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Game News Tyranny Dev Diary #12: The Spires

Infinitron

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

Brian Heins and Nick Carver did another one of their Tyranny dev streams on Paradox's Twitch channel last night. The topic this time was the game's stronghold system, which is rather unique. Tyranny's stronghold isn't one single structure, but a network of towers known as Spires that rise up from the Oldwall ruins that span across the Tiers. I was going to write a detailed summary of how the Spires work, but the new dev diary update Obsidian published today has done the work for me. Here's the stream and an excerpt:



Two of the most prominent features of the world of Terratus are the Oldwalls and the Spires. We mentioned the Oldwalls in our update about the Bane and showed some gameplay inside the Oldwalls in a previous stream. The Spires play a prominent role in the game’s narrative, and also serve as the location for the player’s base.

As you explore the Tiers you have the opportunity to gain access to several of these Spires. Claiming a Spire unlocks several gameplay benefits:

Reduced Travel Time: Each Spire is magically linked with the others. Once activated, you can teleport between your spires, reducing your travel time through the Tiers.

Upgrading Your Spires: Once you’ve acquired a Spire, you can spend money to build an upgrade on top of the Spire. You can find the details of each upgrade below. Each upgrade provides different benefits to your party, among them providing different rest bonuses when you rest at your Spire. You receive the bonuses for all of your upgrades when you rest at any of your spires.

Hiring Recruits: Once an upgrade has been built on top of a spire, you can begin hiring recruits to work for you at that upgrade. Recruits provide several functions for your party: they can train your party members in skills, they can sell unique weapons and armor, and they can produce new items for your party while they’re out adventuring.

Recruits can come from many different factions in the game, including from your enemies. With the right price, some members of factions that hate you are more than willing to work for you at your Spire. Some recruits are only available if you make certain choices during Conquest.​


The full update has the details on the four upgrades you can construct on your Spires - the Infirmary, the Library, the Forge and the Training Grounds. As you can see, it's a much more elaborate and useful system than Pillars of Eternity's stronghold. It's unclear, however, whether it'll have "events" that you need to deal with like Caed Nua's visits, quests and invasions.
 
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Looks like at least the reduced travel time will make it useful.

Nevermind, the timer is just for the beginning when you don't even have spires.
 
Last edited:

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Important factoids from the stream not mentioned in the update:

Item upgrading at the Forge improves the base item descriptor only ("Common", "Fine", "Superb", etc). You can't add additional attributes like in PoE's crafting system.

Crafting potions at the Infirmary requires an "alchemical supply" resource.

You can only train a character's skills five times every level.
 

agris

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Crafting sucks. I don't remember when was last time I didn't ignore crafting system in RPG.
The only crafting that I liked was the spell crafting system in Morrowind (with a mod that made the magicka cost reasonable) and the item upgrade system from BG1/2.
 

retamar

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The backgrounds of this game are so incredibly stylized ( in a cartoony, WoWesque way) that I particulary feel that the 2D prerendered backgrounds are a real big waste of time and resources. Why to model everything High Poly, then render and photohopped it if just looks like Divinity Original Sin?
There is absolutely no fucking point to go trough all this work for such a meager results.
 

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The backgrounds of this game are so incredibly stylized ( in a cartoony, WoWesque way) that I particulary feel that the 2D prerendered backgrounds are a real big waste of time and resources. Why to model everything High Poly, then render and photohopped it if just looks like Divinity Original Sin?
There is absolutely no fucking point to go trough all this work for such a meager results.
The high poly modells are only visible if you look at them very closer, mostly on the character screen. When playing with the regular camera it barely looks different from PoE's modells.
 

Urthor

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Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
they have done all of this in 1 year? InXile should fell ashamed...

Pre-production started in 2014, when Paradox fronted up the cash and funded the game. Actual production probably started during the production of Pillars of Eternity after scriptwriters and area designers had done their bit they'd have moved on to Tyranny.


Realistically though, this is built on Pillars of Eternity's engine, and InExile are developing the forked Unity engine for Torment for the first time. 18-24 months of devtime for an isometric RPG in 2016 with a mature engine and ~20h of content seems about right.
 

ilitarist

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Item upgrading at the Forge improves the base item descriptor only ("Common", "Fine", "Superb", etc). You can't add additional attributes like in PoE's crafting system.

Thank god. PoE equipment management was hindered by upgrades. It was easier and faster to update basic items than to look for special artifacts with fancy descriptions. They had to cheat and add special non-craftable soulbound weapons to make equipment interesting again in expansions. Also there was a forge there with an upgrade and upgrade materials were extremely limited.

Crafting sucks. I don't remember when was last time I didn't ignore crafting system in RPG.

It's even worse for me. I too think that crafting sucks in all games but I like the very idea. So I'm trying to do it but it ends up to be a chore with a minor result. Fallout New Vegas was OK partly: you could concentrate on converting ammo into a type you need and creating explosives or drugs. But it was mostly made for Hardcore mod and was supposed to give you food with Survival skill and it turned out to be useless.
 

retamar

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The high poly modells are only visible if you look at them very closer, mostly on the character screen. When playing with the regular camera it barely looks different from PoE's modells.
What are you talking about? I am referring to the background, not the characters.
 

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The high poly modells are only visible if you look at them very closer, mostly on the character screen. When playing with the regular camera it barely looks different from PoE's modells.
What are you talking about? I am referring to the background, not the characters.
Sorry, I misread your post, I thought you are talking about the character modells.
 

Urthor

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Thank god. PoE equipment management was hindered by upgrades. It was easier and faster to update basic items than to look for special artifacts with fancy descriptions. They had to cheat and add special non-craftable soulbound weapons to make equipment interesting again in expansions. Also there was a forge there with an upgrade and upgrade materials were extremely limited.


Not really. Best weapons in the game were absolutely the uniques, certain rewards from not supremely difficult sidequests that gave you another form of damage, or gave your shotgun pellets damage penetration. You'd find those weapons, then upgrade them as you went through the game. The soulbound weapons were fancy variations on this but overall weren't quite as useful as the best uniques with the most focused abilities for min maxers.

The Tyranny approach is neat though because it doesn't require wiki magic to find the rarest and coolest stuff, it's all there in the forge, which I can certainly appreciate.
 

ilitarist

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Not really. Best weapons in the game were absolutely the uniques, certain rewards from not supremely difficult sidequests that gave you another form of damage, or gave your shotgun pellets damage penetration. You'd find those weapons, then upgrade them as you went through the game. The soulbound weapons were fancy variations on this but overall weren't quite as useful as the best uniques with the most focuses abilities for min maxers.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. You find some early thing and upgrade it whole game. Some ancient cool weapon may be an improvement, but you'll have to upgrade it anyway and the upgrade is marginal. And as you have many characters with many slots most of them used fairly basic upgraded items. Maybe minmaxers are different, but for my typical Path of the damned 6 chararcters non-iron man playthrough soulbound weapons worked great. Besides, they're actually interesting to upgrade.
 

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