Beat
TyrannyWish it was this easy in real life
Finished my first run in about 22-23 hours. Did everything I could, although the bronze brotherhood was glitched for me so I couldn't activate the Lethian Crossing storyline to get into the oldwalls dungeon and get the final rubbing. So I just cheated and found the rubbing online to get up the spire.
The way I glitched Lethian's Crossing quest was:
-Go to Lethian's Crossing and fight the brotherhood on the bridge
-Be on Disfavored route
-After Stalwart (here's where it glitches):
spoiler (click to show/hide)
When I had the choice to kill the baby, if I kill the baby and go back to Ashe, he gives me the choice to address Lethian or Burning Library next. However if I don't kill the baby and search for a way to save it, he gives me only Burning Library and when I'm done with that he moves to marching on Stone Seas and Lethian's Crossing questline just vanishes.
Also had some minor glitches where I couldn't report one of the side quests because the quest giver vanished off the map :|
Normally when I play choice driven rpgs I tend to play pretty much complete paragon/good route. So even though this had some fun evil options I still tried to take what seemed the most good route. Was a little bummed at some of the evil stuff I couldn't avoid. Here's what happened in my route:
spoiler (click to show/hide)
Joined the Disfavored since they generally seemed like honorable decent military and Ashe was like Santa Clause dad, they got out of line sometimes but I mainly kept them in check. Killed Voices of Nerats/Scarlet Chorus murderer/rapist gang, got Tunon to bend the knee and Ashe as well so kept it as bloodless as possible.
Bad things that I was unable to avoid:
-Archon Carne. When the earthshakers wanted to fuck up the entire stone sea region to take out the scarlet chorus, I was like this is fucked up yo and I told that to Ashe who got pissed but said he appreciated my insight and still gave them the go ahead. I was hoping the game would give me an option to sabotage their plan without betraying the alliance, but didn't see an option. Would've liked to fuck up their plan and just go take out the Scarlet Chorus instead saving the Stone Seas.
-Stoneshakers beast tribe. I tried using friendly talks with them, but they'd always reject it (even though I saved the guy in Hedge whatever) and so I ended up having to kill them all
Luckily Kills-in-Shadows seemed to understand.
-Beat the Vendrions Well, Unbroken rebel groups. Looks like there's a way to go that rebel route, but couldn't figure it out. Also accidently wiped out all the Sages because I went to get a captive and they attacked me! Then I saved their member the next location over and he goes "hey, you should go back and talk to Rentera, she'll totally be on your side to take out the Scarlet Chorus at the Burning Librarby" kinda late when she attacked me on the way there and ended up dead.
Gameplay-wise, outside of some weak pathfanding and AI characters not using their skills enough, I really enjoyed the battle system. Mixed around my party a bit and there's some interesting team setups. On hard the game is solidly challenging and was turn-pausing it for a while, but I like that sometimes when it's easier and you just wanna steamroll through you can auto-fight with turbo mode and no pausing and just blow through. I felt around the last 20% of the game the difficulty suddenly got MUCH EASIER, I think that was around when everyone was getting their final skill tree skills and artifact equipment/weapons. Siren getting 2 songs at a time really made a difference for my party. She is great constant buffers/debuffer with 2 songs going.
I felt magic was kinda underpowered and in the last 1/3rd I moved from 2 melee, 2 casters to 3 melee & Sirin as my only caster/healer. Stuff like false pit making enemies prone was good and buffs/debuffs were but eventually skills/artifacts did those better. Caster debuff magic to silence in a straight line was always helpful. I never found any really damaging spells, plus I didn't like how spells a lot of times had low accuracy with my casters so you'd waste a queue only to miss it anyways (best spells seemed like ones that hit a bunch of targets so even if they missed on one or two they'd hit the others). I felt in general a lot of the moves/spells lacked impact or major damage. Sure the team combo ones were nice, but they were sloooow to pull off and leave the characters open. I really liked using Kills-in-Shadows in the last 1/3rd because here dash move felt impactful as she'd slam through and knock a line of enemies down and then do an extra 40% damage to the prone enemies. My MC was a 2H Melee character and I never felt he had the strong hit impact skills like that. In fact, pretty much all his skills were just single enemy walk up and strike them outside like one multi-hit slash that did weak damage (.80x).
Combat was still real fun though, just felt like a low level underdog campaign. Which is ironic because the story is fairly short (not too short though) yet the power levels story-wise are crazy and your MC is supposedly going from a normal guy to ridiculous power taking out armies and stuff all within the timespan of this short story and combat-wise you're still going around poking guys for 50 damage maxing out at level 13 or 14. Just sorta a disconnect there.
In fact on the scope size, even though I think the length is fine, certain aspects of the game feel like they were built for a much bigger game. Like I just got my party member's final skill (or some didn't even get there) right before the end, and I was only just able to build an artifact weapon right at the final boss fight. I never even used any of the support potions and those seemed like they'd be fairly useful especially when you have an infirmary and could build out what you want. Like the gameplay systems seem like they could go for a 30-40 hour game even though the story is 20-25.
I feel like the replayability is alright. The game doesn't remind me of Alpha Protocol at all which is what I was hoping for (my favorite branching game ever), but it feels like a smaller scope, mini-Fallout New Vegas from the Tribal War factions to the way reputation is handled between them to the 3rd act and ending stills. Which is great. Fallout NV was awesome, and I'm quite happy with a mini-NV campaign here with D&D combat. I can see there being enough really unique content for at least a second playthrough as the other army (I'm assuming act II plays out very differently if you are on the other side) and I'm really curious how the
spoiler (click to show/hide)
rebel faction
playthrough goes and if it's unique enough to make a 3rd playthrough its own thing. I'm not a big fan of replaying games, so I probably won't play it again but definitely will check out some guides/youtubes once their up to see how things go down in some of the other branches.
For the most part, especially when the ending rolled, I felt like it did a pretty good job being an rpg where it's
your story and you make a bunch of choices and go down your own route and the ending reflects that. I think maybe there were a couple parts where you could have had more leeway, but I'm satisfied.
Definitely was worth a play. I still haven't played Pillars or Dungeon Siege III, but haven't played a bad Obsidian game yet. Tyranny joins their lineup of interesting & quality games.
