Many Pillars fans were wanting to hear about POE2's release schedule. This one came out of the blue, however. Looks like POE2 will have more preproduction time. Maybe 1+ years.
Tyranny's split narrative and dark tones, seems to fit with some of the developments in POE. Hopefully, they learned about how to avoid the problems with POE's story narration.
One of the problems was short term motivation. The player in POE had a long term goal, but not a lot of short term motivation besides companions, side quests, combat level ups.
By ensuring that the short term goals in Tyranny are the long term goals, it makes it more streamlined experience wise. Pillars also had several dispositions, like aggressive or cruel, which might be considered evil. They weren't fleshed out very well nor had much impact on the larger narrative and plot events.
Tyranny's split narrative design might allow it to impact the plot in much greater detail.