Tyranny Pre-Release Thread

[Roguey]

Those are all cinematic open-world games now, Obsidian wouldn't have the budget to compete.

 

[Theldaran]

I don't really like this recycling of ideas and concepts into other different games. They probably make sense on the original game, and not on some further iteration. The result is games like PoE that feel like monsters of Frankenstein, with different parts made at different times and thrown in with no consideration and with a feel of disharmony.

 

[Infinitron]

The most prominent example of a game that recycled old concepts is not PoE but Fallout: New Vegas. GameBanshee's newsposter says:

One of the reasons I suspect Fallout: New Vegas was so rich in terms of stories and characters is that Obsidian's employees had plenty of time to refine the ideas that they started putting on paper back when Black Isle was developing its own Fallout 3, project Van Buren. Hopefully, the fact that they have been mulling the ideas for Tyranny for this long means that they've had time to really refine them, which would make the project all the stronger for it.

 

[Zombra]

I don't really like this recycling of ideas and concepts into other different games. They probably make sense on the original game, and not on some further iteration. The result is games like PoE that feel like monsters of Frankenstein, with different parts made at different times and thrown in with no consideration and with a feel of disharmony.

Don't be silly. A good idea doesn't become bad just because a project doesn't work out for some other reason. Now ill-considered use of an old idea is obviously bad ... but so is ill-considered use of a new idea.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

If anything, it's better for things to sit longer in the oven. PoE was a rush job and how did that work out?

 

[Irenaeus III]

PoE was a rush job and how did that work out?

Great. One of the best cRPGs of all time.

 

[Ninjerk]

 

[Theldaran]

Dunno, supposedly Obsidian's writers don't sit idle all the time, and with the small amount of games they put out, there's time to refine ideas over the years.

The biggest problem is mixing fine ideas with half-assed ones. This creates some kind of ungodly mess. But the truth is, if you discount the walls of text, PoE is just another CRPG in terms of writing. There are more glaring aspects to it.

 

[Roguey]

The most prominent example of a game that recycled old concepts is not PoE but Fallout: New Vegas. GameBanshee's newsposter says:

While it did recycle, according to Josh this person is wrong.

NV was given one year of development time, right? Was meeting the deadline hard? Also, how much was taken/slightly modded from Van Buren to use in NV? Do you think you could've met the deadline w/o the help of VB ideas to base off of?

No, it was about 18 months. All we really took from Van Buren were some faction ideas (Caesar's Legion), characters, and a variety of plot hooks/setting changes. We used no material resources from VB, no VB documentation, nothing that would actually give us any significant time savings, honestly.

 

[Infinitron]

The most prominent example of a game that recycled old concepts is not PoE but Fallout: New Vegas. GameBanshee's newsposter says:

While it did recycle, according to Josh this person is wrong.

NV was given one year of development time, right? Was meeting the deadline hard? Also, how much was taken/slightly modded from Van Buren to use in NV? Do you think you could've met the deadline w/o the help of VB ideas to base off of?

No, it was about 18 months. All we really took from Van Buren were some faction ideas (Caesar's Legion), characters, and a variety of plot hooks/setting changes. We used no material resources from VB, no VB documentation, nothing that would actually give us any significant time savings, honestly.

He said time savings, not ideas.

 

[Roguey]

"Obsidian's employees had plenty of time to refine the ideas that they started putting on paper back when Black Isle was developing its own Fallout 3, project Van Buren."

 

[Infinitron]

"Obsidian's employees had plenty of time to refine the ideas that they started putting on paper back when Black Isle was developing its own Fallout 3, project Van Buren."

I think Josh isn't the kind of guy to factor that into his definition of "time required". (because slowly chewing on ideas over the years isn't something you can schedule)

I mean, look at the DLCs. It's kind of weird to say that the very existence of Joshua Graham as a Van Buren character didn't contribute "time saving on idea formation" for Honest Hearts.

 

[Roguey]

I mean, look at the DLCs. It's kind of weird to say that the very existence of Joshua Graham as a Van Buren character didn't contribute "time saving on idea formation" for Honest Hearts.

I'd say not because Josh scrapped practically everything about the character Avellone envisioned because he hated it.

I think it's worth noting that in even Van Buren's documents, a lot of the references to the Hanged Man's "evil" refers to past acts. In VB, he was seemingly a man without purpose. While his characterization by others and his tendency to laugh off/ignore attempts by others to control him could have been interesting, it really ended at "nasty guy who says and does creepy stuff and is a badass". There were specific instances (such as at New Canaan) where he would specifically avoid conflict and showed some additional depth, but he effectively had no character arc within the story.

Personally, I think the "wow so crazy" type characters aren't particularly interesting or insightful because they only exist in pure fantasy and, as such, can't really be related to. I think it's important for characters who are influencing player opinions to be more-or-less human. If you can't put yourself in the character's shoes, it's hard to empathize with him or her.

Joshua was inspired by a lot of different characters and things. The apostle Paul, Rodrigo Mendoza (Robert DeNiro's character from Roland Joffé's "The Mission"), T.E. Lawrence aka Lawrence of Arabia, and others. His outfit was designed to feature body armor but look somewhat "old west"/preacher in style -- hence the low-collar white shirt, sleeve garter, and the cut of the ballistic vest. The rattlesnake skin on his belt, shoes, and gun are symbolic but also intended to reflect that "western" feeling. The stitched patterns in his shirt were supposed to be tribal markings from the Dead Horses and were inspired by a scene from The Mission where Mendoza receives patterned body paint from the Guarani. I remembered a white dress from PJ Harvey's White Chalk tour where she had lyrics stitched into the cloth in black thread and I just put the two ideas together.

 

[Infinitron]

Nice trollbait, but it actually kind of supports what I'm saying. He didn't actually scrap everything about him, he evolved him.

 

[Roguey]

It's likely the DLC would have been about a religious conflict anyway.

As much as can be expected. A lot of players really wanted to see the Hanged Man/Burned Man incarnation from the Van Buren design documents, so I think most of those people were unhappy with how he turned out.

I had wanted to develop a religious conflict in an RPG for a while, one that wasn't presented as pro-religion vs. anti-religion. I didn't want to use a proxy/fictitious religion and I didn't want to use religion as the set-up for a series of jokes. My first idea for Honest Hearts was a direct conflict between Joshua and Daniel where Joshua was more like his pre-fall self, but I didn't think the characterization would be particularly interesting and I didn't think players would struggle much with the decision of whom to support. It didn't take long for me to change the main conflict to one about Joshua and Daniel vs. an external threat, with the player's choice revolving around which leader to support. I think we often present players with a choice between two bad solutions and we ask them to decide which one is least bad. With Honest Hearts, I wanted the player to decide which solution would produce the most good.

I wanted the player's first encounter with Joshua to be very reductive. In way, I wanted the player to be initially disappointed. They hear legends of this fearsome, terrible, demonic figure and when they first see him, he's doing the equivalent of putting his pants on one leg at a time: sitting at a table maintaining a stack of guns. Even internally, some people complained about his appearance. They wanted him to be huge and monstrous or they wanted his first encounter with the player to involve him brutally gunning down White Legs. I believed that for his character to feel right in the context of the story, he needed to be a man first and the monster later. But that expressed desire on the team made me ask for the graffiti players see on the way to see Joshua: an entire cliff face dominated by the image of Joshua with tiny White Leg corpses falling down below him. In the image, he's like Goya's Saturn, dwarfing and destroying everyone around him.

Presenting the conflict with Daniel posed some challenges because Daniel is not a living legend, i.e. he is even more of a normal man than Joshua is trying to be. Additionally, Mormonism is not a pacifistic religion (and its soteriology does not depend on pacifism), so the conflict could not reasonably by framed around violence vs. non-violence even in the post-apocalyptic version followed by the New Canaanites. Daniel's concern was about larger issues than fighting or not-fighting; he was concerned that Joshua's lapsed nature would cause a whirlwind of warfare that would pull everyone far away New Canaanite traditions to the point where religion was virtually abandoned in favor of a war cult surrounding Joshua.

I had expected that most people would support Joshua, in part because of Joshua as a character but also because of the nature of gameplay in Fallout (i.e., violence is almost always a solution). I did not expect that the Survivalist's logs (written by John Gonzalez) would push so many more people toward supporting Joshua. I think it's an interesting example of players finding their own connections between the two stories and making an emotional connection that pushes them in a particular direction.

I bet Chris was one of the people pushing for "huge and monstrous"

 

[Zorba the Hutt]

I'd say not because Josh scrapped practically everything about the character Avellone envisioned because he hated it.

Must... resist..

 

[Irenaeus III]

tl;dr Roguey is wrong again

 

[Fairfax]

I don't really like this recycling of ideas and concepts into other different games. They probably make sense on the original game, and not on some further iteration. The result is games like PoE that feel like monsters of Frankenstein, with different parts made at different times and thrown in with no consideration and with a feel of disharmony.

That's actually one of my concerns as well. There must have been something wrong with it, considering how many times it was rejected and Stormlands ended up cancelled.

The most prominent example of a game that recycled old concepts is not PoE but Fallout: New Vegas. GameBanshee's newsposter says:

Main difference is that VB was not a failed project.

 

[Maxwell's Demon]

That's actually one of my concerns as well. There must have been something wrong with it, considering how many times it was rejected and Stormlands ended up cancelled.

Something wrong with it in the eyes of a publisher.

Don't forget that last part, it's rather important.

 

[dragonul09]

That's actually one of my concerns as well. There must have been something wrong with it, considering how many times it was rejected and Stormlands ended up cancelled.

Something wrong with it in the eyes of a publisher.

Don't forget that last part, it's rather important.

Can't really blame the publisher ,after PoE I wouldn't trust Obsidian even if they would do it for free.

With all their bullshit ''Publishers are evil and holding our imagination back'',PoE has to be the most generic rpg I have played in the las 10-15 years.

 

[Kem0sabe]

Obsidian is creatively bankrupt, they dont have the people there anymore to turn out great original stories and settings.

 

[Infinitron]

By what definition is Stormlands a failure while Van Buren isn't? They were both cancelled in mid-development because their publisher (who owned the developer in Van Buren's case, which makes the cancellation seem even more damning if anything) didn't think they'd be successful enough.

LOL, this reminds me of raw's thing back in 2012 when he was telling people that Kickstarter was unnecessary and "If only one of these developers could put together a GOOD pitch, a publisher would happily fund an isometric RPG! It's their fault, they don't know to sell it!".

 

[Maxwell's Demon]

Aren't there two design teams at Obsidian working staggered and in parallel?

 

[Turtle-Zone 3000]

LOL, this reminds me of raw's thing back in 2012 when he was telling people that Kickstarter was unnecessary and "If only one of these developers could put together a GOOD pitch, a publisher would happily fund an isometric RPG! It's their fault, they don't know to sell it!".

Link to rant plz

 

[Athelas]

By what definition is Stormlands a failure while Van Buren isn't? They were both cancelled in mid-development because their publisher (who owned the developer in Van Buren's case, which makes the cancellation seem even more damning if anything) didn't think they'd be successful enough.

LOL, this reminds me of raw's thing back in 2012 when he was telling people that Kickstarter was unnecessary and "If only one of these developers could put together a GOOD pitch, a publisher would happily fund an isometric RPG! It's their fault, they don't know to sell it!".

Funny that you should say this considering Paradox is funding Tyranny.