Tyranny Pre-Release Thread

[Infinitron]

The fear in the half-naked barbarian chick's eye

 

[Athelas]

You get the point.

I do? I'm seeing three different games with three different art styles (although not wildly different). Let's just agree to disagree since I'm not particularly in the mood for a 1oneyedking-inspired debate.

Though if you meant you wanted to see more half-naked chicks in cRPG's, you could have just said so, and we would've agreed on something.

Now that I see that Tranny screenshot though, I see they gave NPC's sitting and kneeling animations - I don't recall that being in PoE.

 

[Infinitron]

Now that I see that Tranny screenshot though, I see they gave NPC's sitting and kneeling animations - I don't recall that being in PoE.

Raedric was sitting down, and I think GM is kneeling and digging around in the ground when you meet her for the first time. That stuff was there although they didn't necessarily use it all that much.

 

[Lacrymas]

It's the same art style. You have to be blind or purposefully contrarian not to see it. Especially when compared to the Egon Schiele paintings I found.

Here's some more paintings for comparison -

Spoiler

etc.

 

[Fry]

I'm pretty sure the list of people who wanted avant-garde art from PoE is restricted to one guy ITT.

 

[Lacrymas]

Egon Schiele is far from avant-garde :p I also wanted to point out that fantasy games and paintings tend to concentrate on too similar themes and locations. Forests (cliffs optional), ruins, barbarians and dragons. Tranny is not different - forests (cliffs optional), ruins, barbarians, probably dragons.

 

[Manmower]

Honestly, I couldn't give a rat's ass about locations. If they deliver a believable story with strong characters and fun systems, then all is forgiven.

 

[Lacrymas]

The concept of evil (in the narrow sense) is a very modern topic of debate btw, it's only after the events of WWII that we turned to it and tried to philosophically rationalize it. There's a lot of questions that can be explored - what is Evil? Where does it come from? Who can be considered a moral agent? The difference between institutionalized and individual evil? Societal interpretations/pressures of evil? "The Banality of Evil"? Ignorance-as-evil? Evil vs wrongdoing? Sadistic voyeurism? Is conventional morality a pointless exercise? Struggling against your own evil? Evil as a mirror of Good? etc.

There is a LOT of literature out there concerning the nature of evil in the narrow sense from the last half of the 20th century and the whole of the 21st, so not doing your homework is just lazy when you are writing something with "evil" as the theme. I just hope they don't go with the supernatural explanations of evil (Manichaean dualism, Satan, evil spirits etc.) because it's really boring and absolves the characters from their actions.

 

[Manmower]

it's only after the events of WWII that we turned to it and tried to philosophically rationalize it

The fuck are you smoking, evil's been written about and dissected (and rationalized) since the time of ancient Greeks, and probably beyond.

But I agree with the rest of what you wrote. Hopefully they can deliver a deep and satisfying story that won't veer into cliche-town.

 

[Lacrymas]

That's why I said that it's only in the narrow sense, the broad sense has been discussed to death since Plato.

 

[Manmower]

Nah m8, St. Aquinas wrote treatises on this shit ages ago. It's been done to death, both broadly and narrowly.

 

[Lacrymas]

Just out of personal pet peeves - that's the broad sense, i.e. the "problem of evil". He wrote about the necessity of natural evils in a world where an all-powerful and all-good god exists. He doesn't have a problem with moral evil (broad sense) because that originates in moral agents (narrow sense). The broad sense is simply the existence of evil, whether natural or moral. The narrow sense concerns only agents and their actions, nobody spoke of that before WWII, trust me.

 

[Maxwell's Demon]

I wish writers would move beyond Good and Evil.

 

[Fry]

I wish writers would move beyond Good and Evil.

Hipster.

 

[Bubbles]

I wish writers would move beyond Good and Evil.

Thank God for Alpha Protocol.

 

[Kem0sabe]

I wish writers would move beyond Good and Evil.

I see what you did there... Clever.

 

[Prime Junta]

I'm pretty sure the list of people who wanted avant-garde art from PoE is restricted to one guy ITT.

Two. Don't forget Sawyer and his dream RPG which looks like a slowly cracking Orthodox ikon.

(On further reflection, make that three. I'd totes want to see that too.)

 

[Prime Junta]

beyond Good and Evil.

It's not a bad game actually, and the music is wack.

 

[Llama-Yak Hybrid]

All it takes is to put single tranny in, and you'll have ebin shitstorm.

 

[Sannom]

I wish writers would move beyond Good and Evil.

There it is,

where do you want to put it?

 

[Lacrymas]

I would totally like to see an RPG which looks like a cracking Orthodox icon! Get cracking Obsidian.

 

[Gremius]

New update at official blog:
https://blog.tyrannygame.com/2016/05/04/dev-diary-2-the-basic-game-systems/

 

[Infinitron]

Hell yes, new info at last.

Dev Diary #2 – The Basic Game Systems

Hello again!

Last week I talked about the vision for Tyranny. For this week’s update, I want to talk about some core game systems – mainly skills, attributes, and character progression. We’ll go into more details about other game systems like combat and magic in the coming months.

Skills

One of the first decisions I made when I started designing systems for Tyranny was to make it a skill-based game. These are my favorite RPG systems to play, as they give players a lot of freedom and flexibility to make their own character. A lot of my favorite games – both pen and paper RPGs and computer games – are skill-based, and the first game I ever worked on was a skill-based RPG. Making this change felt a bit like coming home.

Skills in Tyranny are grouped into three broad categories: Weapons, Support, and Magic. Weapon skills determine how accurate your character is when wielding weapons of that type. Support skills determine how good you are at avoiding being hit in combat, as well as how nimble, sneaky, or knowledgeable your character is. Magic skills determine how precisely your character can draw various magical sigils and control the forces they evoke.

Skills increase as you use them, but there must be some challenge involved. You can’t fight characters who are far below your level to gain experience, or climb up and down the same wall over and over.

Attributes
Tyranny uses six core attributes to define characters. These are:

• Might – your character’s physical strength and attack power.
• Finesse – your character’s physical precision.
• Quickness – your character’s speed and reaction times.
• Vitality – physical health and force of personality.
• Wits – intelligence and arcane potential.
• Resolve – ability to endure physical and mental challenges.

Attributes also determine the base values of skills. Each skill has a primary and a secondary attribute that contribute towards the skill’s rank. Primary attributes increase the skill by 1.5x the Attribute value, while secondary attributes increase the skill by 0.5x. The One-Handed Weapons skill, for example, uses Might as its primary and Finesse as its secondary. A character with 15 Might and 10 Finesse would have a base One-Handed Weapons skill of 28 ( 15 Might * 1.5 + 10 Finesse * 0.5 ).

Attributes also contribute towards secondary statistics, such as the Endurance, Will, and Arcane resistances.

Progression
I wanted skills to increase as you use them, rather than spending skill points at level up. This meant a fundamental change to how character progression worked. In Eternity, characters gain experience as they complete quests and objectives. Individual combat encounters or conversations had no effect on level, unless they advanced a quest.

With the decision to increase skills by use, I needed skill gains to contribute towards character level. Otherwise you could theoretically have a character with a hundred ranks in a skill, but still technically considered ‘level 1’. So, in Tyranny as you use skills they gain experience. When they gain enough experience, they increase their skill rank. When a skill increases in rank, your character gains experience towards their next level.

A benefit of this is that it makes even optional combat encounters rewarding for the player. This change could have made conversations less rewarding, as players would need to fight in order to level up their characters. To resolve this, we added functionality to allow players to level up their skills in conversations. Player choices that are gated by skill requirements will add experience to those skills when they are used. Additionally, if you use a skill to intimidate an encounter into fleeing, we grant skill experience to the party equivalent to what you would gain if you fought them. It can’t be exact, as there are too many decisions that players can make during combat to replicate it exactly.

So, your characters gain experience as their skills increase in rank – whether it’s through combat, conversations, or interacting with objects in the world. You also gain some experience for completing quests and objectives, though it’s a smaller portion of your overall experience than it was in Eternity.

As your party members increase in level, they can improve their Attribute scores and purchase new Talents from Talent Trees. Your character has 6 distinct trees to purchase talents from, while your companions have their own unique trees.

 

[Gremius]

Is it just me, or the UI looks consolized?

 

[Sizzle]

Vitality – physical health and force of personality.

I can sort of understand the reasoning behind PoE's Might stat, but how on Earth are they going to rationalize this one?

Can't think of a single RPG where Constitution was clumped together with Charisma.