Tyranny Interview

PCGamesN has published a new Tyranny interview with game director Brian Heins. The interview focuses on Tyranny’s peculiar position as the first game where Obsidian had the opportunity to iterate on a certain gameplay style and technology, its skill system, and its take on morality and ethics. A few choice quotes:

I have to imagine that, along with that, there must be a lot of lessons learned through the development of Pillars of Eternity that are being applied in Tyranny.

A lot of it was looking at what people really liked about Pillars of Eternity. Pillars was very much going for the old school nostalgia of the Infinity Engine games. With Tyranny, we’re still making that same type of game, but we’re not going for that same nostalgia element. We can change a few things like adding a minimap that shows more of the scene, changing more of the base mechanics so that we can go with a more of a cooldown-based ability system. We don’t have to worry about the fact that that wasn’t how things worked in Infinity Engine games because that’s not one of our goals.

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Well let’s just say I’m someone who flat-out wants to play a good person by today’s standards. Does Tyranny cater to me at all, or do I need to suck it up and accept I’m going to make some terrible choices?

There is definitely a better path you can take through the game but it’s harder. It’s not as easy as playing an evil character because you’re surrounded by evil characters for the majority of the game. Even when you’re on that path, it’s not like you’re suddenly surrounded by paladins of noble virtue. Everyone has their own agendas and you have to deal with them, but you can try to hold a more morally correct stance if you want to.