Even if I admit there’s a place for character like that Tyranny has a very special place for a person like that and that’s act 3. Before that you’re nobody and should have problems dealing with local mercenaries and army squads. And make those squads diverse. That would work fine.

Killing Archons so easily (no reloads on highest difficulty game can give me on my first go in a final fight) was disappointing.

I did also like the skills, specifically the fact that everyone can cast spells. Everyone on my team had 70+ Control Life at the end through healing each other and nobody ever died towards the end. I kind of regret that the game isn’t long enough to experiment with some true multiclassing, but then that would probably make your characters even *more* overpowered than they currently are.

And yes, I do like that the outcomes you get aren’t necessarily the outcomes you’d expect. Life isn’t always that neat.

I played through it on Hard, and I thought the big problem — and I don’t know how you fix this — is that you start the game with one ability and have nothing to do in combat, and then at the end of the game you’ve turned into this sort of overpowered anime “WHICH TECHNIQUE SHALL I USE TO SEND YOU TO OBLIVION” character. I like games that let me build broken characters (as long as they’re not *too* broken) so I’m not necessarily complaining about the latter part, but I did think the first couple of hours were way too slow combat-wise.

The spellcrafting was… interesting. You could make a good system out of that idea. In fact somebody did about 25 years ago in a game called Legend; unfortunately all Tyranny’s really managed was, as you say, to completely throw to the wind when and where a player would find a particular rune, and thus unlock a particular variant of spell.

I liked the writing a lot, though I think it could’ve used a few more rounds of copy editing. In addition to numerous typos, there were more than a few instances where my character’s responses were very far out of line with the way everyone else spoke (specifically by being both very informal and too modern for the game’s setting).

Still, it was an interesting game, and I hope that with an expansion and some patches it could prove to be a real classic.

Yes, very much so! Don’t want to spoil anything, but I started the game as a mage and thought Disfavored were nice professional guys. Then Voices, being a mage and intriguing guy, fascinated me, and I joined Chorus. Then seeing how Chorus operates my character indeed went through change and had a very interesting conversation with Tunon.

Edicts are fascinating. My problem with spells in this game is they got magic so right with mysterious powers of Voices or other Archons and Edicts. It works just as it should work in a fantasy world: in a strange, powerful and uncontrollable way. But then you get to combat magic and it’s just add +10% power to spell, lower cooldown by 20%, bla-bla-bla. Works well gameplay-wise, but spoils the atmosphere.

Kyros tries to make a point. He doesn’t want to solve problems with edicts all the time, he wants to have a working system.

I love Tyranny. You’re right it’s not about evil. It’s more about being corporate executive for most part. Also you became a special guy during the game itself due to some magical interaction way beyond your understanding (and I like the game not going into precursor backstory), though the same can be said about Mass Effect story. Really my only nitpick for the story would be no way to really remain fully loyal. I was afraid writers will be overzealous again and produce walls of text just as in PoE but no, Tyranny is much more laconic and it works well. Hypertext helps. I really liked factions, characters, places, everything. I was amazed how story changed my view of factions so that I changed owners of a certain town *three times*, each time thinking I’m doing right thing.

The real problem with the game is combat and, specifically, difficulty. My first and only playthrough was on Path of the Damned and it’s supposed to be a real challenge. It was, up until the 2nd act. Then it became trivial. By the time I got to crafting and artifacts and cool fun abilities I didn’t need them. I just rolled over everything. Common problem for RPGs, but it usually comes in the end game when you already used all the toys. Would be very much interested in replaying the game couple more times with different character, party and choices – but only after they patch and expand it for the difficulty to make sense. Usually this would be a snobbish and dumb request from self-centered “hardcore” player. However the game is advertised as reactive and replayable. I’ve played PoE twice, yes, but it doesn’t mean I should *easily* finish it on my first try putting it on autocombat in the second half of the game. This means that even usual player completing game on normal and learning it will be bored on second playthrough just as I was if not more.

They did difficulty right with Pillars of Eternity, 3.0 was really the only real-time with pause combat in RPG even approaching good. Haven’t played Dishonored yet but right now Tyranny looks like a closest thing to my personal GOTY. Or, and there were those Dark Souls 3 and XCOM2 games that I’d probably like but didn’t get to, and Master of Orion is supposed to become good on December 1. So we’ll see.

Some other thoughts:
- It kind of annoyed me that your character knows more about Kyros that you do. There are plenty of references to having met or spoken to Kyros, so it’s a bit disappointing there’s no clear indication of who/what Kyros is.
- The thing about the edicts is that it seems (spoilers) Kyros doesn’t actually have as much control over them as everyone assumes.
- As for the “now choose” plot point, what’s interesting is that even in spite of that, people (notably the PC Gamer reviewer) complained that they were forced to make choices when they couldn’t appreciate the outcome (which for me was a selling point).
- I actually think they were right to position it as a game where you play the bad guy, given that you can do some really nasty stuff without the game judging you for it. I think for some people expecting pillars of eternity 1.5, they’d have freaked out to discover it’s a lot more morally ambiguous. But that said, perhaps it didn’t go far enough, but then I didn’t pursue the “chaos” path either.