So, I finally completed Tyranny. Once upon a time this would have happened within a few days of me getting my hands on the game, but life now dictates that even a short-ish RPG like Tyranny takes me a few months. Anyway, it's done, and here is what I think.
1. This is a genuinely excellent game, which innovates RPG systems in a way that I think are truly valuable to the genre. My opinion on skill-based leveling rather than XP-based leveling has for a long time being "Good in theory, grindy and tedious in execution", but then Tyranny came along and proved to me that it wasn't only doable, but preferable to handle leveling that way.
2. That said, I think the skills in Tyranny need some serious iteration, simply because it wound up being that a handful of them were really important, and the rest not so much. Maybe just something the delineates a few "core" skills from less important sub-skills.
3. The sheer number of abilities you gain over the course of the game was both overwhelming and eventually, filled with redundancies. I think this too could be streamlined by taking the spell-crafting system and applying it to all the abilities. Learn various combat techniques and stances and combine them into attacks, just as you combine sigils into spells.
4. In fact, I think perhaps levels could be removed altogether. Let the core skills dictate which sigils, combat techniques, stances, warcries, whatever you can learn. Using abilities increases the lesser skills, and increasing the lesser skills repeatedly will eventually lead to an increase in one of the core skills.
This does remove the fun of advancing through an ability tree, but I think this could be implemented in other ways. Perhaps change the trainers so that they can unlock new branches of the tree when your core skills are high enough.
(This is not to say I thought the system was bad - I thought it was great! - it's just that I felt like it was a first pass at a whole new way of handling character progression in video game RPGs, I really would like to see it taken a whole lot further.)
5. Game mechanics aside, the narrative structure of this game was incredible. Has any other RPG ever allowed you to play through a game in such thoroughly different ways? I wasn't even aware that there was a third (and fourth?) way to play through the game until I read about it online - which forced a restart. I mean, each area felt intimate a deep, which is probably how I prefer my RPG worlds, rather than massive but shallow, and yet I knew while playing it that it must be possible to play the same area from an entirely different perspective and yet still get the same depth. It was truly, genuinely impressive.
6. However, I must admit that I wasn't actually that enthralled by the world of Tyranny. Before playing the game, I was really enthused about the non-traditional setting. A pre-medieval world in which you play one of the bad guys sounded really appealing, after so very many samey RPGs with humans and elves and dwarves and medieval settings. But the actual game failed to really grab me. I won't be particularly upset if this is just a one-off, and doesn't turn into a franchise. But I obviously would love to see it's systems carried over into other settings. I'd be more than happy to see a cyberpunk RPG from Obsidian, or a steampunk one, or a Lovecraftian Western one, etc, etc.
7. That's not to say that I don't think Tyranny has franchise potential. The world feels like it has potential. I just need to see more of it, maybe. I'd definitely play a sequel, or DLC.
1. This is a genuinely excellent game, which innovates RPG systems in a way that I think are truly valuable to the genre. My opinion on skill-based leveling rather than XP-based leveling has for a long time being "Good in theory, grindy and tedious in execution", but then Tyranny came along and proved to me that it wasn't only doable, but preferable to handle leveling that way.
2. That said, I think the skills in Tyranny need some serious iteration, simply because it wound up being that a handful of them were really important, and the rest not so much. Maybe just something the delineates a few "core" skills from less important sub-skills.
3. The sheer number of abilities you gain over the course of the game was both overwhelming and eventually, filled with redundancies. I think this too could be streamlined by taking the spell-crafting system and applying it to all the abilities. Learn various combat techniques and stances and combine them into attacks, just as you combine sigils into spells.
4. In fact, I think perhaps levels could be removed altogether. Let the core skills dictate which sigils, combat techniques, stances, warcries, whatever you can learn. Using abilities increases the lesser skills, and increasing the lesser skills repeatedly will eventually lead to an increase in one of the core skills.
This does remove the fun of advancing through an ability tree, but I think this could be implemented in other ways. Perhaps change the trainers so that they can unlock new branches of the tree when your core skills are high enough.
(This is not to say I thought the system was bad - I thought it was great! - it's just that I felt like it was a first pass at a whole new way of handling character progression in video game RPGs, I really would like to see it taken a whole lot further.)
5. Game mechanics aside, the narrative structure of this game was incredible. Has any other RPG ever allowed you to play through a game in such thoroughly different ways? I wasn't even aware that there was a third (and fourth?) way to play through the game until I read about it online - which forced a restart. I mean, each area felt intimate a deep, which is probably how I prefer my RPG worlds, rather than massive but shallow, and yet I knew while playing it that it must be possible to play the same area from an entirely different perspective and yet still get the same depth. It was truly, genuinely impressive.
6. However, I must admit that I wasn't actually that enthralled by the world of Tyranny. Before playing the game, I was really enthused about the non-traditional setting. A pre-medieval world in which you play one of the bad guys sounded really appealing, after so very many samey RPGs with humans and elves and dwarves and medieval settings. But the actual game failed to really grab me. I won't be particularly upset if this is just a one-off, and doesn't turn into a franchise. But I obviously would love to see it's systems carried over into other settings. I'd be more than happy to see a cyberpunk RPG from Obsidian, or a steampunk one, or a Lovecraftian Western one, etc, etc.
7. That's not to say that I don't think Tyranny has franchise potential. The world feels like it has potential. I just need to see more of it, maybe. I'd definitely play a sequel, or DLC.
Upvote
0
