptical of this claim.

You shouldnt be. PoE and Tranny have irredemably bad combat.

Enemy types, absolutely. Encounter design? Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

While encounter design from a narrative standpoint is decent in tranny, gameplay wise its about the same as DA:Os deep roads. Except with less enemy variety.

 

[Roguey]

While encounter design from a narrative standpoint is decent in tranny, gameplay wise its about the same as DA:Os deep roads. Except with less enemy variety.

The Deep Roads was too combat-dense, but it also had a lot of fights I enjoyed.

The only demanding fights I remember from Torment were the (completely optional of course) robot wizard at the end of the maze and the demon from the box. A lot of people seem to agree that the fight at the end of Tyranny's act 1 is pretty tough so it just needs one more to match it, two to exceed it.

 

[Fairfax]

Even Torment's combat was better

I am somewhat skeptical of this claim.

and had more variety in enemy types and encounter design.

Enemy types, absolutely. Encounter design? Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

I'm not saying PS:T had stellar combat or encounter design, mind you. I'm just saying it's better than Tyranny. Tyranny's dungeon is a joke and most encounters have the same enemies in very similar positions.
Torment's encounter design not that bad, the problem was the lack of complexity and challenge in the combat mechanics failed to make them work, which made most encounters feel pointless. At least Torment's encounters are pretty fast, which is one of the reasons I don't get why people complain about its combat so much. Probably takes <5% of the player's time in the game and doesn't require a lot of thought.

While encounter design from a narrative standpoint is decent in tranny, gameplay wise its about the same as DA:Os deep roads. Except with less enemy variety.

The Deep Roads was too combat-dense, but it also had a lot of fights I enjoyed.

The only demanding fights I remember from Torment were the (completely optional of course) robot wizard at the end of the maze and the demon from the box. A lot of people seem to agree that the fight at the end of Tyranny's act 1 is pretty tough so it just needs one more to match it, two to exceed it.

I had no problem with it at all, and that's way before some of the companions and tactics become insanely overpowered.

 

[Lhynn]

The Deep Roads was too combat-dense, but it also had a lot of fights I enjoyed.

Yer basically getting the same deal, tons of awful fights with a few decent ones sprinkled across the entire game, the enconter design is just based on different enemy party composition and size but ocassionally you get a named guy that has x5 the hp the normal units have, that hits harder than they do too.

The last fight of act 1 is just hard if you are retarded, you can end any fight using combo attacks, which are the equivalent of them super attacks in DA:I. And you can use those in every fight, but i usually dont because im not sure how much they delay me when it comes to skill xp.

 

[Fairfax]

The Deep Roads was too combat-dense, but it also had a lot of fights I enjoyed.

Yer basically getting the same deal, tons of awful fights with a few decent ones sprinkled across the entire game, the enconter design is just based on different enemy party composition and size but ocassionally you get a named guy that has x5 the hp the normal units have, that hits harder than they do too.

The last fight of act 1 is just hard if you are retarded, you can end any fight using combo attacks, which are the equivalent of them super attacks in DA:I. And you can use those in every fight, but i usually dont because im not sure how much they delay me when it comes to skill xp.

I was assuming the last fight of act 1 is the last when you assault the Citadel. Is that it? If so, there's nothing special about that encounter. They throw 7 enemies against your 4, with 2 being archers and another 2 being mages (1 is Eb). The archers and the other mage are pretty easy to kill, then it becomes a very easy and standard fight.

 

[Lhynn]

I was assuming the last fight of act 1 is the last when you assault the Citadel. Is that it? If so, there's nothing special about that encounter. They throw 7 enemies against your 4, with 2 being archers and another 2 being mages (1 is Eb). The archers and the other mage are pretty easy to kill, then it becomes a very easy and standard fight.

You always fight against the second in command of a faction, be it the blues, the purples or the reds. The leader has increased stats compared to anyone else at that stage of the game.
You can also get rid of 2 members of the enemy party with a skill check.

 

[Lacrymas]

I only managed to get rid of 1, using the athletics skill, I didn't have the enough of the others, but the game didn't give me an option to use them anyway.

 

[Lhynn]

I only managed to get rid of 1, using the athletics skill, I didn't have the enough of the others, but the game didn't give me an option to use them anyway.

Lore to get rid of the mages, subterfuge to get rid of the archers and athletics to get rid of the melees i think it was.

 

[Roguey]

The single-player MMO grows even stronger

Kevin Jordan - designer on World of Warcraft, three of its expansions, and Armored Warfare.

 

[Excidium II]

Who's Matt Perez?

 

[Kaivokz]

So how many different "paths" are there through this game? Five? The three standard Disfavored/Chorus/Rebels, and then:

Spoiler

4) Siding with Bleden Mark against Tuon and the other Archons (going to the Burning Library instead of meeting Tuon).
5) Siding with no one (burning Bleden's missive and attacking everyone)?

Are there any others?

 

[Excidium II]

4) If you go to Tunon first he teleports there, didn't know those two cancelled out.

 

[Roguey]

Who's Matt Perez?

Area designer from PoE.

 

[Lilura]

Even Torment's combat was better

 

[Excidium II]

It was better tbh. By virtue of having less busywork.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

Weirdly enough, I blame the Germanics.

Something I've noticed as a continuing trend of a more Central European influence on cRPGs has been the following:

A preference for 'realism' over magic
A preference for micro-combat detail over simple variety
A preference for humanoid versus similar humanoid encounters over exotic enemies

And all three points are kind of the same, but until you see the points separated you might not necessarily realise they are all the same point if someone mentioned a dislike for one particular issue in isolation.

You know how it goes, long lectures about whether a spear is superior to a sword, what their striking distance is, are they equipping the right kind of spear and sword for the time period, blah blah blah, yadda yadda yadda, you've been bored by it a million times before. It's one of those topics you either get fanatically insane about, or you simply don't give that much of a shit in the slightest, there's very little middle ground. When fighting a hydra, for example, then the hydra's attacks can be whatever the game designer wants them to be.

While combat is still combat and no matter what it involves it is still cRPG combat, whether you fight another dude or a floating one-eyed beholder, there's a completely different mindset at work when designing a combat system around the unrealistic rather than the realistic that will effect the entire gameplay as a whole. When you fight a beholder, your advantage wont be having a 15% increase in melee damage. When you fight a beholder, your advantage wont be a longer blade over a shorter blade, your primary advantage over a beholder will be having someone in the party who is mentally strong. Someone who can withstand the paralysing attack and then either cure allies or deal with the enemy themselves. As you can imagine, this effects everything from character builds to loot before you even get to the combat.

What seems to pass for complexity in a lot of these modern games from this more germanic interpretation of the genre is the intense detail of the specifics of how combat works, on a supremely intense level, whereby you are more concerned with all the different micro-details of how a sword interacts with its enemy than worrying about whether you have enough acid protection. For example, phrases like Riposte, Deflect, Evasion, Block, Parry, Attacks of Opportunity, Disengagement, etc etc all go deeper and deeper into the micro-bile of what makes a swordsman interesting from a reality perspective, however, from a cRPG perspective, simply fighting a beetle that also spits acid provides enough complexity by itself to not require any of that detail in order to feel thoroughly 'in deep' with the game's mechanics and systems.

A beetle with a basic dumb physical attack + acid spitting being attacked by a dumb swordsman with just a dumb prod at enemy skill >>>>>>> creates a more complex and deep cRPG than >>>>>>>>>>>> Two humans engaging in a 'realistic' duel parrying and riposting and etc etc. Because once you've parried and riposted a dozen guys who are also parrying and reposting then you're bored of that and are ready for a different encounter, but so much effort and detail has gone into the system that you cannot develop all of those systems just for a dozen encounters, but with the beetles it's more a matter of general loot, healing, speed of the kill, tactical positioning which don't consume all the game's detailed combat systems, leaving the dev free to make the next enemy, I dunno, a bat that breathes fire.

While D&D made reference to all the different battle micro-complexities, they were very much in the background and took a much weaker priority than you'll see in the more germanic style of PNP, such as Dark Eye, which puts the micro into the foreground and moves the magic into the background. Games like Gothic, Witcher, Eisenwald, Drakensang, AoD, all have this bias, where imagining the game you imagine two dudes 'duking it out' before you imagine something more exotic. People used to complain if a game had 'too much' of one specific enemy type, be it Elves, Dwarves or Orcs, and the reason they did that was because Elves, Dwarves and Orcs are just reskinned humans, and killing humans over and over again is boring. No matter how micro-detailed the combat is.

Tyranny doesn't appeal to me because its micro-combat complexity stifles it into something boring, something that is overall simply not complex enough for my tastes.

 

[Excidium II]

holy shit words

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

holy shit words

And I've still posted less words in this thread than you

 

[Excidium II]

ZING

 

[Fairfax]

And Tyranny: lack of party composition options, dull copy-pasted encounter design, no enemy variety, smaller party, useless consumables, hack and slash sequences, MMO cooldowns, level scaling and the skyrim-like progression, which is the most twisted form of level-scaling: players are punished with less XP for ending encounters quickly.

Torment's combat also takes less time. If I had to choose between two bad combat systems, I'd pick the fastest one every single time.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

the most twisted form of level-scaling: players are punished with less XP for ending encounters quickly.

This is pretty bonkers.

 

[Lhynn]

At this point i dont even know how you can defend Tyrannys combat, its inane, you have to constantly pause, you never get to see the combat play out, you microing every single trivial shit, when you lose half the time is because of the retarded lack of feedback or material time to react to anything. Someone runs from you you run behind them, doesnt matter if there are 900 motherfuckers already engaged and ready to strike you, spells duration measured in seconds, every skill in the game on a ticking clock, you start the fight using the same skills always, because you want them on a cooldown to reuse them as soon as possible.
Enemy composition is always rougly the same, both in classes and numbers. This shit still has the same problems than PoE did, and its hands down one of the worst things you could be doing with your time. Like even within the genre and limiting yourself to 2016 you still have much better stuff to play available.

And oh my god the loading times, the fucking loading times, it should be a crime, the game looks like shit, the maps are ridiculously small, theres no exploration, all the C&C in this game seems to be balanced in such a way that it doesnt fucking matter, you never feel like youve made a mistake or a bad judgement call, but the same remains true for the opposite, you never feel like you made the right call. Shit, shit shit fuck shit.

 

[Lilura]

Loading time "fixes" atm are get an SSD and disconnect non-standard networks.

You can change shadow setting by holding down shift when you double-click exe. Has helped some ppl. As has cleaning out save folder every now and then.

But yeah, Obsidian and optimization. Don't go together.

Who is defending combat system? But PS:T's combat is not better. It's their execution that needs work (encounter design). Patches will prob address some short-comings here, and in skill/talent balance.

Also, Cooldowns > rest-spam Vancian. Vancian is superior with strict rest restrictions, thoughful itemization and solid resource managment, but only a few RPGs like Swordflight employ this for decent fight-by-fight tactics and overall dungeon strategy. The IEs rely on the player self-imposing restrictions, which is weak.

 

[Efe]

Wouldn't that make sense as a fluid difficulty system? easy fights end up giving you less xp/progression while harder fights yield better returns, sure you can game the system but that is completely your choice and i feel its better that its up to player to decide.