izigame.me

I've false started on Tyranny a few times now. Pillars of Eternity is one of my favourite games of all time, and that's not to say that 'this isn't Pillars and therefore I didn't like it'. It's to say, rather, that I'm not averse to a lore-dense CRPG - they're my jam. But I feel like for all its successes, Tyranny missteps early on in a few critical ways and it soured the experience for me and made me fed up with the experience relatively quickly.
The game demands a more...'classic' kind of patience. The character creation and story preamble will take you - I'm not joking - between 1 and 2 hours depending on how much you labour over your decisions. The character creation is dense in a way that requires you to read at least 100 lines of flavour text to get the vibe for what all the different skills do. Despite it offering a mandatory secondary weapon specialisation, there's little point in diversifying your character as it will only leave you weak in the difficult battles. Then there's the part where you retread the years of conquest before the present day - a long affair in which you decide your character's past choices that is incredibly ambitious and signals what's to come in terms of the depth of the lore for better and worse.
Once that's done you're thrust into a, frankly, miserable world in which you play the part of arbitrator between two factions that are constantly at each other's throats. Most of the decisions you make are going to make someone mad, and while I appreciate the fluidity of the ever-shifting allegiances, it's pretty demoralising to be put in the centre of a situation that results in enemies no matter which choice you make. Everyone - EVERYONE - has about 50-100 lines of verbose lore and opinion dialogue. Every character loves the sound of their own voice, and it takes a long time to realise that they have nothing interesting to say. I prefer text to voiced characters, and even then I found myself groaning when I'd click one of 5 different questions and it would open up a tree with 12 things to discuss within that one question. Once, again, while I admire the ambition, I don't feel the amount of effort actually results in a better experience. Imagine you were playing D&D and the DM insisted on answering every single question with a monologue. The game would collapse. You'd want to die. This made me feel that way.
After about 4-5 hours you end up at a crossroads that I was relieved to experience as it arrived at the exact point I was almost entirely fed-up with being constantly berated by both sides of an asinine rivalry. It was the highest point of the experience and if it hadn't happened that way I would have quit sooner. The choice you make doesn't change the fact that almost everyone you meet will treat you like garbage, but it gives you free reign to beat down on them more directly, and this was cathartic after the quagmire I had to wade through at the start. But this didn't fundamentally change my experience. The dynamic combat system is still pretty annoying, as it was in Pillars. It's difficult to discern where each character is in the melee, and hard to tell if they're failing to carry through with their actions because they're blocked or otherwise. The only effective 'Hail Mary' healing spells take so long to cast that you're more likely to be interrupted and killed before managing to cast them. Enemy health bars are opaque and it's impossible to know if they're one or ten hits away from death, which makes it difficult to strategise. The only effective combat tactic is to gank individuals one-by-one. There's no benefit to the real-time aspect as the enemies pile on damage so quickly they'll kill your softer characters in seconds and the companion AI consistently resorts to using basic attacks instead of abilities, even when they're ineffective. You *HAVE* to take control of them, which means constantly pausing and unpausing the game every second or so to direct the action. It's just turn-based with extra steps and an added layer of inconvenience.
But all this piles at the feet of my biggest issue, which is where the comparison to Pillars really comes into play. Pillars is one of my favourite games because it made me feel like I was making a genuine difference in a world that felt real and that I wanted to be a force for change in. By contrast, Tyranny starts with the conclusion effectively forgone - the bad guys have won and everyone is miserable, and your goal is to decide which dictator rules the world. For all the attempts at imitating a nuanced world, the game suffers from a superficial premise that leads towards a predictable ending, and this narrative thinness flows all the way downstream.
The verbose and performative dialogue detaches the cause of the resistance fighters from grounded reality and everything they have to say feels token and empty. Your army is overwhelming, so they seem to have nothing left to stand for but a thin motivation of moral resistance. Meanwhile the characters within the conquering army are either indoctrinated beyond reason, agreeable for reasons of survival only, or outright sadists. For all the tens of thousands of lines of text describing this world and the thoughts and motivations of everyone in it, it is largely posturing, superficial, and lacking in genuine human emotion. The question of how to navigate a world in which evil has triumphed is an interesting one, but only if you're exploring it from the perspective of someone given a choice to side with the evil or against it, *or* if you're a part of that force for evil and are made to confront the things you're responsible for. In Tyranny, you're neck deep in culpability by the point you take control - your character knows what they've been doing and the fight is effectively over so the opposing side has no reason or will to try and convince you otherwise. And so the only real choice is who gets to be the Sauron of this place - you, or someone else.
In short, there's a lot to appreciate about the effort the game goes to in order to give you a politically complex world with a literal metric tonne of worldbuilding and lore. Games like this are valuable. But I think that it falters in investing so much of its efforts into a world of characters that feel at best annoying and at worst distinctly lifeless, and shaves a lot of fun away in order to make space for a concept and execution that lacks an emotional connection or any genuine moral complexity.