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Dev Diary #1 - The Vision for Tyranny

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MalinS

MalinS

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Hello fellow followers of Kyros!

Today game director Brian Heins published the first developer diary for Tyranny, and it's all about the dev teams vision for the game and how to make a player powerful from the start. It's available here: https://blog.tyrannygame.com/2016/04/21/dev-diary-1-the-vision-of-tyranny/
 
Pyramid_Head said:
This picture should be relevant when we talk about dialogues and Choices and Consequences
Ap7HR.jpg
Click to expand...


RPGs then also didn't have a voiced protagonist, its a trade-off between having a character you can hear and conversations that aren't one sided versus more options but less voicing.

Besides, DA2 was a classic case of a game pushed out the window, Inquisition and Mass Effect(1,2,3 and likely Andromeda) both use the dialogue wheel and they allow for lots of character options and statements, don't condemn a system for better or worse based on one example. The humour option is also designed to be humorous is what the second picture tells me, who would have thought it.

And besides, less choice allows for greater depth to options, a classic case of this is the very end of DA2 and the Witcher 2 with the Humans vs Elves. Choices and consequences must be carefully balanced for both to remain meaningful. Too much choice and not enough consequences makes the world unreactive, against their ethos it seems. But flipped too many consequences for too few choices makes a player frustrated they could just do "x".

But Paradox seems remarkably self aware for a developer/publisher and so I feel they already know all this going in. Tyranny looks like a good game from this initial marketing.
 
AvatarOfKhaine said:
...Inquisition and Mass Effect(1,2,3 and likely Andromeda) both use the dialogue wheel and they allow for lots of character options and statements, don't condemn a system for better or worse based on one example. The humour option is also designed to be humorous is what the second picture tells me, who would have thought it.

And besides, less choice allows for greater depth to options, a classic case of this is the very end of DA2 and the Witcher 2 with the Humans vs Elves.
Click to expand...
>DA2
>Choices and Consequences in the end

CgmCqVLWYAALHKo.png:large
 
Well I'm liking your vision for the game. I'm looking forward to reading more developer diaries in the future.
 
Pyramid_Head said:
>DA2
>Choices and Consequences in the end

CgmCqVLWYAALHKo.png:large
Click to expand...

If you'd paid attention to the point rather than your own bias, you would see I meant it in the sense that the finale of DA2 was able to be engaging due to only 2 divulging paths. This meant they didn't have to think about alternate path choices, but could focus on making the consequences of that final choice (Mage vs Templar) realistic and engaging as you fight to the Gallows and the Circle Tower.

DA2's problems in my mind were purely gameplay, they built up from the start that one wo/man could not make the factions reconcile all by herself and that you only were able to pick up the cards after they fell and choose how they fall beforehand.
 
It's not about the number of dialogue options, but to have actual consequences. All the Bioware games of the last (many) years did very little or quite nothing of that, while the cd projekt team was much more aware of the problem, and did a great job with the witcher trilogy
A lot of paths were included in PoE, so I'm surely optimistic on the quality of this new game
 
AvatarOfKhaine said:
RPGs then also didn't have a voiced protagonist, its a trade-off between having a character you can hear and conversations that aren't one sided versus more options but less voicing.
Click to expand...

Not really, no. That's just the excuse shitty developers use for lazy writing.

Also see: Fallout New Vegas. Which completely destroys your argument.
 
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Pyramid_Head said:
This picture should be relevant when we talk about dialogues and Choices and Consequences
Ap7HR.jpg
Click to expand...
The multiple options also often obscured two or three main pathways of the conversation. I remember the dialogue with, as she was called in my version "Ravel Rätselschön", in Planescape, in which I tried so ridiculously often to reach different outcomes when there were only two (I guess, has been a long time).
 
Dagda said:
Not really, no. That's just the excuse shitty developers use for lazy writing.

Also see: Fallout New Vegas. Which completely destroys your argument.
Click to expand...

It is a tradeoff, most games with voiced protagonists have to limit conversation options, I haven't played NV or any other Fallouts so I can't comment there.

But regardless, one example does not make an argument, when more games with voice protagonists have to limit conversation options. This is purely hard cost issues due to having to hire out voice actors for longer for a main character isn't exactly cheap. If NV is like other Obsidian games, they likely made up for the cost by having lots (more) of repeatable lines in ambient dialogue compared to others. Neither of these are objectively bad things, but it is a trade-off and sometimes devs try to make the trade-off invisible.

I'm not trying to shut this debate down, but we should try to avoid being too off topic on a dev diary.
 
andry18 said:
It's not about the number of dialogue options, but to have actual consequences. All the Bioware games of the last (many) years did very little or quite nothing of that, while the cd projekt team was much more aware of the problem, and did a great job with the witcher trilogy
A lot of paths were included in PoE, so I'm surely optimistic on the quality of this new game
Click to expand...

lol, the witcher was the worst CRPG series in recent memory.
 
AvatarOfKhaine said:
DA2's problems in my mind were purely gameplay, they built up from the start that one wo/man could not make the factions reconcile all by herself and that you only were able to pick up the cards after they fell and choose how they fall beforehand.
Click to expand...
No DA2's problem was in a lot of things, the new aestetics (spiky hair and unrealsitic armours yay), the "darker" story (really it was just dumber), in fact gameplay was one of the few things that in many ways were better, DA:O had too many OP builds, though I did miss having options and equipment in DA2.
In many ways DA2 was like ME2 a grab for mainstream appeal for a franchise which had been great in it's niche, the diffrence is ME2 worked, DA2 didn't.
DA:O was a 3D Baldurs gate, DA2 was a fantasy mass effect 2 (and mass effect 2 was a third person shooter based sequel to a game that was a RPG).
 
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