Fenixp

Well... Considering the old Fallout community, I think I'll take people who just want to shoot stuff :-P

Worse is subjective, but the combat is quite objectively massively simplified on just about all fronts. It's... Trivial. There's nothing interesting to do. The character combos are cool... And that's about it, really.

Yeah, while combat is kinda poor, the game is certainly well worth the asking price. Writing is excellent - and Tyranny is a shining example of how to create companion characters. You can do something far worse to her.

To be fair, in Witcher 3, crafting things just means you'll get things with marginal damage increase like an hour earlier than you would otherwise. It's quite safe to ignore entirely.

I thought the spell creation system was a cool idea, until it turned out that it mostly just means I end up with a bunch of generic spells that all more or less do the same thing with different colors applied. There are some exceptions to this of course, but overall, Tyranny's spell creation system is ... Not that great.

Uh, you do? I'm not sure entirely sure how does that happen, but okay, to each their own I suppose. Anyway, just tested the potions and, as it turns out, they really don't consume an action and don't trigger recovery. There's even a tooltip in one of the loading screens stating so - which is why I checked in the first place. The way consumables work is that they get consumed instantly upon clicking them, current action doesn't get interrupted and right after consuming them, character is continuing with its current action. I'm elaborating so that there's no misunderstanding. Nobody ever is surprised about the fact that doing this triggers cooldown on consumables. This is grounds for a refund. Actually, screw refund, we need to issue a class-action lawsuit against Paradox and Obsidian for allowing this to happen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghpgGwz7nEQ

Asides from loads of rebalances, bug fixes and such, I'd say these are the most important, and I'm talking changes since the release that I know of: - Party no longer needs to enter stealth mode as a party - individual members can sneak individually. - Companion AI has been introduced and can be customized to a very limited extent. More importantly, it's easy to turn off. - Hard counters were introduced. Priest spells now grant complete immunity to status effects an instantly lift them when casted. Applies to scrolls as well, incidentally. - Stronghold got a bunch of new story-related content. - Skills of Athletics and Survival were changed rather significantly - Athletics now works as a per-encounter healing spell basically, while survival lets you choose resting bonuses every time you camp - You can now respec your characters. It's fairly tucked away in the UI and entirely optional. Play however you want, it's an RPG ;-) But generally, I'd say play it as you'd play BG1 as area progression is quite similar to that. Not from the start, but from the first inn you discover. Money will then most likely become the limiting factor, but you don't really have to touch pre-defined companions, ever.

When I was learning writing as a teenager, I did so as a part of creative writing community - so yes, I did get to see a fair amount of various writing styles, including very emo stuff. Which happens to be a viable style you were comparing PoE to, by the way, I just pointed out the comparison doesn't work. If you said it reads like chimps were pressing random buttons.. Yeah, that would be an obvious exaggeration. Nope, and it's true that some spell effects were exaggerated. But situation getting utterly chaotic was much more of a rarity than a rule, especially now that the game got patched heavily to improve on clarity (still not perfect, but much better). Regardless, I'll take interesting albeit a bit more chaotic combat system over dull cooldown spam - not to mention system with far better UI. Seriously, the UI is a tragedy in Tyranny, and it's not a tragedy only occasionally. I do hope some patching goes into fixing that. Friendly fire, soft counters, hard counters, flanking, mechanically much more varied classes... Whoa there cowboy, it does? All right then, I suppose I have just misinterpreted that mechanic then. My mistake. All right, let me elaborate: Positioning matters as much as attributes matter in Pillars of Eternity by your standards :-P There are situations in which it does, but by reducing party size to 4 (less options for area denial), removing friendly fire (mage can be pretty much anywhere for some of the more powerful spells) and lack of flanking (I don't need to hide my rogue anyway. Well I really can't as that means dropping my initial party size by 25%) I also kinda enjoyed the crowd control focus of combat in PoE against mobs of monsters, but focus on less, more powerful opponents can't really be called a disadvantage, it's just... Different. Respecing is not a natural part of character progression, it's an option that you may or may not use - and I'd actually welcome its presence in Tyranny too, even tho I'd never use it since I like semblance of weight in my character progression decisions. I'd also like to point out that the option got added later on when people were complaining that it's not present. Oh no, they don't matter as much in usual builds, they're fairly essential in specialized builds. So when you don't have a first clue about what it is you're doing, you won't be actively punished by the game (altho you can make it more difficult on yourself), but when you do, you can achieve pretty great effect by minmaxing. I'd call that a pretty good design all in all.

Overall writing seems to be better than in Pillars. And the world is more interesting. But no, if Pillars of Eternity was written by whiny emo/goth kid who wants to be dark, so is Tyranny. (This just proves you didn't spend a lot of time reading stuff that emo/goth kids actually write. Pillars is not particularly dark even when compared to modern fantasy literature at large, and emo/goth kid writing is a different league altogether.) Oh I take it you didn't play Baldur's Gate *ducks* You're right, you can always see what everybody is doing, but you could also see that in Pillars of Eternity. Well as long as you sport a pair of eyes that is - altho being colorblind could cause an issue I suppose. Otherwise, the combat in Tyranny is just ... Massively dumbed down when compared to Pillars. Pillars offered layers upon layers of options, and even tho it could have done with *some* streamlining, this just took it into territory of complete triviality. Positioning doesn't matter, spell selection hardly matters, engagement mechanics seem to have been rendered into a bit of a joke... Click the buttons when cooldown ends. Since drinking potions no longer even costs an action, you just click those when you get in trouble. And you win. It's... God it's bad. And that's all combined with the horrible UI. It does one thing better tho - it explains its mechanics more precisely it would seem. No, attributes don't matter at all in Tyranny, because you can constantly change them. One thing I loved in PoE was that you were locked to your combination of attributes outside of item bonuses and buffs for the rest of the game, your selection actually mattered. Tyranny is, on the other hand, fairly generous with levels, and each allows you to increase an attribute. Meh. (and the whole "attributes don't matter in Pillars of Eternity" thing people sometimes keep pulling out of their sleeve is just ... Ridiculous. It's correct that they don't matter as much as in many other RPGs, but they're still damn important, especially for specialized builds.)

As far as I'm concerned, take the surely massively overblown VA budget and put it somewhere where it'd so more good to the game. Anywhere. I have a lot of imagination and I love reading books, I'm fine in that department. Sure, a lot of cinematic games would feel quite weird without voice acting, but I don't think text-heavy isometric RPGs need it at all.

The lore promised sex slaves, I didn't get one yet.

More importantly: You're releasing hotfixes! Thus far untapped marvels of that fancy internet thing are finally being exploited! I hope it's at least 1,3 GB on GOG.

Oh god, don't be a scam.

All right, I liked how the spell crafting works, but it turned out it's just boring. I can have single-target close-range fire thing, single-target close-range ice thing, long-distance slight-AoE fire thing, long-distance slight-AoE ice thing and in an extremely exciting twist of events a single-target close-range thing that freezes people and puts them on fire and long-distance slight-AoE thing that also freezes people and puts them on fire. (don't ask, I have no idea how does that work.) In comparison, my lvl1 mage in Pillars of Eternity could summon puddle of oil, shoot fire from his hands in a cone which was powerful but required careful positioning, could cast a powerful shield on himself, summon a slow-damaging area of ice, buff friends, debuff oponents and that's just one magic casting class. I always felt like I've had a ton more options, which also made me feel more in control, yet fast pace of combat ensued that timing was of the essence. In Tyranny I'm just... Waiting for cooldonws to expire so that I can cast again. On bright side, locations in Tyranny are really impressive-looking. They're sadly a lot smaller than in Pillars and exploration is a lot less of a factor, but oh well. Writing also feels quite a bit more interesting.

I just dropped difficulty to story mode and the combat is a nice, relaxing collection of flashing lights and people jumping about.

I'm harping on it a lot because I've not yet played a ton of it (like 3 hours or so thus far) and a lot of the game's problems are readily apparent, but it is quite a looker. And the game presents player with an unstable region which just recently emerged from a state of war, and it gives player a role of a pivotal member of the conquering army. I don't usually play goody two shoes in RPGs on purpose, I play them because I enjoy playing diplomatic characters and in mindset of most RPGs, that means a good character by default - but it's a "When in Rome, do as Romans do" mentality more so than anything. Applying the same mentality to Tyranny allows me to be a massive judgemental bastard and I'm loving it - you're in a position of power, telling somebody to STFU or his head'll roll often is the diplomatic solution.

I'm not very good at dem videogames and so I actually found Pillars on hard fairly challenging. I mostly just find Tyranny on hard irritating. You watch cooldowns of everybody's abilities and then click those abilities. It's Dragon Age: Origins all over again, just without mana and far worse animated. Well actually, I'm going to go on record here and say that the combo skills executed by two members of the party in tandem are neat, but I'm pretty sure they're useable per rest? So in combination with time limit, you're not ever going to use them? Am I wrong here?

Oh it's not irrational at all, you find people whom you trust and decide based on their opinions. But that's how it's always been, even with reviews in magazines of old - there were reviewers I knew I could trust and those who I could not. Now we just get access to massively larger number of information sources, and generally speaking, youtubers can relay some kind of information, reviewers other and players yet another, which when pieced together, you can be more or less 100% certain about a purchase. I'm not necessarily arguing with you y'know, just saying: You always trust people, regardless of their occupation. Anyway, played a bit more of it. I'm not sure how much of a fan of the time limit am I, but it actually seems pretty generous - I just can't rest-spam, which is good. I don't really like the wounds system tho - when a character gets down to certain percentage of his health, said character gets wounded. Problem is that the health limit for wounds is not really indicated in any reasonable way, so you're just fighting and suddenly a wound. And the only way to get rid of a wound is to rest. And to rest, you need to sacrifice time. I think you can guess where this is going... I'm also playing on hard and thus far, the game has not been particularly difficult.

Well there are trustworthy reviewers and bad reviewers, trustworthy youtubers and bad youtubers, trustworthy people and untrustworthy me. The trick is in finding who you can trust and who to ignore as opposed to a blanket "All of these people are terrible", but as long as it works for you...

So, I have reached the beginning of the time limit (yes, the first major quest is time limited, but most who watched some info on Tyranny should know this) - Combat does indeed feel a lot slower, which is not great in my book. Reduction to party size is another aspect I'm not a fan of, although I'm yet to meet more than a single companion, so it's not that big of a deal yet - Somehow, the game has managed to take pretty damn good UI from Pillars and make it look a lot more busy and more difficult to navigate. Not a huge fan of that. (fullscreen map is gone. Why!? Especially since map is one of the few things that has actually improved... Also, dialogue window background is transparent for some reason, making text harder to read. I'd also kill for an option to increase font size. Oh and you can no longer resize dialogue window, because who needed that anyway.) - At first I loved the decision to insert those colored hyperlinks into the conversation as I assumed those mean characters aren't going to dump lore at you and instead, lore will be hidden behind these hyperlinks, because surely your character knows all of these things. Well, turns out it's Obsidian and they can totally lore-dump while they lore-dump. Also, ignoring these hyperlinks is pretty much impossible as at least one conversation thus far has found a way of inserting fairly important information into them, as opposed to ... I don't know, just writing that stuff directly into conversation. - Learning by doing system is pretty nice, but feels strange during conversations. That's because the momenty your character passes a qualifier in a conversation, not choosing that conversation option means losing out on XP using eligible skill would give you. (yes, when you need, say, lore skill for a conversation check and use option using that check in a conversation, you get lore XP. You don't get lore XP if you just skip the option) - Writing is generally good, but sometimes it feels like the game has been written to take the whole "Everything is evil here" to comical levels of ridiculous. Nevermind the statue crying blood, I thought that looked pretty at the very least, first companion is just adamant in repeating how much she enjoys killing people in multiple ways. - Spell crafting seems to be a really nice system, with a decent amount of possible choices with an outcome of interesting spells. Lore as a limiting factor also forces you to make tough choices, while allowing your spells to slowly improve. I like this. I ... Think that's about it. The tutorial section has nothing on tutorial section in Pillars sadly - latter lets you loose in a reasonably sized area and then in a nice, seemingly open dungeon, whereas Tyranny has you following a linear path while fighting a string of battles with very little in terms of conversation options. I was not impressed. But things started improving rapidly the moment I reached the first open-ish location of the war camp, so the game is growing on me quite fast now. Edit: Oh and character creation. Character creation is great.

I started playing over half an hour ago and didn't even get halfway through character creation yet, this is great

In other words, pirates are getting the superior version again. Aren't you glad EA has this whole auth service to check whether you have actually purchased their DLC after purchasing their DLC?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvpgyjRWcqY

There's less micromanagement because there's less to react to. Situation on the battlefield doesn't ever change during your turn in turn-based games. Which is one of the reasons for why they feel so sterile to me.