Playing the bad guys
Tyranny is fun and does offer some interesting gameplay structures, writes Emillio Daniel
TYRANNY comes with an enticing offer for its premise — it lets gamers play under the banner of the bad guys. More than that, the game puts you at the tail end of the war for conquering the fantasy world it puts players in.
With publisher Paradox Interactive and developer Obsidian Entertainment boasting its’ sales-pitch of, “sometimes, evil wins”, the game invites players to the path of evil at RM85 on Steam.
Eagle-eyed gamers would be aware that Obsidian is no stranger to tipping its toes in grey areas of morality with previous titles such as Fallout: New Vegas (2010) and South Park: The Stick of Truth (2014) under its belt.
Although Tyranny was initially released on Nov 10, 2016, the game, unfortunately, did not meet sales expectations despite some fairly good reviews. It is fun and does offer some interesting gameplay structures for players to indulge in so it’s worth revisiting or picking up if you’ve never played it before.
PLAYING THE GAME
The first thing you’ll notice about Tyranny is that there is a lot of reading. Imagine every game that ever had lore books and data entries strewn around the world for players to collect and comb through.
Now imagine that the entire game was delivered to you in that form. While Tyranny does have incredibly well voice-acted lines even for minor characters, quite a large chunk of information is fed to the player via incredibly long blocks of text.
For some players, this is a good thing as it means that almost every nook and cranny of worldbuilding information in this game is explained to the player as long as they’re willing to sift through a novel’s worth of text.
On the other hand, some people don’t like reading. To understand this game design choice, it is important to pick out what inspires Tyranny.
The game comes about from the nostalgia gamers have been touting for old-school RPGs (role playing games) from the 90s. From days where triple-A level budgets for voice-acting were rare and the skip text button in a video-game had such hilariously bad response time that it was better to just sit and read through the text before moving on.
Unless of course you just kept your finger on the skip button in every Pokemon JRPG. The angled top down gameplay harkens back to the early days of games such as
Diablo and Fallout; as in the original not the post 2000 sequels.
There’s just a little catch with this nostalgia — the gameplay is dated to what we currently have in the game market with so much more given to the players.
MORALITY SYSTEMS
Role-playing games in recent years have already been boasting morality systems albeit clearly tailored to be a lot better for players who choose the moral high path.
Games such as Mass Effect, Drag on Age and Fallout all have morality systems that change how the story goes and what factions align with you in-game.
Tyranny does have a little bit of an edge in this regard despite being clearly weighted towards being evil. It hinges on a less binary system of good and evil and takes on several different metres of reputation such as Loyalty and Fear with companions or Favor and Wrath with influential NPC characters.
The fun part is that if you play your cards right, you can end up with both metres filling up instead of just having one go up and the other go down. This makes for decisions that tend to feel like they truly are impacted more by a sense of how the player wants to roleplay instead of what perks and rewards they want to get.
Tyranny does suffer from the same gameplay design problems those older top down style RPG games had such as how it makes finding your way around a level confusing as it isn’t clear what paths can be reached and where one needs to go.
It’s also surprisingly easy to not know where to find important NPCs as there isn’t a quest marker. While that particular design choice does provoke the player to explore the world more, it’s hampered in the fact that the gameplay world isn’t scaled for exploration in the way a game like Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014) is.
CONCLUSION
Tyranny does offer a rather compelling throwback to an older time in gaming that would suit a gamer who is patient with a wall of text so long that it rivals the one Donald Trump wants to build.
However, the game doesn’t offer much else aside from an interesting premise and the chance to pretend to be the baddies. It lacks downtime moments and is a constant barrage of getting the jobs done with even companion chatter looking suspiciously like ways to pry information that can be used to blackmail them or others.
However, the premise has a valuable lesson to be learnt and is proof that games don’t have to push players to want to be on thegoodside.
Games are a fantasy where the players are given the chance to be whoever they want to be. If this premise was taken to a larger scale game, I have no doubt that it would do much better as long as they drop the dependency on textual guidance.
The game is worth picking up during a sale where it’s known to drop rather drastically.
I rate the game a 6.5/10. The game is still fantastically written and a joy to go through its lore; it was just too much lore in one format.