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I also feel like the nightfall one would kill less people?
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Apr 1, 2021 12:26
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Cthulhu Dreams posted:I also feel like the nightfall one would kill less people? I'm pretty sure blocking out the sun is actually pretty lethal, humans, animals and plants kinda need it to live. I mean all Edicts are destructive in the end, even Malediction will probably lead to accidents and tragedies to normal, innocent people. Pooncha posted:This blooper reel? (Relevant section at 5:03) Ooops, forgot to post it. And yeah, by now it's 100% safe to watch and worth it.
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Apr 1, 2021 12:31
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GiantRockFromSpace posted:I'm pretty sure blocking out the sun is actually pretty lethal, humans, animals and plants kinda need it to live. Oh yeah absolutely, but atleast you could run away, vs everyone is literally set on fire.
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Apr 1, 2021 12:48
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Cythereal posted:Edict of Nightfall, it's exclusive to this route. Seconding this, though I really like the sound of malediction, I have to go with this. Can we do Malediction next?
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Apr 1, 2021 13:07
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nightfall My favorite thing about hamfistedly slamming in the loyalist ending is that you can make Tunon forsake kyros for your service and then immediately turn around and swear loyalty to kyros. Talk about throwing the guy under the bus.
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Apr 1, 2021 14:25
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Nightfall I did one play-though on release, before they added the loyalty ending, and didn't even know it was a thing before this LP. I haven't seen it, but from what others have said, it sounds like Kyros accepts your submission and you're rewarded by becoming her right-hand minion. If so, that's stupid. To a tyrant, loyalty is entirely a one way street. They expect devotion from their followers, but their followers have no right to expect it in return. As has been seen throughout history, a tyrant stands ready reward devotion with utterly destruction the second it becomes expedient. The game as originally written clearly understands this as you see this behavior throughout the game, particularly with Ashe. Beyond personal concepts of loyalty, surrendering to Kyros doesn't make sense. Fascist regimes rely on, among other things, always having an external enemy for to oppose for legitimacy. The entire conquests of the tiers/archon rebellion is one giant false flag. Send two incompetent, insubordinate generals who hate each other to the tiers with the explicit (as Tunon admits) directive that only one of them will gain control of the tiers at the end. Wait until one side destroys the other, it doesn't even matter which one wins. Declare the losing side as the loyal martyrs for the cause, and the winning side evil and treasonous. Boom, you have an external enemy for a few more years. The plan only stalled out because both generals were equally incompetent and unable to gain an upperhand over the rebellion and each other. So, Cleo is sent in as an x-factor. Again, it doesn't matter who wins the stalemate, Ashe, Nerat, Cleo, or a unified rebellion. All that matters is a pretext for the war to continue, like Africa in 1984. rastilin posted:The loyalty ending is considerably better, since you're only really claiming to be loyal, and isn't that what everyone has been doing since the beginning? You can always change your mind later, you're not actually giving up the power to use edicts... and your reign of peace in the Tiers doesn't start off with a war crime against civilians. I'm not sure, but it feels like re-swearing loyalty might compromise your ability to use edicts. In the cosmology of the game magic, including edicts, comes from belief that others have in you. Cosmology aside, edicts and magic are direct metaphors for political power and the ability to unify other behind you. It makes sense that a very public show of groveling and subordination permanent damages your access to such power. Even if you aren't truly loyal and only intend the fealty to be for show, ultimately appearances are what matters. Arcanuse posted:I was firmly in the "Kyros wants the Tiers to be an eternal meatgrinder" party when I did my own run, and thus picked it because it would make my fatebinder look good and secure their fame while putting Kyros in a bind. In totalitarian regimes corruption in law enforcement and bureaucracy is deliberate. Severally underpay cops, and you get a corrupt police force as a feature not a bug. You want underlings to be feared and hated, that makes it harder for them to challenge you. Additionally, if and when you need to remove them you do so under the guise of fighting corruption, and the people cheer for you exterminating threats to yourself. Remember the fatebinder has broken Kyros law many times, the laws are written in such a way that it is inevitable. For example, either your disobey the law against trespassing in the oldwalls, or fail to administer Kyro's justice to lawbreakers. Either way, you lose. Kyro's way out is that she doesn't accept your "pledge of loyalty" The "loyal" fatebinder, like all fatebinders, has been setup since the beginning to be decried and disposed of as corrupt at any time.
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Apr 1, 2021 14:37
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I also vote for rebellion with the nightfall edict.
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Apr 1, 2021 14:51
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I dont know posted:In totalitarian regimes corruption in law enforcement and bureaucracy is deliberate. Severally underpay cops, and you get a corrupt police force as a feature not a bug. You want underlings to be feared and hated, that makes it harder for them to challenge you. Additionally, if and when you need to remove them you do so under the guise of fighting corruption, and the people cheer for you exterminating threats to yourself. Remember the fatebinder has broken Kyros law many times, the laws are written in such a way that it is inevitable. For example, either your disobey the law against trespassing in the oldwalls, or fail to administer Kyro's justice to lawbreakers. Either way, you lose. Kyro's way out is that she doesn't accept your "pledge of loyalty" The "loyal" fatebinder, like all fatebinders, has been setup since the beginning to be decried and disposed of as corrupt at any time.
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Apr 1, 2021 14:59
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I actually like the swear loyalty to Kyros ending. If you play the game as a Fatebinder who buys into the system and ignores the rampant inconsistency I can see Kyros temporarily showing mercy for someone so clueless and gullible. My assumption is the Fatebinder gets a knife in the back a year or two later when things settle down a bit.
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Apr 1, 2021 15:22
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surrender is just the graven ashe ending though, and it likely wouldn't end better for us than for him
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Apr 1, 2021 15:27
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V. Illych L. posted:surrender is just the graven ashe ending though, and it likely wouldn't end better for us than for him We might get lucky and end up like Tunon. It would still be a miserable existence but it is would be a much slower process.
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Apr 1, 2021 15:48
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First of all: nightfall Second: What happens if you go to train with as much wrath and as low loyalty as possible? Does Tunon just insta-kill you? V. Illych L. posted:surrender is just the graven ashe ending though, and it likely wouldn't end better for us than for him That's not bad in the grand scheme of things. Of course, the question is: With nothing else to funnel soldiers into, what will She do?
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Apr 1, 2021 15:53
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V. Illych L. posted:surrender is just the graven ashe ending though, and it likely wouldn't end better for us than for him Graven Ashe surrender at a point in time when he was useful to Kyro, as there were more wars to fight and he had a large force of disposable soldiers at his command. I'm not sure what the fatebinder has to offer. Remember dictators handbook, non-useful subordinates must be ruthlessly purged under some pretext, even if they are totally loyal. Otherwise, they are at best a drain on resources or even worst a credible alternative for enemies to rally behind. But it doesn't ultimately matter either way, it's just a matter of when it most expedient to knife the subordinate. The knife is inevitable. Edit: Now that I'm thinking more about it, if the fatebinder offers humiliating public shows of subordination, that is useful for a little while at least. Make sure everyone knows that Cleo was only reading another edict for Kyros. She didn't really cast an edict herself, that was just a crazy rumor. Everyone knows only Kyro can cast edicts. Thought this still would leave the matter of the tiers unsettled I dont know fucked around with this message at 16:11 on Apr 1, 2021 |
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Apr 1, 2021 16:05
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I dont know posted:In totalitarian regimes corruption in law enforcement and bureaucracy is deliberate. Severally underpay cops, and you get a corrupt police force as a feature not a bug. You want underlings to be feared and hated, that makes it harder for them to challenge you. Additionally, if and when you need to remove them you do so under the guise of fighting corruption, and the people cheer for you exterminating threats to yourself. Remember the fatebinder has broken Kyros law many times, the laws are written in such a way that it is inevitable. For example, either your disobey the law against trespassing in the oldwalls, or fail to administer Kyro's justice to lawbreakers. Either way, you lose. Kyro's way out is that she doesn't accept your "pledge of loyalty" The "loyal" fatebinder, like all fatebinders, has been setup since the beginning to be decried and disposed of as corrupt at any time. Yes, Kyros is absolutely free to deny the fatebinders pledge. The fatebinder, in turn, is free to drop an edict (perhaps try one without a cancellation clause?) on Kyros's head until one or both parties is dead, with any survivors picking up the pieces. At this point the fatebinder isn't just an underling pretending to pledge loyalty here, this is someone that has made their own powerbase, killed or converted several Archons to their side, and demonstrated they have the means to rival Kyros in full and are very much willing to drop edicts until they get what they want. Kyros can do it the easy way, accepting the pledge they and the fatebinder both know is fake, or they can kick the last legs out from beneath their empire for... What, exactly?  Regardless, the fatebinder is loadbearing from the moment of their public declaration of loyalty with or without Kyros's acceptance. If Kyros refuses and decries the fatebinder a corrupt traitor, the other Archons will take note of Kyros declaring someone who was ostensibly loyal as such. It's easy to say that the Archons that got something out of Kyros's empire might've gotten complacent, or not especially care. They don't have a choice. The tiers aren't just another front, It's the last place Kyros has yet to conquer, but there are still up and coming Archons looking to make their fortunes. Even more with Bleden Mark dead or by our side, not working for Kyros to deal with them. And one way or another Kyros has to do something to keep them all in line, which stands to mean declaring so-and-so the Archon who has land corrupt, sending eager archons who want land to go fight them. Unless the Archons who have land from fighting for Kyros are collectively braindead, even they can see what's going to happen as previously valued Archons are decried as corrupt one after another for actions previously permissible because it made for easy corruption charges; leading to Archons needing to decide very quickly whether to make their move first or let Kyros mark them as the next target. New rogue archons popping up are already going to be a problem, how about ones turning on Kyros on the other side of the continent, seeing what awaits them if they don't? Now the collapse will happen with or without the fatebinder, mind. If the fatebinder isn't the first to be marked corrupt, there are plenty other Archons out there marked for just that purpose. The fatebinder just takes it from executing underlings to pay other underlings until they eventually revolt, to going against someone who could ruin large portions of Terratus if they don't get what they want. So the pledge of "loyalty" here isn't just a minion vying for favor. It's a potential equal to Kyros giving them the chance to recognize someone who could genuinely hurt them in a manner that costs Kyros nothing without risking mutually assured destruction from rejecting it. Or Kyros could reject the pledge, declare the fatebinder corrupt, march archons off to fight them, and go to war while the Archon's over on the other end of the continent have a strong incentive to turn while Kyros is busy.
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Apr 1, 2021 16:17
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Inflict Malediction on Kyros for daring to oppose the rightful ruler of the Unified Tiers, punishing the tyrant's followers and rewarding those who recognize our rightful claim. Using Nightfall on the empire just seems like a good way to reduce the entirety of the non-Tiers world to a lifeless wasteland very quickly. GiantRockFromSpace posted:I can understand the developers adding the Loyalist Ending for one reason: the marketing of the game hosed up real hard by presenting Tyranny as "Evil Overlord Minion Simulator". I remember clearly the game being presented as this back on release, so the disappointment of people who thought the game was about that (granted those same people missed the point of the game). A large number of those people are probably some mix of not understanding that evil minions always try to betray their masters and full blown fascists. I remember the advertising being to the effect of "you serve a brutal tyrant, but choose how you go about this." The mention of Tyranny being a Darth Vader simulator is much more accurate though.
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Apr 1, 2021 16:23
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malediction Hexes and bad luck on our enemies, good luck and blessings on our followers also it doesn't end up murdering a bunch of innocent people/destroying the land nearly as hard.
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Apr 1, 2021 16:27
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That trial result right there is why Tunon is my favorite character in the game. He may have probably done some morally reprehensible things in Kyros' name, but he's so principled that when he finds the Fatebinder innocent, he accepts his own judgement and is like "gently caress it you're in charge now because you're actually better at this than Kyros is
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Apr 1, 2021 17:00
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All this talk about the endings reminds me a popular current of though is that Kyros actually planned all this out guys, he wanted to create a powerful rival by pitting Archons against each other and fed things so the Fatebinder would rise (to the point some claim Fatebinder Myothis is actually Kyros in disguise), except a)why would Kyros create a rival who has the same special power as him and b)Kyros is clrearly shown to be incompetent on several manners, Cleo is just something he couldn't prevent. And I've never seen the Tunon fight, so at least I'm glad Tunon works well as a "final boss" no matter your choice (either you have a memorable dialogue challenge to convince him or you get a boss slightly more difficult by Tyranny combat standards).
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Apr 1, 2021 17:32
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Arcaneouse explained it very well. There's no option to downplay the rebellion and build up a power base, it's either roll over onto your back or go all in with waves of fire; remembering that most of the people we'll kill are just randoms. Saying that we'll get a knife in our back down the line assumes that we're ever planning to let any of Kyros' minions anywhere near the Tiers. The Tiers belong to Cleopatra. If Kyros sends anyone, we'll just kill them, that applies both to individual Fatebinders as well as armies. The point is that we can publicly claim loyalty while still running a rebellion, what's Kyros going to do about it that he wouldn't do if we were openly rebellious? We lose absolutely nothing by just lying to him (her?) (and literally everyone else). For bonus points we can brand any invading army as "traitors" and blast them with edicts while we send messages condemning the archon running it to Kyros' court. At that point Kyros can publicly be the first to admit that they've lost control, or they can publicly start throwing their own archons under the bus. Either way benefits us. On that note, Kyros is probably a woman as Tunon refers to Kyros as "she" and presumably Tunon would know. We should also start conducting R&D by naming things Kyros and seeing if any across the realm protection edicts look like they're triggering. Also, the edict of Nightfall, if we're going to do a first strike, we should at least try to minimize civilian casualties. Our edicts all expire after a few days anyway, so it probably won't blight the target permanently.
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Apr 1, 2021 18:03
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Maledictionrastilin posted:I had similar thinking, and that's what rubbed me the wrong way about the edict ending. You're railroaded into throwing down an Edict against an unsuspecting city, and the game doesn't pull any punches about how tens to hundreds of thousands of people die just so you can prove a point. You can't threaten first, you can't nuke an empty chunk of land, it's just "blow away this city out of the blue". Unfortunately I can definitely see the argument that the only way to successfully fight an opponent as entrenched as Kyros is to open the fight by metaphorically ramming a dagger into her heart. The rest of the Empire is nothing like the Tiers, there's no rebellious population and deep unrest. Kyros' invincibility is completely established and normalized in the minds of the people. If you don't start by proving that "yes I can hurt him, she isn't infallible" then you'll never gain any traction.
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Apr 1, 2021 18:04
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And also Kyros has multiple archons and armies she can send at the player without having to resort to an Edict until things look unfeasible. Archons that may not hate each other nearly as much as Ashe/Nerat did with a clear enemy to point them at instead of trying to control a bunch of rebels.
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Apr 1, 2021 18:08
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ChaseSP posted:And also Kyros has multiple archons and armies she can send at the player without having to resort to an Edict until things look unfeasible. Archons that may not hate each other nearly as much as Ashe/Nerat did with a clear enemy to point them at instead of trying to control a bunch of rebels. Then you can drop an edict on all of them while declaring that Kyros launched the first strike. Hopefully while having established a spy network and logistics chain in the meantime.
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Apr 1, 2021 18:16
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But also I wanna see you show off the fealty ending just for how much of a nothing it is
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Apr 1, 2021 18:22
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Is Kyros kind of hosed in the Edict game? Cleo has Edicts she can cast at range. Kyros needs to write on a piece of paper and give the edict to some poor bastard to cast. In terms of M.A.D. that would be one country having ICBM's while the other country still has to use bombers to deliver the payload. Also I'm kind of annoyed that we're erasing some Northern city and not the army coming to kill us. Oh, NEVER SURRENDER AND NIGHTFALL.
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Apr 1, 2021 18:31
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Nuking the Northern Capital or whatever is probably more effective in setting up your power and causing chaos than just wiping out an army, there's bound to be a bunch of people very hard to replace there along with the chaos from an edict done by not-Kyros done on the capital that they did, or could do nothing to prevent.
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Apr 1, 2021 18:43
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Dropping Malediction on whatever city Kyros resides in would be a pretty massive blow since depending on the wording of the Edict anyone who rises up against Kyros because of it would suddenly get the boons of the Edict instead of the punishment and unless Kyros is smart enough to have an Edict that protects them from other Edicts regardless of phrasing, they'd be weakened and ripe for any hostile Archon (of Shadows) to show up and take care of in the mayhem. e: OTOH, presumably nothing stops the Fatebinder or Kyros from creating an Edict to the effect of "X has until [date] to unconditionally surrender otherwise they and all those loyal to them shall perish" as the thermonuclear version of the Edict you drop on the valley at the start of the game.
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Apr 1, 2021 18:49
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GiantRockFromSpace posted:All this talk about the endings reminds me a popular current of though is that Kyros actually planned all this out guys, he wanted to create a powerful rival by pitting Archons against each other and fed things so the Fatebinder would rise (to the point some claim Fatebinder Myothis is actually Kyros in disguise), except a)why would Kyros create a rival who has the same special power as him and b)Kyros is clrearly shown to be incompetent on several manners, Cleo is just something he couldn't prevent. The only way that kind of logic works is if Kyros is in a Dread Pirate Roberts situation and desperate to retire. But if that were true, she'd have to provoke a one-on-one battle with the Fatebinder/Archon of Edicts instead of following her standard procedure of never going anywhere near danger herself. I agree that Malediction seems most effective in the sense that it encourages people to actively oppose Kyros and her forced in order to turn their personal luck around, while protecting them against pursuit and detection. Kyros has to be massively paranoid already and that is going to make things worse. Without Fatebinders to proclaim her Edicts and with Archons no doubt noticing the difference between Kyros declaring a "only one can survive" policy and Cleo accepting fealty from most of the Archons in question, I have to like Cleo's chances of holding out until someone else disposes of Kyros for her.
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Apr 1, 2021 19:46
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the archons are all like 150 years old except tunon whos older and sirin, so 'retirement' is not a thing, they turn immortal along with the weird glowy bits
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Apr 1, 2021 21:24
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Malediction
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Apr 1, 2021 21:25
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Malediction time
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Apr 1, 2021 21:55
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I'm a bit surprised Tunon didn't say anything about Barik being out of his armor. The Edict of Malediction sounds like fun. Given the skill bonuses/penalties are flat, it seems like it'd be a huge swing in ability for the average person. A thirty point difference in athletics between your followers and Kyros' would be impactful to say the least
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Apr 2, 2021 05:28
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:
Actually the map gives each archon their own corner!  Also give them nighttime
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Apr 2, 2021 07:54
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All of those replies only make me think that a 1984-style "Tyranny 2" with an eternal stalemate between the Tiers and the Northern Empire would be a fascinating thing to explore.
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Apr 2, 2021 09:32
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Mr.Misfit posted:All of those replies only make me think that a 1984-style "Tyranny 2" with an eternal stalemate between the Tiers and the Northern Empire would be a fascinating thing to explore. "We have always been at war with the Tiers. Kyros is watching you."
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Apr 2, 2021 10:51
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Make the sun set on the Kyrosian empire.
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Apr 2, 2021 11:33
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Having thought about it, I've a request for the second run: When you get the chance, save, then ask Tunon about his mask and keep pressing to the end. We didn't see it in the main playthrough because, well. Page 23 of this LP posted:Back to the previous questions! DO NOT ASK ABOUT THE MASK IF YOU WANT TUNON TO LIKE YOU! I remember it being a fairly big bit for Tunon. Arcanuse fucked around with this message at 14:38 on Apr 2, 2021 |
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Apr 2, 2021 14:29
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JeffRaze posted:I'm a bit surprised Tunon didn't say anything about Barik being out of his armor. Might just not have realized they're the same person without the armor and horrifically overpowering smell.
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Apr 3, 2021 06:49
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Narsham posted:The only way that kind of logic works is if Kyros is in a Dread Pirate Roberts situation and desperate to retire. But if that were true, she'd have to provoke a one-on-one battle with the Fatebinder/Archon of Edicts instead of following her standard procedure of never going anywhere near danger herself. Not really, the theory does make sense, it just isn't supported by the text (though it's not disproven by it either, so it's what it is, a pure, unverifiable speculation). Similar things have happened historically, and they happen even today - leaders manufacturing outside threats to cement their domestic support, to keep the elites occupied and the masses placid. Caesar basically rose to become the most powerful man in Rome by repeatedly going on campaigns to reconquer previously conquered territory and then dividing the spoils among his supporters. Nowadays you get autocrats (see: Russia) purposefully maintaining antagonistic relations with their neighbors so they can point to their threat to quell dissent. And historically, given Tyranny's setting, idle generals with standing armies of soldiers who have to be somehow fed and kept satisfied but also disciplined are like the worst threat imaginable to a monarch because it's just a matter of time before they become disloyal warlords if they are not regularly thrown at some other enemy. So yeah, if there's no enemy to fight, it's just a matter of time before somebody gets the bright idea to start a rebellion, and maybe it's better to preemptively pick the circumstances and the leaders of the rebellion yourself by manipulating the events from the shadows. Though I must say the fact that the Fatebinder rises through the ranks by discovering the secret of edict for himself makes this seem less likely, but again, there's nothing to go by in the material we have available. steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 13:09 on Apr 3, 2021 |
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Apr 3, 2021 13:06
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Cleopatra Jones and the End of the Game See if you can catch my mistake.  : [Turn to your companions] This probably amounts to a declaration of war against the Overlord. Ready? Dammit, Eb.   : If I don't show Kyros my ability to cast the Edict is more than a one-time thing, the attacks will never stop. : Mmm. That would be a riposte for the ages. If it were up to me, we'd debate the matter until Kyros' forces were upon us. You had better hurry.: He nods to the resonator at the center of the Spire.  Clicking this button ends the game.  We are treated to the animation we saw earlier when the Chorus attacked - Cleo floats up and says a bunch of shiny words...  The resonator glows brightly...  The Edict is pronounced!   This is the part that makes it difficult to believe that this was all according to Kyros' evil plan to create controlled opposition - we get out of control and completely destroy the capital. Before someone brings up 1984 and the rocket attacks, those weren't really consequential. They happened, sure, but WInston was able to go about his life more or less uncaring.  The sky is bright...  ...and darkens as our mighty Edict takes effect.     The red waves of Kyros are driven back as we've broken the offensive.  The clouds close over the map, concluding the game.   This is obviously not Kyros' intended result. It makes it legitimately profitable for the Archons to defect. More on that later.   Well, it wasn't just me and Cleo, the thread nearly unanimously decided Ashe and Nerat sucked.     This one is kind of weird to me. There is an authority - us! We even have Tunon and his legal system intact and Bleden Mark to politely ask idiots to shut up. It would make more sense if people were discussing new ideas a la the end of the English Civil War, but the language used makes me think people are fighting in the streets, and that doesn't seem like something we'd allow.    The only way to save the Stonestalkers, sadly, is to leave the Edict in place. It's kind of dumb, especially if you either join the tribe or challenge Hundred-Blood for dominance. You'd think you could leave standing orders to leave the Beasts alone or have them hole up in the Spire or something. There's a lot of bizarre railroading in these endings, where the game assumes you went on the Anarchy path because you're a selfish rear end in a top hat and not because all the factions sucked.   I'm not really sure what the tactical disadvantage is of having the fortress, and we also saved the country and the kid. Then again, who said detractors were reasonable?     We get railroaded into hoarding the knowledge instead of setting up a university or something.   This is my big mistake. Because I usually don't play on Anarchy - the route where you have to take the hat or piss off Mark - I usually just leave the Helm in Lethian's Crossing, because it sucks. If we had returned the hat Harichand Bronze - the Scarlet Chorus merchant - takes the city for himself. I think the idea behind the Anarchist endings is that we don't have a solid powerbase having pissed everyone else with armies off, but we're also portrayed as having an army of tax collectors who can ravage Apex. It's really weird! We still have the Court of Fatebinders we can ask to look into this stuff.  Like this one. When you play as the rebels and recruit the Forge-Bound, they start making weapons for your army instead. When you play as an Anarchist, they all take their ball and go home. Why not.  We, uh, saved Bastard's Wound. Yay?  I guess we're supposed to just forget about all the murdering and torturing they did. Man, was that DLC terrible.   I wouldn't mourn, he never cared about you anyway.   If Tunon dies, you recreate the Court of Fatebinders to help you keep order.   Wait, hang on, we have a whole army of troops trained by Barik, why is everything falling into infighting again?  These are the high loyalty endings for all the companions.     I actually like this one.   Roll credits.  Tyranny is a flawed game, both in gameplay and story.  We've covered enough of the gameplay to know why it isn't great, and the story kind of falls apart at the ending (notice how all the ending events are bizarrely independent, when they should be entwined) and we are using the Bronze Age to critique a lot of modern political ideas.  The DLC is kind of a mess, as you can see from the completely different lead who took it over and didn't seem to get the rest of the game. Bastard's Wound is a buggy, incoherent snorefest, the random events vary greatly in quality, the new ending is a nonsensical doozy demanded by reddit, and it's just not great overall.  All that said, I will stand by the assertion that Tyranny is the best of the Obsidian infinity-style CRPGs, at least as far as writing goes. Pillars of Eternity didn't really have a lot that stood out to me. The opening really wanted to remind you that it was like Baldur's Gate II - a mysterious evil mage hosed with your soul in a way that drives the plot - and the driving force of the game, much like the opening of Baldur's Gate, is to track down the mysterious mage and beat answers out of him. Pillars of Eternity 2 starts with a weird mystic montage where you're resurrected by false gods and the opening narration explains that you know the gods are false (as explained by attractive elf ladies) and then takes a hard turn into colonialism that you as the player have absolutely no reason to care about, because you can just get to the endgame island on your own by upgrading the ship or betraying the pirates. You don't live in the Deadfire or either of the lands attempting to colonize it, and at the end of the game you can take your ship and leave. The Rauatai-Huana dynamic is interesting, but ultimately I remember my playthough of PoE2 collapsing in "I don't care about these dumb idiots because I want to know if we're going to see any followthrough from the revelation that the gods are false and made by people." As it happened, there really wasn't. Sure, Eothas was maybe going to smash the resurrection machine, but that entire plotline was you just following him around to make one request Now, Tyranny is not without its flaws. Act 3 is extremely short and rather rushed. I'm not convinced they effectively use their Bronze Age setting as anything more than window dressing seeing as we have modern fascism running around. The Anarchist path is especially odd, as per the ending we have no friends and are explicitly disallowed from doing effective things like building a coalition out of, say, the Bronze Brotherhood, the Stonestalkers, Chorus defectors, and Lethian's Crossing denizens and thus our career as a politician should be cut very short. The prose is bad, with constant cut-ins to describe gestures the characters make when their dialog speaks for them, and with far more words than necessary. Yet despite all of this, it manages to be - for a video game - a cogent analysis of a tyrant's rule and why it fails. A lot of videogames will excitedly proclaim that they are going to let you, the player, choose your morality, and then give you a choice between self-destructive puppy kicking and saintly altruism. Not a lot of them are going to start you with committing horrible atrocities as backstory, then forcing you into a series of choices that are bad not because your protagonist is irredeemably evil, but because the system forces your hand. Kyros is evil not because she's a Satanic figure - although this is arguable, as Milton's Satan displays many of the traits common to these petty tyrants - but because everything she does is to maintain her power and control over the system no matter the cost. It would have been easy to cast the Tiers' leadership as some kind of heroic wise government cast down by the usurper Kyros, but the game presents us with a bunch of complacent and inept leaders leaving a dissatisfied populace that Kyros takes advantage of. It's clear the Tyranny writers actually did research into tyranny, even if their examples came much later than the Bronze Age, and understood enough about the general power struggles of tyrants to put together something coherent. None of this is new or groundbreaking, to be fair. You can see the general incompetence of evil in media ranging from Volker Ulrich's biography of Hitler to the Empire Strikes Back, where Darth Vader's inept leadership ensures that all of the Imperial officers are incompetent because he keeps killing all of them and no one dares try anything new for fear of attracting his attention. It's not groundbreaking writing by any means, but it's nice to see writing that has some depth to it after crap like Numenera that shoves what it thinks is a Big Important Theme in your face and then incoherently drops diarrhea all over the floor because the authors clearly only read crappy nerd books. Hell, I'll even go out on a limb and defend Tyranny's ending a little in the postmortem. Frequently Asked Questions Who is Kyros?  1984 posted:O'Brien left this unanswered. 'Next question,' he said. We've used 1984 a lot as a guide for Tyranny, because Kyros' setup owes quite a bit to Big Brother and the cults of personality that inspired him. There are a few things missing - there's no good example of the Two Minutes Hate, but the omnipresent feelings of being watched and continually judged (as favor and wrath rise and fall), the cult of Kyros, and the constant lying about how the Leader is going to fix everything and make things good are straight from the pages of 1984. Bleden Mark even acts as our O'Brien in pointing out that power is the only thing that matters when we ask about justice. Of course, problems arise because this is a fantasy RPG and the game wants to use magic both as an allegory for political power (in the case of the Archons) AND the sort of industrialized weaponry being used by the twentieth-century dictators. More pragmatically, I'm not sure if the original draft of the game was ever supposed to reveal Kyros. Part of me wants to say we would never meet her because there's no way she can live up to the height as a 400 year old conquerer, and part of me says they'd have to make her pathetic as part of the broader theme about how everything Kyros touches turns to failure and poo poo. Both Tunon and Bleden Mark refer to Kyros as a woman when they talk about her seriously, but to be honest it doesn't matter. The gender thing isn't because she's queer or whatever, it's because officially Kyros is above such mundane concerns as "gender" or "appearance" because she transcends humanity as a god. Unofficially, the game's climax proves she's fallible by us proving as much to Tunon. Kyros and Controlled Opposition There's a lot of debate in the Tyranny community about whether or not Kyros secretly planned the player character's rise to power to create opposition she could use to hold the empire together and keep her power relatively intact. Going back to 1984, it's the reveal that O'Brien actually wrote the Goldstein book about how IngSoc secretly works and that the "resistance" was just a trap designed to catch people like Winston and Julia. The game actually addresses this, so it's not like the Kyros' plan theorists are pulling things completely out of their asses.  The idea that we've been doing everything Kyros' way the entire game honestly doesn't hold water for me for a few reasons. The first is that the optimal outcome for Kyros is that everyone dies when the Edict of Execution goes off - Ashe dies, Nerat dies, the rebellious Tiersmen all surrender instantly, Cleopatra dies removing the threat of a highly trained Fatebinder who actually survived two Edicts and training by Bleden Mark. My interpretation is that Kyros is improvising after that - the end goal is to get rid of Ashe and Nerat, destroying their potentially dangerous and hard-to-control armies using the Fatebinder as a tool to destroy one or the other, and then relying on Tunon to find the Fatebinder guilty of violating one of Kyros' many laws if the Fatebinder survives. It's honestly not a terrible plan and Kyros isn't stupid. The problem I have with the "Kyros planned your actions all along, and the Tiers rebelling is part of their plan" is that you aren't controlled opposition, and you're perfectly willing to turn and fight Kyros if pressed enough. In 1984 the Resistance is never a serious threat to the party, as it's controlled entirely by O'Brien and the Thought Police. In Tyranny the player ends the game by bringing "ruin and devastation" on the Northern Empire. Kyros isn't some infallible mastermind, the entire game is about the many ways Kyros IS fallible. That's the point. No tyrant can ever single-handedly fix everything, because they're one person who can never admit they're wrong or trust others enough to truly rely on their expertise. It's not even clear that this is a war Kyros can win, because people in the Northern Empire are realizing the Overlord is fallible (why didn't she protect us from the Edict?), we have subverted the legal system and the secret police, all the Archons who are sick of Kyros' poo poo can now demand more loot or they go over to Cleopatra at a time when the coffers don't have more war loot coming in, and the Empire is on the brink of collapse. The legitimacy of the system is intricately bound up with Kyros as ruler, so she can't even fall back on nationalism or something to motivate the troops in the face of our challenges. I honestly don't see Kyros' empire making it out of this without either empowering the Archons at the expense of Kyros as they're needed to put down the rebellion. Even if Kyros wins this war, they have to deal with whichever general commanded the victorious forces as said general can actually push back and demand more privileges, and then they have to deal with any Archons who decided that they weren't going to deal with Kyro's poo poo and broke away to form their own little fiefdoms. It's just a mess all around. The way to run a controlled opposition or using the opposition is to ensure that the opposition can't actually topple you. The Iranian mullahs like to whine about America a lot, but they know that if they go too far and provoke a war America shoves their poo poo in and that's the end of the looting. Again, this stuff is open to interpretation, so if you have an argument I haven't seen before, go for it. We still need to pick a route and a gimmick for our second to last playthough. I am thinking our second Fatebinder is a cruel rear end in a top hat who gets all the party members killed and pisses off Tunon, but I'm open to suggestions!
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Apr 3, 2021 21:39
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I especially don't like the Magebane helmet thing because after the initial decision to take it or not, you're never given a chance to give it back. It's notable here in that you promise Tunon you'll return the helmet, and then.... never do? It's odd that they give you a reasonable in-game thing to say but not act on. Bastard's Wound is especially buggy because I went with the 'rampage through the settlement' thing. It's kind of unsatisfying because the NPCs go full uncanny valley there by neither pushing a force to come counter you, or you know, fleeing for their lives. But then I apparently got the 'left Bastard's Wound alone' ending rather than the 'murdered it the gently caress up' one. The Edict of Stone ending parts are also a bit buggy and show the 'ending bits REALLY don't interlace well' part. I do appreciate the ending for putting the cap on the point that Kyros' empire is really heading for a full collapse. The Archon of the Spires technically doesn't need to act anymore if they don't want to/can't. All of the symbolism of Kyros has been completely destroyed, and all you have left are a bunch of petty power-hungry assholes no longer cowed by a greater one. If you're going full-rear end in a top hat, Chorus really does feel like the appropriate one there. Disfavoured path is I kind of feel the disillusionment theme, whereas Rebel is.... something. Honestly I didn't like Rebel that much due to several reasons. But Chorus is definitely the full petty rear end in a top hat one. The DLC at least gives us the material on Barik. I feel it's completely appropriate within the game confines. Act 3 is problematic in that it really is very abrupt in its ending. But I can at least appreciate that they didn't pad it, either.
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Apr 3, 2021 22:05
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