I really liked Pillars of Eternity, so I figured I’d pick up Tyranny (which runs on the same engine) to support the studio. Given Obsidian’s record I’m not sad that I paid full price, but I’d suggest waiting for a sale for other people.
Lots of options in how to solve *some* situations. I enjoy the feeling of thinking of something as the reasonable solution to something, and then having the game let me do that.
The “Fear” and “Wrath” companion influence/reputation mechanics which allowed you to get nice perks by terrifying people. Fits the theme, allows proper villainous role-playing. None of this “wow you’re mean and I disagree with you no stuff for you,” stuff required, you can crush their will. Fun!
Puzzles that can be solved via pattern recognition, allowing you to minorly sequence break if you notice how they work. Nice.
Lore hyperlinks in the text worked well to remind myself of what all of the various names and proper nouns meant. You can just mouse over them and have a small paragraph explaining what they were, and then click for even more context for encyclopedia style stuff.
The Elder-Scrolls style “learn what you do” system is one thing for a game with a single player to keep track of, and another entirely for a party of four. Experience gained by party members was extremely lopsided, it’s difficult to get better at some skills (Atrophy I’m looking at you!) because they award so little experience in the first place. The game-play incentives for proper experience gain and tactical advantage were often at odds with each other. I gave characters secondary weapon sets with crappy weapons from the beginning of the game so in easy fights they could gently whiffle-bat the enemy while building up important parry and healing skills. As a bit of a compulsive power gamer, I found that these conflicting pulls lent a somewhat constipated feeling to the fights, it’s hard to enjoy a power fantasy when you’re trying to figure out if you need to micromanage your back line more to keep health topped off.
One of my favorite mechanics from Pillars, engagement, became useless. It’s basically an attack-of-opportunity style system where you hold a certain number of enemies hostage with your character, if they move out of your engagement range you get to hit them for free! It became much less lethal in Tyranny, allowing people to rush past front lines with wild abandon. This didn’t help with the fact that the AI follows a rigorous and suicidal code of prioritizing the party member with the lowest defense stat for its attack, all the time unless taunted or (in SOME situations) engaged. The willingness of the enemies to break engagement did give me some laughs when I realized I could abuse it. A character in the game called Sirin can learn a talent where they can literally never be engaged, but she still draws a lot of aggro due to her flimsy clothes and “come hit me” attitude. Enemies rush her, breaking engagement and getting free-hit on the way. They get to where she is, I bring the fighters back to re-engage them. Sirin runs away. They follow, breaking engagement again, allowing more free attacks against them. Due to Sirin’s ability no one got the engagement attacks against her, so it was one-sided cheesy fun. That said the system was still inferior to Pillars.
The Custom spell building system had some fun elements, but ultimately it constrained the space of spells they could work with. Base element, base form, add some frills. Ice + cone + glyph that makes it do best of fire/ice damage. Lightning+ cone + glyph that makes it mark enemies. Fire + distance + glyph that lets it chain. They hide the base elements throughout the game, so you don’t get to use some of the fun ones until the game’s already over, and this combos very poorly with the experience system, as if it turns out that you really like stone for instance, well too bad you’re going to spend your early levels getting experience points in elemental control skills that will not matter to your later build.
The sense of scale was normal rpg bad. You’re a political figure with the force of law behind you, who owns mystical strongholds and commands armies, but you still end up walking around with four people fighting around ten people at most at any given time. You don’t really get to exercise your power or feel like you’re ruling or conquering, it’s just quests.
Overall I had fun playing through parts of it. It was fun figuring out how to do cheesy stuff and which talents/spells were overpowered, but it’s not hitting my top list. If you haven’t played either pick up Pillars instead, they broke more than they fixed.
