Tyranny - Review @ Game-Over

Game-Over has reviewed Tyranny:

Tyranny

• The Good: Nice spell crafting. Some good voice work. I like the “evil conquers” motif.
• The Bad: Endless, worthless loot to plow through. Combat gets very repetitive.
• The Ugly: For a branching RPG, the branches are actually very few.

I’m of two minds when reviewing Tyranny. One mind likes the idea of a world in which you’re working for the bad guys, so to speak, the conquerors who have defeated all the armies in the realm and taken over. Being on the side of the ruthless overlords should be a bedazzled opportunity to let your inner douche out as you crush what little pockets of resistance to the malevolent overload remain uncrushed. I also liked this idea in the hands of the people who gave us the quite good Pillars of Eternity. The other mind however is disappointed in how limited your opportunities for being an a-hole turn out to be, and how, for a game with so much combat, the combat turns out to be one of the weakest points. Let’s take a deeper dive, shall we?

[...]

As I read this over, I find it all seems very negative, and I didn’t intend it to sound like that. Tyranny is no Pillars of Eternity – let me say that straight out – but the story has some compelling moments, even as the branching portions aren’t really among them. Your decisions come to affect the fate of the whole world, even as I’m not sure making those decisions differently would have ultimately made any significant difference in the outcome. Side with the Dishonored, side with the Scarlet Chorus, side with the rebellion – except for some (at least as I see it) minor who lives/who dies outcomes, the overall fate of the world remains unchanged.

Score: 75%

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More information.

The Good: Nice spell crafting. Some good voice work. I like the “evil conquers” motif.
The Bad: Endless, worthless loot to plow through. Combat gets very repetitive.
The Ugly: For a branching RPG, the branches are actually very few.

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So how the hell does that equal 75%

gg math

While I agree with a lot about this review I find that who you side with does seem to have been significant enough that the game is worth an extra playthrough, if you can tolerate the mechanics. Unlike most rpgs where your choice is very cosmetic and you pretty much have to go through all of the same quests regardless of your faction or moral decisions, the whole second act of Tyranny (which is by far the longest) plays through differently depending on your faction choice. It reminds me in that way of the Witcher 2, which seemed to have one main choice with two outcomes, but that choice really significantly made the playthrough different.

As per usual, it seems like a view, not a review.

A view on the writer's tastes, nothing like a review on the product.

our decisions come to affect the fate of the whole world, even as I’m not sure making those decisions differently would have ultimately made any significant difference in the outcome. Side with the Dishonored,

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Question is hanging, that must be part of the review process to investigate that part and inform about it. Nope.

Discounting the dishonoured thing, while it probably means disfavoured. Not even able to get a simple point like that right.

And the view was carried out on a Paradox provided key.
Somehow, finding a way to get keys to produce those kind of views is profitable.

luj1 said:

So how the hell does that equal 75%

gg math

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I know right? It should have been more like 85%.

Tyranny and Luj are like girlfriend and her boyfriend in kindergarten ( or a married couple).
They may yell, hate and scream at one another, but don't be fooled…there's always a deeper affection between the two.

I'm replaying Pillars with White March atm after I gave up on the base game soon after release. After all the patching this is much more enjoyable now. Fights are still a bit of a mess, but that was no different in BG. I rate it now as a very solid RPG that brings back memories of the olden Infinity games.

Tranny though, seems a bit more like a shot from the hip, that makes it sale material. Could also be that it will show up in a Humble Monthly sooner or later. And man, how I hate floods of meaningless loot!

Tyranny just doesn't appeal to me. Can't put my finger on it exactly.

Loot can hardly be recognized as meaningful.

As a consequence of having no audience, devs went as far as making players'inputs useless on certain levels of difficulty, the AI does it all.

In this context, it is not possible to assign any meaning to loot.

Players who are able to play in RTwP might find out meaning to loot. As they find encounters differing one from another, skills differing one from another etc
Players who cant and keep exploiting pause as a prop will have a hard time finding anything meanigful.

Does not come from the product, comes from players.

luj1 said:

The Bad: Endless, worthless loot to plow through. Combat gets very repetitive.

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For those who have played this, can you clarify? Is he saying that the gear you find during the course of the game is irrelevant - i.e. you can just stay with the proverbial rusty short sword and leather tunic the whole time with no meaningful impact to gameplay? If that's the case that would be a bummer. One of my favorite pastimes is fiddling around with gear in my party to find that perfect combo of effectiveness and roleplaying.

Also...I thought the combat for Pillars was lame and repetitive when I purchased and played after first release. But I replayed with White March expansions earlier this year and found it to be much, much more fun. Not sure if that was all in my head, but makes me think they cleaned up and improved combat in Pillars over the course of the various patches. Seems odd then that combat in this game would be boring, given built pretty much on the same engine (if I'm not mistaken).

bizorker said:

For those who have played this, can you clarify? Is he saying that the gear you find during the course of the game is irrelevant - i.e. you can just stay with the proverbial rusty short sword and leather tunic the whole time with no meaningful impact to gameplay? If that's the case that would be a bummer. One of my favorite pastimes is fiddling around with gear in my party to find that perfect combo of effectiveness and roleplaying.

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As I understand it, the problem is not that you find only shitty gear, but more that you are flooded with better and better gear en masse, which makes the sword you found 2 mins before worthless.

What I want in a RPG is meaningful loot in the right doses. The Infinity games and also Pillars did this quite well. Do you remember how it was when you found a +2 sword with a nice backstory in BG1? Or when you cheesed Drizzt out of his sabers and Mithril chain?

Unlikely to be that.

Loot is plenty and of different kinds. Best items must be bought or crafted.

A player coming with a specific idea to developp the PC and a supporting party around does not find that much corresponding loot to carry out the project.

The loot is plentiful to fund what is missing. A player going sword plus shield might find two or three relevant items during the run. You dont find better swords/shields as they come. You find axes, hammers, daggers, staves, gauntlets... Plenty of them as they are supposed to be attributed to the party or irrelevant, meant to as funding material and support a different developpment scheme in an ulterior run.

There is no incentive to iron out the PC developpment as the exploit of spamming pause dilute any relevant feature. Loot included.
Players playing RTwP might starve out for a specific item, a specific build etc
Players playing as if "ugoigo", no.

I didn't find any problems with loot either. I got upgrades once in a while, not too fast or slow. Hell, I was like 20-25 hours into the game and still hadn't filled my 4 characters accessory slots.

There are a few problem with loot in Tyranny, in my opinion, over Pillars of Eternity. One has to do with the skill system. In Pillars each class had a few types of weapons they could use based on the proficiency system, and normally they offered up a choice of style. For example my ranger used a shield, so that shut out my two handed choice. In Tyranny there are no classes, and everything can be more or less divided up into dexterity based one hand weapon, strength base one hand weapon, or two handed weapon,and for ranged there are bows and thrown. This means you have a lot more useable weapons, and you spend more time sifting through them. Also in Pillars the weapons had various quality types and occasionally a magic property or two. Tyranny weapons are much more like in an ARPG with multiple qualities, so its not readily apparent what is better, and often you have very similar quality weapons with mild differences. For example do you want the helm with better armour and elemental resistance, or that with better deflection and shorter cooldown times. Personally I find the Pillars system much better, also for the skills. Only at the end of Tyranny for example, do you have a wide range of spells available and can really customize your spell casters. At the beginning everyone is running around with the same spells. So unfortunately the classless system doesn't encourage variety but uniformity and spending too much time sifting through equipment, which a lot of people don't find fun.

@forgottenlor Weapons and armors base stats (Armor, Deflection, Elemental resistance and recovery penalty) are the same as in Pillars of Eternity, the info is just presented differently (Armor and Elemental Resistance are Damage Resistances in Pillars and instead of the easier to understand recovery penalty in seconds of Tyranny, Pillars just had -50% to recovery).

Darkheart said:

As I understand it, the problem is not that you find only shitty gear, but more that you are flooded with better and better gear en masse, which makes the sword you found 2 mins before worthless.

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You don't get flooded by better and better gear every two minutes. Most of the stuff my characters ended up wearing/using was bought in stores with money. Enemies loot drop is mostly stuff that exist only to be sold (like gems and broken armor/weapons) and consumables (that I didn't use so I sold them too). They sometimes drops weapons, but it is rarely better equipment to what you already have outside of bosses (sometimes).

Score 30%

For effort only

forgottenlor said:

In Tyranny there are no classes, and everything can be more or less divided up into dexterity based one hand weapon, strength base one hand weapon, or two handed weapon,and for ranged there are bows and thrown. This means you have a lot more useable weapons, and you spend more time sifting through them. Also in Pillars the weapons had various quality types and occasionally a magic property or two. Tyranny weapons are much more like in an ARPG with multiple qualities, so its not readily apparent what is better, and often you have very similar quality weapons with mild differences. For example do you want the helm with better armour and elemental resistance, or that with better deflection and shorter cooldown times. Personally I find the Pillars system much better, also for the skills. Only at the end of Tyranny for example, do you have a wide range of spells available and can really customize your spell casters. At the beginning everyone is running around with the same spells. So unfortunately the classless system doesn't encourage variety but uniformity and spending too much time sifting through equipment, which a lot of people don't find fun.

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No.

A run provides that much to make a character proficient in a few skills. The way the system works, a character might not even be equally proficient in bows and dual weaponry. The character ends being proficient in one more than the other.

To obtain an efficient character, specialization is required, there is not many weapons to shift through.

As party members get specialized, the way to approach an encounter is changed, the party synergy cant be the same one party to another.

That is worthwhile when playing in RTwP as proficient members are required to reliably execute a plan. In RTwP, a fight cant be eternally sustained, effects must reliably triggered, damage must be done etc

Now, playing "ugoigo" with spamming pause, allows to do with inefficient characters. Characters no longer need to be efficient. The possibility to stack up rounds given by extended control dilutes everything. A character missing his target twice, thrice is nothing like the issue it is in RTwP.
And party members can be inefficient in everything.

At least Tyranny is trying to break away from the mold of doing the same old, same old. It's got to be beneficial to the genre in that respect. I'd like to see more of these types of experiments.

ChienAboyeur said:

No.

A run provides that much to make a character proficient in a few skills. The way the system works, a character might not even be equally proficient in bows and dual weaponry. The character ends being proficient in one more than the other.

To obtain an efficient character, specialization is required, there is not many weapons to shift through.

As party members get specialized, the way to approach an encounter is changed, the party synergy cant be the same one party to another.

That is worthwhile when playing in RTwP as proficient members are required to reliably execute a plan. In RTwP, a fight cant be eternally sustained, effects must reliably triggered, damage must be done etc

Now, playing "ugoigo" with spamming pause, allows to do with inefficient characters. Characters no longer need to be efficient. The possibility to stack up rounds given by extended control dilutes everything. A character missing his target twice, thrice is nothing like the issue it is in RTwP.
And party members can be inefficient in everything.

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I understand perfectly how the skill system works. But your specialization occurs relatively late in the game, depending on weapon use. Earlier in the game it is relatively easy to use anything. Also a character specialized in dual wielding one handed weapons still has a wider variety of items than a charater in Pillars usually does.
@Azarhal. It could be that the same qualities are on items, but I personally found the POE equipment system better (granted its now been over a year since I played) whether its actually due to the number of qualties, or as you suggest, the way its displayed.