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I'm just a few hours into the early game so far. First thoughts: - The writing is really uneven. When it's good, it's good, but when it's bad it feels like a self-published e-book. Every Choirman I meet seems to feel exactly the same way about the Disfavored, and vice versa, and it's getting kind of dull having this hammered home back and forth that they are two homogeneous lumps who don't like each other. Grammar, spelling and punctuation occasionally just go crazy, which feels to be honest pretty wildly unprofessional. Missing full stops, spliced sentences, and lost apostrophes are all over the place. For a game that trades on its writing, this is poor. A real sentence from the quest I just did: "Sorry Quip, but I'll strap you to my back and charge down that bridge alone, but doing nothing isn't an option." Why the double but? Why the comma splice? It feels like a bright ten year old wrote this whole segment. - But when it is good, it's good. The backstories stuff is good. The Voices of Nerat and Graven Ashe are cool. The entire setting is very cool, in fact, and the concepts at play in it are exciting and fresh. - The voice acting is completely all over the place. The direction for Verse and Barik seems wildly off: Verse sounds weirdly sultry all the time, and Barik sounds like a hale and healthy boyscout rather than a filth-covered fascist mummy. Sirin is an evil valley girl. Lantry occasionally hits "Shaggy from Scooby Doo". The Voices of Nerat, on the other hand, sounds radical and I love the direction there. - The combat doesn't feel as fun as Pillars. It's the same basic system, so I think this is down to the character building stuff. Having specific weapon skills and more traditional RPG attributes makes the whole thing feel flatter and a bit more limited - there's no switching your barbarian to a dagger to cleave through a bunch of low armour enemies here. Cooldowns being more common than per encounter usages also makes me feel like I'm managing a tedious rotation rather than picking the best time in a fight to use an ability. On the whole, wanting to like it more than I'm actually liking it. Does it improve as the game goes on?
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Nov 12, 2016 01:08
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I'm approaching the end of Act One now. Thought it was extremely silly that you can't actually achieve the thing you were sent to do, i.e. get the Chorus and the Disfavored to work together, and instead are forced into an arbitrary one or the other choice that makes one group treat you as a traitor, pretty much completely out of the blue. Not only that, when they tell you, "choose one or the other of us to fight the entire offensive alone!", you can't be like, "no", you have to accede without a fight to their dumb demand before getting railroaded out of the room. Felt really abrupt and as though any effort you might have made to be a fair mediator up to that point was more or less pointless.Rascyc posted:I still can't believe they used Kana's VA for Barik. I dumped Barik ASAP just because of that alone It's certainly not the VA's problem, he was fantastic as Kana. I just feel it's an absolutely bizarre directorial choice to have this hulking sheet metal mummy who is literally, and the game does not shy away from telling you this, covered in his own poo poo (and presumably a bunch of suppurating bedsores) sound like Captain America. I guess it's challenging your expectations? But I also don't feel it's an interesting performance. Verse's VA direction just feels lazy. She's a psychopathic murder libertarian who has been part of a barbarian war cult from a young age, and she just sounds like Woman At Bar #2. None of her character comes through in the performance at all, except maybe "sort of smug". But we don't get any sense of her weirdness or damage, or the highly unique culture she comes from, in the voice at all. Samuel Clemens posted:They're similar in the sense that both are RTwP systems, but their pacing feels very different. Pillars was primarily about per-rest and per-encounter abilities, so individual fights tended to be over quickly, and strategy primarily revolved around maximising the value of your abilities while pacing yourself between encounters. By contrast, Tyranny's cooldown-heavy approach means each battle is designed to go on for quite a while (not much use in having cooldowns if combat ends before they expire). Correspondingly, PoE had a lot more fights, but they generally didn't drag on as much. And, as you pointed out, PoE also had far greater build variety (and greater enemy variety, though Tyranny gets a bit better in this regard once you reach Act 2). Yes, I've noticed this. Combat sort of drags. Enemies are big sacks of HP designed to be knocked down by cooldowns with basic attacks as buffer space. Now that you point it out further, I definitely prefer the PoE approach.
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Nov 12, 2016 03:47
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The problem isn't that you can't side with the rebels in Act 2, it's that the game assumes your character is now a fanatical devotee of whichever of the two evil factions you picked, and unless you betray them at one of the arbitrarily chosen opportunities the game gives you, you'll be forced to follow their exact agenda to the letter for the entire act. It's garbage. Example: I sided with the Chorus at the end of Act 1, not because I particularly liked them, but because I thought they'd do a better job leading the attack. When they send you to the Burning Library in Act 2, you get a chance to [Betray Alliance] at the start of the quest and aggro their entire camp, or go into the ruins and look for the Silent Archive. I figured I didn't want Nerat getting his hands on the Silent Archive, but it also didn't make a lot of sense to time my betrayal so poorly, so I'd go in, get it, and then betray the Chorus once I had it for sure. You can go in, kill all the Choirmen in the ruins, get the Archive...and then when you leave, you have an unavoidable conversation with the Censor where you have a series of non-branching "yep, it sure is great we got this forbidden illegal knowledge for the Scarlet Chorus" choices (literally just 1. on the dialogue tree with no further options), which always ends with you giving her the knowledge in the Archive to give to Nerat. There is no option to say "no, I don't want you to have this", or even mention that it would be a violation of Kyros' Law to give this to Nerat. It's shockingly bad, and the complete opposite of what I'd expect from Obsidian. Even the crummiest of narrative RPGs would usually let you say, like, "You die now. [Attack]" at that juncture. From what I hear, this is all very similar on the Disfavored route. And that's just one example: there are many similar conversations, the above being just the most egregious one I've seen so far. The degree of railroading is obscene, and I guess it's maybe a necessary consequence of the branching - they have to lock you in to these insanely rigid paths in order to have this many different paths at all, I guess. But that doesn't make it feel any better when you get but thou must-ed into doing something completely out of character because there's only one option in the dialogue tree.
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Nov 17, 2016 01:07
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Dolash posted:That's a weirdly arbitrary point to draw the line. I can't fault the devs for thinking that if you didn't want to go along with the Scarlet Chorus you'd been offered ample opportunities to defect before that, including within the very mission you're describing - just at the start, not the end of it. And for what it's worth if you stay with the Chorus to the end you can turn on them at the Court and use all that evidence you built up, but otherwise they might as well have a betray button in every single dialogue. Heck at times they kind of do, and I got annoyed by the constant checks that yes this is definitely what I want to do. It really, really isn't. If you're going to betray someone, why would you do it in the middle of a huge camp of people and Beastmen, when you don't yet have the thing you came for, instead of getting the thing and betraying them later? Like, have you ever seen someone betray someone else in fiction? They tend to do it after they have achieved their goal or when there is some sort of advantage to be taken from the situation, rather than as a pre-emptive measure when hugely outnumbered. Even apart from that, it's basically reasonable to assume that you as the player won't be railroaded about a basic "give/don't give" decision. This is the bread and butter of choice based RPGs, and I think you'd be hard pressed to find one, no matter how shoddy, that doesn't handle quests like this in a functional way. It's not as though Nerat is some minor NPC and you're returning a pat of butter for his supper. By giving him this thing, you're breaking the law, perjuring your duty as a Fatebinder, and helping a sadistic torturer who doesn't have your best interests in mind garner power. Why would anyone who isn't a fanatical devotee of the Chorus do this? Even someone who's made an alliance of convenience would probably think twice. It's just lazy, slapdash design, and probably is a result of a time crunch and Obsidian's reach exceeding their grasp. It's frustrating - and quests and conversations like this are absolutely rife in Tyranny, to its detriment. Zore posted:The permutations are insanely unreasonable. At some point you have to realize its a loving video game not a dude in your house who can change the story wholecloth if you decide to go schizophrenic murderhobo. It's also exacerbated by the fact that the game does not ask you if you want to "side with X". You get a decision as to who should lead the attack, and then there are some VFX and you get railroaded out of the conversation and now the side you picked is your ally and the other side hates your guts. If they wanted to give the player a binary choice as to which faction they should side with, sure. They should have done that in an explicit way rather than making it a weird confluence where the Chorus/Disfavored thinks you're on their side in a flipping civil war because you said they should go first when quashing some rebels. Like, the side you didn't pick to lead the vanguard is instantly trying to kill you even before the civil war starts. It's ridiculously ham-handed and maybe is the worst possible way to do the thing they wanted to do i.e., make you pick a faction to ally with.
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Nov 17, 2016 01:56
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Bright side: Kills-in-Shadow is the breakout character of the year and her voice actor deserves a medal. Probably like, the kind of medal a soldier would get, because her vocal chords must be wounded after that performance. It's really good and genuinely pretty amazing how much work she's putting in.
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Nov 17, 2016 02:05
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Insurrectionist posted:I actually agree with the overall point but I also sided with the Chorus, with the intent of betraying the Voices eventually after gathering intelligence/evidence and getting all the goodies I could first (my character background was opportunistic gang-member/thief so the Chorus was a natural fit!) and I could take the archive with me just fine. I did the Burning Archive second after Lethian's Crossing and generally played nice with The Chorus at any opportunity before that and even the Voices didn't really object to me just having grabbed it for myself when I came back to him later. You can keep the Archive itself, but you have no choice but to let the Censor take the info in it and give it to Nerat. You allow her to scan it with her book powers and then Nerat eats her mind when she returns to camp and sucks up all that forbidden knowledge. The other end case is that you just hand over the Archive. Branching!! Android Blues fucked around with this message at 02:18 on Nov 17, 2016 |
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Nov 17, 2016 02:12
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Also, yeah, the binary choice at the end of Act 1 means that literally all the choices about the Disfavored and the Scarlet Chorus you've made up to that point, outside of Conquest stuff, were meaningless set dressing. The game shows you a complicated reputation system, lets you build rep with one camp or the other for 4 - 6 hours, and then goes "psyche! None of what you just did mattered at all, even a little tiny bit!" and sets it to One Faction - LOTS Other Faction - NONE. It is a terrible way to showcase a mechanic.
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Nov 17, 2016 02:27
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Eej posted:Well no, the Conquest decisions do make some difference. Lethian's Crossing will be garrisoned by whoever you decided to leave them with, for example. That's why I said "outside of Conquest stuff".
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Nov 17, 2016 02:32
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Dolash posted:Also, Android, if you don't want to give Nerat the archive, you already have a way to do that. If it's not the way you want to, well sure, but betraying them at the start of the quest vs. doing it at the end just doesn't strike me as the true breaking point for immersion. Okay, so you're in their camp and it's going to be a fight - sooner or later betraying Nerat is going to be a fight, I don't expect the devs to be ready for the player to betray at any time. Either betray them at the Well, or betray them when you get to the library and dislike the sound of what they're asking you to do, or betray them further down the line in Court, but that's at least three opportunities and saying that one specific scenario where they didn't let you betray means the whole thing is a railroad is just too extreme. Less than 100% flexible, sure, but still way more flexible than most other RPGs. Way less flexible, surely. My gold standard for comparison here is probably something like Shadowrun: Dragonfall, which wasn't exactly a big budget studio effort, but never falls down so often as Tyranny does in key decision points like this. You could also compare it to the Geneforge series - which are lo-fi indie RPGs on a shoestring budget that are often very similar in structure to Tyranny (multiple morally compromised factions you can back or be independent of, each with their own endings and "routes" through the game) - and none of which fall down in this way even slightly. But even without ranging far outside the box, Bioware, so often touted as the less-clever version of Obsidian, doesn't lock you down this hard in their choice systems either. In fact, I struggle to think of a single game that handles situations like the one described so clumsily. A lot of flex in overall "path" is great, but if it comes at the price of the individual paths being landlocked single lines where your only choice is to do exactly what one faction requests with an occasional opportunity to go anarchist and turn against both factions, that is a bad trade in my view.
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Nov 17, 2016 02:46
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And again, the key issue is that the chances to turn against your faction of choice in Act 2 are just that, occasional, and are not placed at sensible junctures. They all pop up just as you enter a new area or begin a new quest, so the player's natural instinct is to scope out the situation before they decide what to do next. Some quests give you the option to betray at the start, when what your faction's asking you to do seems reasonable, but eschew it at the end, when the actually bad/important stuff starts happening. Others lock you in to quest chains where the scope of the tasks you're asked to do escalates, and have no built-in options to betray at all: the Scarlet Chorus' quest to destroy the Sages' Guild is like this, starting with you interrogating a prisoner and then auto-accepting a quest to kill the Sages' leader, who auto-aggros to you without even so much as a "Die, pawn of Kyros!" by way of hello.
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Nov 17, 2016 03:00
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Dolash posted:You really can't get out of destroying the Sage's Guild at that point in the story, they're a rebel faction and you're an agent of Kyros - whether or not you're a friend of the Scarlet Chorus, you are beyond the point where the thought of killing Tiersmen who reject Kyros's authority can give you pause. The sages had their chance to surrender and the ones that are left are absolutely not interested in it, so I don't see why that would be what would get you to betray Nerat. By comparison, I think your case for not wanting to give Nerat the Archive is stronger. Sorry bud, I just cannot agree. For one thing, your thing about the Sages doesn't really hold true. In the Burning Library quest, there are various sages you can chat with, befriend, and variously shower with the milk of human kindness. Your idea that of course your character would never talk to a Sage, as they are agents of sedition, isn't even consistent within an hour's gameplay of the game itself. You meet the Sages for the first time in the Library and can actually get a decent ways up their Favor track just by helping them out. Then, you're handed a quest where you kill their leader that literally has no dialogue options at all, which is automatically added to your log, which makes Renata perma-hostile to you, and which you can't choose to turn down. The level of dissonance here is insane. And it again betrays the wonkiness of the reputation system: I had Favor 2 and Wrath 0 with the Sages at this point, but that's apparently still enough for Renata to auto-aggro you when you walk within eyeshot. The more you look at how the game fits together, the more evident it becomes that the reputation system is just for the occasional dialogue check and the bonus powers and does literally nothing outside this. All your actual faction loyalties are determined by invisible quest flags. This actually ties in to the answer to your other question: if you wait on betraying the Chorus, you can get the drop on every single Chorus gang in the place and encourage their enslaved Sages to turn against them, whereas if you betray your alliance at the start of the quest, more of them are just hostile mobs. You also get a reward from the Censor for winning the contest she's set up among the Chorus gangs in the ruins, which she tells you you'll get up front, so really, why wouldn't you go down there and weaken the Chorus' numbers, get a prize, and then make your play? What's the incentive from an in character perspective not to? I didn't say the whole game is a railroad: obviously it isn't. The problem is that each individual track is a railroad, which sort of defeats much of the point of having branching paths at all. Like Viral Warfare says: Viral Warfare posted:Stop strawmanning. That's not what anyone is complaining about. What people are very obviously and pointedly complaining about is having agency taken away from them once they go down one of these paths. There isn't even the illusion of choice that most RPGs offer- it's just straight up "but thou must do everything the Archon says or else go onto the edgy anarchist path". There's no room for variance in how you progress down at least some of these routes. In the Witcher 2, which also did this, you were free to dick around and do whatever and make lots of relevant choices even if at the end of the day you had to work with Henselt or Saskia. It gave you means to define just how you work with them, to draw lines in the sand and to put limits on what you're willing to do. That's cool and good. That's not what this game gave us. There's not just a lack of texture in how you interact with the path you locked into, there's a lack of anything except the one, single path through the route, to the extent where conversations are stripped down to one or two options almost uniformly. You can be your Archon of choice's lackey, acquiescing to his every demand without a hint of contrition, or you can go independent. You can't even go independent at any time you choose, which would not be hard to implement - just have an option to either go into the reputation screen and click "Betray Alliance", or have an option in Graven Ashe/Nerat's dialogue tree that says "hey, I'm done helping you, later". The Geneforge series, which are made by a much smaller team on a much lower budget than this one, all have this as an option because it's both useful to the player and not particularly hard to include. Here's another example that is less egregious plot-wise, but I think illustrates the point pretty well. You get a quest from the Chorus to question a Sage and find out Renata's whereabouts. When questioning him, your options are "hit him" or "have a Choirman hit him". If Sirin is in your party, she steps in after you hit him and mind controls him into giving up the goods, but otherwise there's literally no option to even attempt to intimidate, trick, or reason with the guy. You're on the Chorus track, so your character is apparently locked in to doing things how the Voices of Nerat would do things, with so little room for individual variation that the game is now refusing to let you not beat prisoners. As someone previously said, the game understandably bottlenecks you into certain outcomes on each path, but makes the bizarre decision of achieving this by stripping the option to even object from the player character rather than making it the result of circumstances outside your control. The choices you'd expect to be able to make frequently just aren't there. Instead, you're just confronted with a 100% homogeneous path, down to the majority of the sidequests, that you can only get out of by clicking [Betray Alliance] at one of the predetermined (and thin on the ground) points the game offers you. This is exacerbated further by the fact that you don't even make an explicit decision to ally with your chosen faction in a civil war in the first place - if you did, a lot could be forgiven, but instead it's just extrapolated that because you backed them in this one instance, you now either do whatever they say forever or go to war with both factions.
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Nov 17, 2016 10:26
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Additional Act 2 spoilers similar to the Burning Library thing: Apparently if you're still allied with the Chorus when you discover Ashe's grandchild in the Blade Grave, you also have no choice but to turn the kid over to Nerat. Again, the Betray Alliance option is at the start of the quest when you arrive in the area and don't know the whole story, while you get no such choice once the stakes are actually clear and you're talking about handing a child over to a torturer. It is ludicrous that the game is structured like this.
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Nov 17, 2016 11:15
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Yeah, that is pretty funny. At the same time, I don't think Kills-in-Shadow feels at all egregious. She's a big talking animal and it helps sell it when she matter-of-factly talks about animal stuff. It's also just like, of course she would be naked. She's effectively a giant tool-using wolf. I actually have way more problems with the other companions and characters in the game, like Eb, who insert off-colour sexual references into every other thing. I had a sidequest where I sentenced a murderer to early execution and Eb disapproves because she wanted him to suffer before dying, but she expresses this by saying "maybe mercy killing gets your nethers primed, but...". Like, what? This is such a laboured, unnecessarily crass way to say that Eb doesn't like the thing you did.
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Nov 17, 2016 12:36
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I don't believe there's a time limit, but you do get limited and weirdly arbitrary chances. The next chance you'll get to betray the Chorus is after you've finished that quest and started another major quest for them in a different location.
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Nov 17, 2016 18:30
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Ironslave posted:You're joking, right? Yeah, Sirin is ludicrous, especially once you hit level 13. You can spec her tanky (points in Vitality raise Performance, and wearing heavy armour doesn't make her sing any slower!) and she'll just persist forever a hundred rounds after the rest of your party dies, singing out damage. I still haven't seen her actually get knocked out yet. Kills-in-Shadow is also ludicrous. The talents that give her +45% bonus health, plus the talent that makes all her attacks double attacks when she's under 70% max health, combined with a big slow-swinging weapon is just dirty. She has like 500 HP and hits harder than Verse.
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Nov 17, 2016 22:21
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I don't think so, no. I did the same thing and it's no big deal. The spires are kind of weird, the game obviously wants you to go and find them, but it doesn't really give you any compelling reason to do so other than "they're there, they're slightly weird, and you get the occasional dialogue option indicating that your character is interested in them".
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Nov 18, 2016 00:24
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Combat wounds lowering conversation skills doesn't feel that satisfying, yeah. I wouldn't be comfortable railing against it until I'd thought about it some more, there's something to the idea, but I just don't think it feels that good in play.
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Nov 18, 2016 01:09
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CommissarMega posted:You can only get across peacefully if you go indep or rebel, sorry. Welby might seem reasonable, but she's still somewhat faithful to her boss. Besides, you're a Fatebinder who's seen to not only be loyal to Kyros, but as someone who prefers the company of either Roman Nazis or Bronze-Age Warboys. Actually, you can bypass the Bronze Brotherhood without fighting if you're allied with the Chorus. It's just another of those weird gating things. I think it's only Disfavored path where you have to fight them. e: might change if you gave Lethian's Crossing to the Chorus in Conquest? I gave it to the Disfavored.
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Nov 18, 2016 14:39
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Talent tree advice: No-one seems to be offering advice for Kills-in-Shadow. She's probably the strongest character in the game, on a par with Sirin, although they have very different roles, so I figured I would make some brief notes. Skip her unarmed abilities/buffs, but go into the unarmed tree far enough to grab Dual Claw. This gives you double attacks on every hit when Shadow is at 70% health or under, and it works with weapons as well as unarmed. This means you can cheat the swing speed on slow, heavy weapons and give them a wildly disproportionate damage boost that they're not really balanced for. Then, go into the weapon tree and grab the two talents that give a +30% bonus to weapon damage, the track that gives +45% max HP and 50% shock/crush/ice damage resistance, Berserker Stance, and the talent that gives her bonus damage per % missing health. Once you've finished all this she should have in the area of ~600 health and be hitting for ~170 damage per round when Dual Claw is active, depending on which big clonking weapon you equip her with. Berserker Stance increases damage taken by 100%, but when you have like 600 HP, this actually just means you effectively have 300 which is still loads, and healing magic scales with max HP so it's easy to fill up again. Get her Sunder talent and the one that gives her a triple attack on a 1 minute cooldown to taste. For attributes, take Vitality to 19, and then throw the rest into Might, or Finesse if you're having trouble hitting stuff. Accessories that give % health regen are strong. The 50% bonus damage from Berserker Stance applies to every source of damage she deals, including trinket procs and artifact abilities, so items that proc on-crit AoE are strong as well.
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Nov 19, 2016 00:21
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Also, having finished the game, it feels narratively like a classic Obsidian mess of the sort that we haven't seen since the launch version of Knights of the Old Republic 2. Janky, imperfect, occasionally self-contradictory, but wildly ambitious and doing something that other games have not done. The ending route I wound up was on fun, but basically a series of nonsense events. It's bizarre that you're railroaded on the Anarchy path into defying Kyros, setting up your own empire, and starting a war with the north. Like, you don't even get an option to say "no, I'd rather not establish myself as a rebel warlord", it's just assumed that the player is by default so into this that that's what you're gonna do. Also, Tunon grovelling to you about how you understand law and fairness better than he ever could or has made my eyes roll out of my head. What an infantile, boring power fantasy of a scene. This centuries old judge monster whose entire purpose is meting out The Law is telling you that you're smarter and wiser than him on the basis that you...got Bleden Mark to say "hey, cut the kid a break"? Found out that the blindingly obviously evil guys did some evil stuff and told him about it? Defended yourself in a trial where the charges were "you went into the Oldwalls and that's not allowed, and also you read a forbidden book?". It's unearned. It feels pretty un-Obsidian to have powerful NPCs just roll up and start worshipping the ground you walk on once you reach an arbitrary point in the game, solely on the basis that you're the player character and are Special and Important. If the trial had actually been difficult to navigate, I'd buy it more, but even then it feels weird that Tunon would flip-flop on a dime like that. More thoughts also, but that's freshest in my mind right now. Also funny that the "independent" path just replaces an Archon telling you what to do with Bleden Mark telling you to go collect McGuffins for no adequately explained reason. At least he gives you more leeway about it, though.
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Nov 19, 2016 00:39
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Kontradaz posted:Seemed pretty obvious to me Tunon is a pushover who sides with the winner when you understand his whole back story of changing the laws of his town so that the Overlord can just come in and take everything over in the easiest way. Right, but he's laying it on a little thick with the bootlicking praise about how much smarter and wiser and more Law-y you are than him just because you outwitted your way out of the frame-up trial equivalent of a paper bag. Also, you're not the winner yet, you're a lone rebel with like twelve friends and the ability to do some of Kyros' magic, who rules a tiny mountain holdout, vs. Kyros who rules literally the entire planet except for this one place. If he wanted to side with the winner he could just leave the Bastard City and go literally anywhere else in the world.
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Nov 19, 2016 00:51
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Dolash posted:I definitely agree about Tunon folding like a wet paper bag, especially since apparently it just comes down to a favor check rather than having to actually legal-judo him into having a meltdown. Sure, you gain favor by being lawful and wrath by not being lawful, so if you have high favor then you probably argued your case well, but it really doesn't feel like a definitive confrontation and it certainly doesn't build to some kind of central theme or point. Hell you can gain a whole point of favor with him by asking him every available conversation topic about Kyros's laws, so a refresher course on your job can be the difference between Tunon trying to kill you or worshipping you. Re: the loyalty to Kyros thing, you actually don't get a chance to proclaim loyalty to Kyros in Act 3 on the independent route - I think the closest you can get is like in your second meeting with Bleden Mark in Act 2, you can say "I'm just upholding the law my way". Once you become an archon, though, the game just assumes that you're down for rebelling against Kyros and gives you dialogue options that range roughly from "I will be a fair and just ruler of my empire", to "ha ha, power! Powerrr!". Also, I feel like it's definitely inconclusive whether Kyros would want to let you live or not. She basically sends a proclamation telling you, Nerat, Ashe, Tunon, and Bleden Mark to sort it out amongst yourselves and whoever is left standing can rule the Tiers, which doesn't seem like a declaration of murderous intent to me. Sure it would make sense that Kyros might want you dead, and maybe she's just pitting the archons against each other to wear you down before crushing you, but the game never actually confirms that that's the case. That being so, it feels similarly janky to much of the other-path railroading that you're just assumed to want to start your own rebel empire, and the only thing you get to choose is whether you say so in a nice way or a cackly evil way. Like, rebelling against Kyros seems like a very risky, somewhat pointless decision unless you're really certain she would want to kill you otherwise! Sirin can literally mind control Kyros, and Kyros still just put her in a power limiting hat instead of murdering her. Your limited control of Edicts is probably small potatoes compared to what Big Daddy Overlord can do in a magic fight, as well.
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Nov 19, 2016 01:25
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Eej posted:Kyros is definitely sending some mixed messages in Act 3 though. She says that last Archon standing rules the Tiers but then you also find out that she's sending the Archon of Plague (Ruin?) at you with their zombie army that is normally deactivated in peacetime. It just sounds like she wants all of you do weaken each other so that the zombie invasion can clean things up more easily. Oh, I must have missed that snippet. That definitely does change things a lot, yeah. Where does that show up? I remember the Archon of Ruin being mentioned early in the game, but I didn't see anything about them in Act 3.
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Nov 19, 2016 01:32
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Yeah, I definitely didn't get anything about the Archon of Ruin. After killing Graven Ashe I just got an unexplained quest in my log to proclaim an Edict on the Northern Empire, ending the game. The epilogue slides said that people in the North were shaken by Kyros' inability to protect them, but no mention of an invading army that was defeated by the Edict or anything like that. Are you sure the Archon of Ruin thing isn't for the Rebel path only? e: tell a lie, there is mention of soldiers pulling back, but I figured that was the remains of the Disfavored or similar, because it doesn't actually mention which soldiers or indeed why you're casting the Edict at all.
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Nov 19, 2016 01:46
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Also, it's hard to see why an army of zombies would want to pull back due to the Edict of Darkness, so that doesn't make a lot of sense either. But yeah, it looks like it's explicit in other runs, but it certainly wasn't even mentioned for a second in the one I just finished. It might have been in Callio's dialogue tree somewhere at the start of Act 3, but if so, I didn't hit on it.
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Nov 19, 2016 01:54
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Dolash posted:Yeah, same for rebel path. Once the other Archons are dealt with you and your rebel council are talking about the future of the Tiers, and I think even at that point some of the conversation options are ambiguous about whether the Tiers will be an autonomous realm within Kyros's Empire (as the Archon War proclamation promised) or whether it'll be independent or the start of your own competing Empire, but then a messenger runs in to say Kyros is overriding his previous proclamation and has ordered the Archon of Ruin and their army to kill everyone in the Tiers, especially you. That's the point where it's obvious that Kyros never intended to let a possible competing Overlord survive so you've got to fend the army off with an Edict which basically acts as the Tiers' declaration of independence. Yeah, that definitely doesn't happen in the independent path. There's literally no mention of it at all, or of any retaliation by Kyros other than as a reaction to the fact that your dialogue has been locked in since the start of Act 3 on how you're gonna start your own, cooler empire. And even then, it's just like one NPC saying "hm, if you try to start your own empire, Kyros will probably retaliate". It makes somewhat more sense that he'd send the Archon of Ruin after you for siding with the oathbreaking rebels you were meant to go and crush, but that doesn't necessarily imply that the same thing is happening unspoken behind the scenes in the Anarchy route. Like, I agree that it is probable, but the game does nothing to actually say that it's happening, and your character is locked in to open rebellion from the get-go no matter what, so it feels very uneven. It's not much of a choice-based RPG when the game just picks a very specific set of choices for you automatically because it's possible for a wary player to deduce etc etc.
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Nov 19, 2016 02:03
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Dolash posted:It might just be that the independent route's a little sloppy since you just don't have anyone left to talk to by the end of it? Did you kill Bleden Mark in the end, or did they join you? Once you'd dealt with Tunon, Graven Ashe and Nerat who did you go talk to? Or did it just skip straight to having a quest in your log that said "now go home and launch an Edict at the North"? Maybe the independent route is missing a good summary scene at the end to lay out what's going on after the Archons are beaten but before you use the last Edict. I still don't know about being "locked in" to rebelling against Kyros, though. I had Tunon and Bleden Mark both alive and loyal, but they don't have any new dialogue on the matter. Bleden Mark doesn't even have a conversation after the trial, just a couple of ambient pop-ups when you click on him that amount to "Stay frosty, kid". Tunon's dialogue tree is just his Act 2 dialogue tree, where you can ask him about Kyros' Law and Kyros herself and etc, to the point where he actually talks as if he's still serving Kyros and you're still a Fatebinder serving Tunon. I mean, I can excuse that as just a piece of detail that's not there, I don't really mind, but there definitely isn't anything substantial. And yeah, immediately after I killed Ashe, I got a quest to return to the Mountain Spire and launch an Edict on the Northern Empire, ending the game. It just sorta pops up in your log without preamble or explanation, and the only final conversation you get on the matter is one where Eb and Sirin are like, "maybe you shouldn't blight a nation, just a thought", but you have to do it regardless because there are no other options in the decision tree. e: re: the other thing, I kinda like Archon of Spires. It feels specific enough to the grade of the other weird Archon titles. If I really got to choose though, I think it'd be cooler to usurp one of the existing Archon titles and become like the new Archon of Secrets, or Shadows, or Law. That has a certain continuity to it. Android Blues fucked around with this message at 02:30 on Nov 19, 2016 |
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Nov 19, 2016 02:26
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Dolash posted:Oh wow, okay, I gotta admit that's pretty bad. Yeah starting to sound like they didn't flesh that route out enough. Did they maybe not think people would pick it first time? Yeah, the rebel route sounds cool. I think my main issue is just that while the game is very wide in terms of "macro" routes, the "micro" decisions you can make inside those routes are often hugely limited and sometimes lack what feel like basic options, and if you end up on a route that has a few of those that rub you the wrong way, you experience a bit of story collapse. I went from being very invested in the stakes and setting in Act 1, to frustrated with how limited everything felt in Act 2, to just coasting through Act 3 without high expectations and enjoying the bits of the game that were good. This is made worse by the fact that, due to the way the Act 1 decisions work, you can end up on a route you don't really want to be on, and permanently locked out of everything else but the Anarchy route. The game doesn't signpost this at all either, and with how the reputation system presents itself, I think a lot of players have a reasonable expectation that maybe you can mend fences in Act 2 with the rebels/your "enemy" faction, but you very definitely can't. That's locked in and flag-based, too - the reputation system is entirely irrelevant to your actual enmity with the faction. By the time I killed Ashe I was actually on like Favor 2 / Wrath 2 with the Disfavored again after helping them out some in the Stone Sea, but it didn't actually matter or allow us to parlay or anything. It's a bummer because the initial presentation of faction reputation in Act 1 is that it's a core system, when in fact it's basically just for a handful of dialogue checks scattered throughout the game, and that's it. Like, if you end up on a route where the basic flow is copacetic to what you wanna do, it probably feels a lot better. But if you end up on a route that's even slightly different, the sheer lack of nuance in approach soon begins to feel maddening.
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Nov 19, 2016 02:52
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Eej posted:It's basically a Visual Novel for better or worse Yeah, I almost made that exact comparison myself. I might not mind that if they just told you it was, but when you go in expecting a more traditional approach, it's very jarring. Basic Chunnel posted:In the independent path, Bleden Mark states outright in his secret message that the trial is a trap to get you executed. It stands to reason that Kyros basically tried every trick in her bag to kill you without directly opposing you, for reasons that are sort of unclear. Not realizing that you could turn Tunon was one of several miscalculations she makes. I actually got his note directly after the trial of the Archons, but like one quest before Tunon summons you for your own trial, so it was very confusing and just made me think something had happened out of sequence. I was like, "no, we just had the trial, he definitely didn't try to kill me...".
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Nov 19, 2016 02:58
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Ibram Gaunt posted:Something I didn't like about the 'locked in' nature of the routes is at least in the Disfavored route it seemed very poorly handled. Since yeah, I'm backing the nazi cultists, but my trip to the Crossing had the people basically say they were fine with the Disfavored since they treated them decently, which makes it seem like they have some depth to them, but you then have to kill like every other faction for them - but it's not presented that way until the end of said missions. I could /try/ to be friends with the beastmen, alot of dialogue options without a [lie] but it ends with them just attacking me anyways, not even saying because I'm with the Disfavored, and that's why it bugs me. If locking in with them made all of my interactions with the other factions different it wouldn't seem as jarring. But to me it was just "well i can be nice and get a ton of favor with these people but they'll just attack me at the end anyways' I don't really buy the handwaving away that it's to be expected because I'm with the Disfavored, because they wouldn't let me go 90% of a mission friendly in that case. I went out of my way to help the settlers in the edict of earth place but I still had to enthusiastically agree to blight their land. I would have even been fine with the ability to tell ashe that it was a stupid idea and get a huge wrath with him and the opportunity to break the alliance or do it with my tail between my legs but no such opportunity arose at that junction. Yes, that's the part of it that is truly a ludicrous and indefensible decision. The fact that, apparently uniformly, you can break alliances at the start of faction quests but not at the end, when often new twists or stakes or consequences (some as major as giving an infant child to Nerat as a hostage, or blighting Azure's land forever) have been revealed, is straight up silly and is a large part of why the locked-in routes feel so bad. Most of them don't even have the option to say that your character feels bad or conflicted about doing the evil thing your faction wants you to do, it's just "yes sir, Mr. Lecter, sir!".
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Nov 19, 2016 03:14
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Yeah, the Disfavored are sort of more plausible than the Scarlet Chorus, who are a Mongol horde-type nomadic army that somehow exists unchanged in peacetime without developing family ties, houses, or static possessions, and which functions as a wing of a large, cosmopolitan agrarian empire.
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Nov 19, 2016 03:18
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Dolash posted:I do wish the reputation system had been used even more. When you're on the rebel route you sort of feel like you get a lot of use out of it because every area has a new rebel faction or two you can gain favor with, and even if you'll usually max that out by the end of the area anyway it feels like it makes a difference if you really go far to win them over or else terrorize them a bit instead. If you ask some Chorus people about it (Verse I believe, but possibly others as well) they say that when there's no war on, the Chorus cloisters itself and does martial training and stuff, with the Scarlet Furies in charge. It's also mentioned that once a place has been conquered, the Chorus can't rape and terrorise its inhabitants any more and are bound to uphold Kyros' Peace, and the person who tells you this seems pretty sold on the fact that this actually somehow happens. I mean, they could have skewed perceptions of their own effectiveness, but there are definitely a couple of Chorus characters who talk about what they do during times of peace/occupation, which would seem to imply that it has happened before. Also, yeah, that would have been super cool. I thought for sure there would be something like that in the pipeline with Ashe during early Act 1, and that would have been the perfect time to do it. Also would be hilarious if you could recruit Nerat and get your mind eaten ten minutes later for ever, ever thinking it was a good idea to recruit Nerat.
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Nov 19, 2016 03:30
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Insurrectionist posted:The Chorus's entire structure seems to just be reliant on strength - you order around people below you, and get ordered around by people above you. Obviously forming cliques somewhat complicates this, but only as far as muddling the actual chain of command if someone stronger than you but weaker tan your boss starts pushing you around for example. Now the Chorus doesn't necessarily have issues existing in peace-time in terms of logistics, because it's not got an actual creed to murder/rape/pillage/whatever constantly and its members are in THEORY perfectly okay sitting around doing menial jobs while honing their strength and improving their social standing purely through fighting with each-other. The game several times presents them as security-forces for an otherwise peaceful (for the most part at least) area. However that still leaves it with three problems. I think Nerat likes the idea of that collapse, and wants the power structure of the Chorus to be inherently self-defeating and flawed. If you ask Kills-in-Shadow what she thinks of Nerat and the Chorus, she says that while it's good that strength rises to the top of the pack, the lack of respect and structure means the Chorus is inefficient, constantly eating itself, and actually pretty lovely from a "strong survive" perspective. If Sirin is in your party at the time, she'll chime in and tell you from personal experience living with Nerat that this is exactly how he wants it: it pleases his twisted personality to institute a poison philosophy in his mass of hapless conscripts and watch them destroy each other over it. He's under no illusions that Murder Libertarianism is actually an effective form of social engineering: it's just all a big game to him. Hence the name Scarlet Chorus, I guess: he views the whole army, both internally and in combat, as just one big beautiful symphony of blood and murder. Android Blues fucked around with this message at 03:46 on Nov 19, 2016 |
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Nov 19, 2016 03:44
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This is also why he murders his ambitious lieutenants. He doesn't actually care about the health or functionality of his army at all, past the basic issue of "can I throw them at a problem if I need to". If someone's rising in the ranks and seems ambitious, they aren't a potential asset, because he doesn't care about the Chorus being good. They're just someone he can torture in a new, slightly more interesting way, because they expected better from him. He's a demi-god playing a game, and the Chorus aren't his playmates, they're just disposable warm bodies he can use as game pieces. It's a very stark contrast to Ashe, of course, who literally bleeds for his soldiers, but who is limited as a general by his excessive care for their dignity and wellbeing.
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Nov 19, 2016 03:50
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Insurrectionist posted:]I do understand that he doesn't want the Chorus to be successful in either an 'attractive to join' or 'constantly growing' aspect - I mentioned that it would need to bleed off a lot of wartime recruits, in combat or otherwise, because ignoring what the Voices wants them to be, they just don't have a lot of use in peacetime and a big Chorus would be a big drain on food and other basic necessities for no gain. I just can' understand how it ever gets anything done (beyond mindlessly charging at an enemy army in its entirety). The Burning Library is a fair example - if the ultra-competent player character wasn't around, it's not exactly unthinkable that the entirety of the Chorus force sent to find the Silent Archive would just kill themselves in their stupid game until only one group remained and then that one would get killed by some other danger in there and they'd be poo poo outta luck and facing Nerat's punishment while he faced no Archive. Only chance and protagonist competence prevented that. How does it get anything done WITHOUT me around to do it? I mean, yeah, totally with you on this. On the other hand, I don't find it implausible that Nerat would just disregard any sort of practical concerns arising from the unwieldiness of the Chorus, because he actively enjoys the misery and carnage that comes from the end point of his big lovely army loving up, and some characters mention that Nerat might be to a degree self-hating or just completely mad: Sirin says she thinks he "might not even trust himself". Where I'm with you though is what the impact of the Chorus would be on an agrarian, imperial society in peacetime. There's no way they wouldn't either acclimate to the base culture (join the rat race, get a house, a farm, some kids...), die off, desert en masse, or cause enough chaos to get executed in droves if you told them to sit still in a peaceful city for even a few months. That's why they seem a little less grounded in practicality to me than the Disfavored chiefly.
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Nov 19, 2016 03:58
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Insurrectionist posted:See, on a personality level this makes sense to me. I can understand to some degree the Voices of Nerat being like this. However that does make me wonder, how did this start? While still bug-gently caress crazy, the story of how he originally joined up with Kyros portrays him somewhat differently - able to see what needed to be done and do it with ruthless efficiency in order to gain favor. In comparison a completely unreliable force simply existing to sow chaos who can't even be relied on to do actual important work yet is still sent to do it doesn't seem Kyros' style at all. Well, nothing ironclad, but there's also some mention of the fact that the more minds Nerat consumes, the more insane he goes. And when he tells you his origin story, it becomes clear that he was initially just a sadistic young nobleman who tortured his own family to death to demonstrate to Kyros his willingness to do anything to get ahead, and has become the creature he became after centuries of consuming other consciousnesses and revelling in torture. It's possible that he's been getting steadily less competent over the decades as his personality becomes more fractured, and that failing to work with the Disfavored and subsequently starting a civil war is his final "wobble" into complete uselessness to Kyros.
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Nov 19, 2016 04:21
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Also, on consideration, it's interesting that Nerat became 'the Voices of Nerat' after killing his own family in a gruesome public ritual, and that so many of the Chorus' initiation rituals also involve killing friends and family members in gaudy public displays. I hadn't really spotted the parallel, but it now seems clear that he's working out his own trauma on the bodies of his servants by enshrining this in their social code. And like him, they also lose their old name, gain a new one based on their deeds, and regard the person they used to be as someone entirely different and divorced from their new identity. Neat.
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Nov 19, 2016 04:25
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Ironslave posted:Nerat also mentions that part of what made him what he is is the perceptions of others on what he is. In this regard, the metaphysics of Tyranny's setting are loving horrifying. I hadn't really thought about that, but yeah, that is a terrifying idea. He's this scheming, sadistic plotter who just slowly slides into being an increasingly bloodthirsty, inhuman chimera simply because the public at large thinks of him as an insane boogeyman figure rather than as a person. Now I'm thinking about Ashe getting Tim Allen'd by people thinking of him as a War Granddad and growing back his big white beard instantly every time he tries to shave it. Much more comforting.
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Nov 19, 2016 04:31
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Graven Ashe literally cannot not tell a dad joke when the setup line presents itself, because of the Archon's Curse. If you show him a razor, he has to teach you how to shave. It's really hard for him.
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Nov 19, 2016 04:33
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 09:35 |
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Also, Dolash, you may be interested to know that I found a really egregious Homestuck reference in this game.
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Nov 19, 2016 04:40
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