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[Tyranny] Obsidian's Brush with Evil
WotanAnubis
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yc-WqIRNDKYThe armies of the evil Overlord Kyros march across the world. Only a small group of rebels still holds out against the forces of evil.
You are an important commander in that evil army and it's your task to help crush the last remnant of resistance and usher in Kyros' glorious reign.
What, you didn't think you'd be fighting against evil, did you?
Tyranny is the latest game from Obsidian. Built in the Pillars of Eternity engine, it's an isometric RPG. Unlike Pillars, the game doesn't use classes, only skills, allowing you to build your character pretty much in whatever way you want.
The devs are also claiming that, as an important figure in Kyros' forces, your choices matter and are going to affect the entire world somehow and people in that world will actually react to what you've done or didn't do. It sounds like Alpha Protocol in the Bronze Age. Though it's unknown if you can be quite the violent psycho Mike Thorton could be.
Here's a link to Tyranny's official home page
And now for some more videos:
Dev Diary 1:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hrzHX1O7MAIntroduction and Character Creation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQ9-o57fh6M +8
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Also included, a brief history lesson on why the Bronze Age ended and the Iron Age began.
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Oh god yes, that's the nebulous vibe I was getting. That's it down to a T.
Yeah, especially with the evil Overlord being a lady. I'm definitley more intrigued by this then Pillars of Eternity.
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Game is up for preordering with a release date of November 10th!
Which is way sooner than I expected, to be honest.
Works for me.
Awesome to the Max
I really really hope they nail the alpha protocol level of different outcomes depending on your actions.
The reactivity is the big selling point just after the "working for Sauron" angle, so fingers crossed.
If anyone can pull it off, it's the writers at Obsidian, though. So I'm optimistic.
Well, there's the Overlord series. The first one did allow you to be sort of not awful as you took over the world, but you were still guiding your minions to conquer the world in the name of Evil.
The Achemaenids are a great go-to source, too.
Yes, they were tyrannic autocrats by any modern standards, and get a lot of bad press from the greeks, but:
1. They established order and societal norms in an area that before had been mostly marked by slavery, ethnic cleansing and genocide.(Read the biblical accounts of living under the Persians vs the Assyrians or Babylonians from the perspective of the Jews, big difference). Basically abolished chattel slavery for the most part in their lands, introduced the idea that conquest didn't mean just coming in and murdering and enslaving everyone.
2. Established a bulwark against the nomadic tribes that periodically overran the region.
3. Linked together the world in a huge way. Went from the middle east being a bunch of isolated warring ethnic states to a place where greeks were running around trading in india and afghanistan in a couple of hundred years.
All things considered, for a lot of people back then serving the king of kings was a lot better than whatever they had before.
Pillars is the best Baldur's Gate game to come out in the past 15 years that isn't running on an older engine. I haven't played the DLC yet, but I've heard it's very good too.
Wasn't expecting it to come out this quickly. That's a pleasant surprise.
For another more fictional examples: Code Geass, Lelouch. Evil bastard using evil methods to fight other evil bastards with good intentions and good results.
In comic books, there's Namor, Dr. Doom, and Black Adam. Some versions of Cyclops and Magneto fit as well.
// Switch: SW-5306-0651-6424 //
Hopefully there are a lot of choices to make that are there just to be a bastard that wants to see the world burn and ruin people's lives or are so ridiculous they run along the lines of dark humor.
A good spectrum of evil, not just for the greater good and the ends justify the means. In Pillars, my bleak walker is almost 100% fueled by his own greed and amusement. Also occasionally helping out his squad that puts up with all his crap somehow.
// Switch: SW-5306-0651-6424 //
this typo amuses me more than it probably should.
Now that's a game I'd pay to see.
Most RPGs (Mass Effect, AP, etc) are kind of limited by telling a certain kind of story. In ME, you're always going to be Shepherd, Savior of the Galaxy. But some people really want to get dark and edgy with that, so you get the Renegade options, which are an uneasy spectrum from "pragmatic" to "ruthless" to "sociopathic" to "straight-up no-shit war criminal", all on the same side of the spectrum.
The setup here is, of course, limited in its own ways, but it's from the other side of the spectrum. I usually try to play a "good", idealistic character in my RPGs, and the plotting mostly allows for that. And so I end up playing more or less the same way every time. But making your character aligned with an evil overlord from the outset really complicates your decisions. If I try to make the most of a difficult situation, and help people where I can... am I not essentially a kind of mid-level bureaucrat in a vicious system, lacking even the credibility of committing fully to the cause, and thus respected by no one? Would it not be better to at least have the conviction to make this awful system work? I've never really been forced to make those kinds of decisions before in an RPG.
And I think it's really neat that they're doing this, because it ties into a lot of the periods in history I like to read about and study. When you read about, say, the actions of the Hellenistic kingdoms or the Roman Empire, or even people like the Mongols - the wars that they waged and all the incipient atrocities, massacres of villages and royal families and so on - one thing that stands out is that most of that was done less with outright malice than simply being the inevitable outcome of a world where the balance of power was fragile and chaotic.
There's a really great scene in Justified where Raylan, the protagonist, is trying to convince one of the villains to call off his feud and leave his (Raylan's) family alone. And the villain is simply having none of it. The viewer assumes this is just stubbornness on the part of the villain, but the villain points out he doesn't really have a choice of his own in the matter: the second he shows any sign of mercy or weakness, his own goons will stop viewing him as a boss and start viewing him as a target. It doesn't matter if he really wants Raylan's family dead or not, he has to kill them if he doesn't want to end up dead himself. Those are just the rules of his world, and their ugliness does not in any way change their essential reality.
I'm looking forward to seeing if that's the kind of choices we're dealing with. Especially given that most of the backgrounds that were listed state you never really had a choice on whether to join the overlord or not. The legionary grunts who crucified Spartacus's army probably didn't have a lot of choices along the way, either.
I think of future companions for the Shadowrun games and one that is always is on my mind is a surfer Shaman. Wears his wetsuit everywhere.
This game reminds of Marvel's Thunderbolts for some reason.
"We have years of struggle ahead, mostly within ourselves." - Made in USA
Pillars to me felt like trying to herd cats that go out of their way to ignore you
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/10/17/tyranny-preview-tiers/
I wish they had bigger images. I'd love to actually be able to read the text in the screenshots they took.
IIRC this is exactly the reason they went with 4.
Five is perfect for me, but that's because for the last decade my table group has been 5 players + DM, so that's what I'm most used to.