Lockstep 4: Banner+Lord= Bannerlord

"She's a bit whimsical, loves a romance

She sponsors comebacks, gives just one more chance

His is the tension, the plotting, the strife

He smiles as he writes, like the edge of a knife"

 

Mary Crowell - Pas De Deux

 

 

Having secured the Eastern marches for the Northern Empire unto the Southern comfort of a Best Western, I turned my Bannerlord's attention to securing my clan's succession only to discover goin' a-courtin' with charisma as your dump stat doesn't warm the sheets in any particular hurry.

Having struck out with my most promising prospect, I turned my attention to the ruling family's two youngest princesses. And struck out again. But! Third time's the charm (especially when you cheat a couple times by reloading) and I finally wooed the lovely young Gala of the Osticos, grand-daughter of now-defunct Emperor Lucon. I repaired with my blushing bride to my own territory, eager to begin producing heirs. First order of business: plant a few javelins in Gala's uterus in a tournament.

A-yup.

Them's sum medieval romance, alright.

(Hey, at least I won the tournament.)

 

There's a favorable comparison to be drawn between this amusing situation growing out of otherwise disparate game elements (marriage and tourneys) and in counterpoint a much worse game called ELEX. Both are ostensibly open world adventures but where Bannerlord owns its sandbox, ELEX tries to copycat Skyrim's winning formula of mixed open world and nannied questing. Too bad that implies talent here absent.

Yes, in the fine tradition of "lesser magic missile" and goldfish named Goldie, their small healing plants are called: "Small Healing Plants" which should give you an impression of their overall creatvity. Granted, just last year as I wrapped up my old playthrough I criticized Skyrim itself for imposing scripted quest status on what should have been freeform exploration, but at least Bethesda's flavor text tasted less rancid. ELEX's unimaginative lore has you fighting painfully generic mutant rat-dogs as an even more generic mercenary-super-mutant-spy-rebel-psychic-soldier-wizard-cyborg in a science fantasy mishmash of all the usual fireball-slinging, boomsticks and space lasers given no particular rhyme or reason. I can't even explain the need for a named protagonist, as "Dax" had all the personality of a freshly divided amoeba. All this wasn't as bad when just running around the landscape, but every scripted quest just focused your attention on the Bollywood-quality scripts, and ELEX was utterly obsessed with denying the player control over the action, in everything from quests to camera angles to randomly teleporting enemies to stepping on a knee-high boulder.

In much the same vein, my recent complaints about Ancestors Legacy focused on its undue focus on fixed construction sites, scripted story missions and over-the-shoulder action scenes, despite it being an inherently fluid, top-down RTS. But hey, don't take this to mean I'm in any way opposed to story-based gameplay, when properly executed. Narrative-driven adventure and RPGs have provided many of the most memorable titles in computer games' short history. The skillfully penned Tyranny, for instance, with its more mature setting, multifaceted characters and complex interactions, managed many instructive counterpoints to the above two's intrusive control.

Technically, the above is just a minor reputation event, allowing you to cozy up to your snarly bolverk, Kills-in-Shadow. Despite being entirely top-down scripted, its ultimate effect grows naturally up from the situation at hand and the player's overall grasp of beastwoman mentality. Unfortunately, rare is the computer game with the literary talent to back up a preset plot.

 

Both scripting and random generation have their limits, but in both cases you're supposed to be fueling interactivity, not just making a show of your artistic/programming prowess. Draw the line too far on either side and you end up tripping over it. I've also been trying my hand recently at ADOM, a text-based dungeon crawler from thirty years ago given an RPGMaker-ish graphic interface.

 

It's a quaint reminder of why, despite some charm, I've never considered those old roguelikes worth my time. Over-reliance on randomization results in either:

1) Giving the algorithm too much freedom, resulting in random deaths, inaccessible locations and otherwise broken content.

2) Giving it too little freedom, resulting in everything feeling suspiciously monotonous despite a few pieces being shuffled around.

The end result being that it's boring until it just kills you for no reason, and given roguelikes' obsession with permadeath you're also expected to get bored all the way around again, every time, until the dice go against you. Aside from the one monster type that seems immune, (floating eye) I've crawled my way to level 10 so far using exactly one spell (magic missile) against everything. Appropriately for a game made the same year as Arena, the randomized combat prompts much the same summary: "as you trot about [dungeons] at night, figures jump out of the shadows at you: rats, goblins, thieves, wolves, orcs, swashbucklers, mages... it doesn't particularly matter, as excepting the odd fireball toss, they'll all perform identically" - and in ADOM I've yet to see a fireball.

 

Still, you'll never quite get away from automatically generated content in games, because when it combines properly with other elements or player choice, the result is usually more memorable than mere preordained storytelling. Take RimWorld's encounter-generating AI, which normally pisses me off for its inherent level-scaling nature. One of its dirtier tricks is teleporting enemies into your base past your defenses, in one case dropping through my roof into the artificially lit, indoor corn field at the back of my base.

I rallied a panicked defense and reloaded a couple of times until I noticed the attackers had managed to light the corn aflame with their crashlanding and first explosive volley... in a space that, apart from their own hole in the roof, was nearly unventilated. Pull back, close the air vent, and every raider simply died of heatstroke, cooked to death by their own stupidity. Given my foresight in positioning a fire extinguisher in the middle of the field, I even lost less than a third of my crop.

 

Or take my last Stellaris run as a Void Dweller Fanatic Xenophile and Pacifist, a combination I just could not make work for several attempts due to a combination of scattered habitat inefficiency, low population capacity during early game and the near impossibility of capturing territory. Even when I wheedled my way into the galaxy's most powerful federation, my allies kept declaring offensive wars (pacifists can only claim territory when defending) and getting rich at my fleets' expense. I almost threw my hands up in despair until noticing the fatter my federation mates got, the more their political influence was worth. And these people liked me. Trusted me. It was easy to get favors from them via espionage.

With my huge tracts of land cordoned off early on, xenophile mixed breeds providing well-adapted population boosts late game and most importantly a slew of political favors and a dozen emissaries tripling my votes in the Galactic Community, I simply outvoted the rest of the known universe and crowned myself Galactic Emperor, dissolving the federations providing my competitors with economic and score bonuses. Shah mat, biznatches, long live the new eternal shah!

 

And while we're talking about tracts of land:

 

Pons Aelius is under attack by dastardly Persians! How shall we reinforce it, your adorable majesty? The Apennines funnel reinforcements from the south into a desert pass which cannot be improved with a road. The Carthaginians are more than happy to allow faster passage... to both Rome and Persia. We keep getting weakened by those damnable sky-darkening Persian archers behind their lines and can't break through on the main front, with reinforcements either slowed to a crawl or whittled down before they reach the action.

Luckily, in order to ambush our reinforcements the enemy also has to circle around the volcano of Thera... and their archers, being closer behind the mountain, are quicker to take the bait. Solution? Let my front line crumble while baiting their ambushing archers into exposed positions, then rally a cavalry charge to flatten them. Without support, their infantry's now easy prey.

Responsiveness. It's a beautiful thing.

Pounding my new wife's uterus with javelins? Freakin' hilarious, and not a scenario you'd find written into official content. She even congratulated me on my win afterwards. Fattening my allies up for a galactic coup? Only one cRPG I can think of in recent years toyed with such a plot. Enemies roasting themselves by setting fire to their objective? In a story-driven game that would actually be anticlimactic, but when it arises organically from a player being able to respond to threats in multiple ways (like closing a vent) it's a completely novel experience. Sure, you could write a convoluted plot about Roman legions getting bogged down in a sandy mountain pass or baiting Persian archers onto an exposed volcanic flank for a heroic cataphract charge, but it can also grow out of the middle ground between customization and randomization.

 

You'd think game designers would more often remember their product's principal advantage over other media: adding player creativity to the creators' own.

Stop prompting one right answer. It's supposed to be a dance, not a recital.

If you want to control every challenge, then you'd damn better have access to some Tyranny-quality writing to make it interesting, or you'll strangle every plot by every damn trite, predictable twist (super Greedfall spoiler: noble savages are noble.) If you try to randomize everything... then once again you end up needing to control the parameters so tightly that you just end up with fifty breeds of interchangeable melee mooks to be magically missiled in a mundane monotone. Talented writers can do better than algorithms, but good writing remains taboo in an industry still refusing to acknowledge any other audience besides shithead tweens. So at least put some effort into giving players the tools to make their own fun, and let the interesting scenarios you're too incompetent to orchestrate... orchestrate themselves.

A(dventuring) Body at Rest

"In the circles we made with our fires
We talked of the pale afternoon
The clouds were like dark riders
Flying on the face of the moon"

Sting - Something The Boy Said


In the past couple of months I finished up one final playthrough of both Tyranny and Torment: Tides of Numenera, in preparation of moving on to new RPGs. It's a wonder we have any new cRPGs these days, especially good ones, after a fifteen year dry spell punctuated mainly by the overall mediocrity of the Neverwinter Nights series and one quickly betrayed glimmer of hope in the form of Dragon Age: Origins, both lost in a sea of "action" titles and MMO gear farming.

Resource management, abandoned by computer game developers somewhere around the time of Morrowind as too complex for their new cretinous mass-market audience, was grudgingly reintegrated into these new strategic, party-based RPGs. This included resting at specific safe locations instead of just plopping your ass down wherever you want to recover all your daily spells, a mechanic which utterly invalidated the Neverwinter Nights series' feigned difficulty. The Elder Scrolls series was little better; most players probably only rested once in a blue moon to trigger specific quest steps. Dragon Age: Origins at least gave resting some functionality in curing wounds.... then immediately invalidated it by filling the player's inventory with cheap, plentiful wound cures. Tyranny went one better by instead tying wound curing to resting and tying resting to a few specific locations which required travel

... though unfortunately travel time had too little effect to lend resting its due relevance. TToN took the more usual route, charging you cold, hard cash for restoring your action pools

 

... though it, in turn, undermined its relevance by providing entirely too many action point restoring consumables and infinite free lodging as quest rewards. Plus, while the cost is greater than the mere token amount it would be in most such games, it still falls an order of magnitude or two below your accumulated wealth by the last act.

A couple of centuries ago by the time of Alexandre Dumas, rented rooms, inns and taverns were accepted intrigue-riddled set pieces in tales of swashbuckling adventure; later wild west saloon scenes followed suit and the "you all meet in a tavern" stage of role-playing campaigns was again cemented by Tolkien's Prancing Pony. While the motif is slavishly copied into every cRPG, finding a place to rest has rarely achieved its due impact on gameplay. Pillars of Eternity threw a nice wrench in the works by offering specific bonuses for sleeping in some locations, but these were still trivialized by their low cost and on-demand availability. For rest to truly become relevant to gameplay, the time spent resting must somehow affect your campaign. TToN copied the original Torment's scarcity of safe havens but still compromised on this point much like The Elder Scrolls by treating rest as a trigger for a select few quests (the most blatant being a murder spree in the first act which continues every time you rest.) The mechanic only comes into its own in games where everything functions according to a calendar / clock.

The old Dune game from '92, with its odd mix of linear adventure and light RTS (before RTS was even a genre) provides an early example. Everything took time, from your own travel to your Fremen armies' travel and battles to spice mining or the spread of vegetation or smugglers replenishing their stockpiles. While resting was not a mechanic per se, you could decide (or be forced by your script) to wait in some sietch or another while the world shifted around you.

More recently, Mount&Blade or Dead State or Pathfinder: Kingmaker all made a better show of it.

Dead State enforced a strict daily cycle, in which you had to return to your home base to rest every night or risk a hefty morale penalty. Each day you had to both ensure a profitable loot haul from your travels and allot competent workers to care for the shelter's own maintenance and production in your absence.

M&B didn't rely much on you yourself resting, but your injured troops required time to heal. Early on you might pay for their rest & recuperation at an inn. Later you might pass by one of your forts now and then to swap fresh soldiers in and your wounded out of your army. All the while, food was consumed, populations grew, taxes and expenses accumulated, bandit bands, armies and caravans traveled across the map in fitting indifference or malice as to your squandered hours.

Kingmaker being split between traditional adventuring and kingdom management emphasized getting your adventuring done in a timely manner so as to arrive back at your capital in time to deal with the various events plaguing your realm. While the initial implementation was quite aggravating, with too little control and too many triggers rewarding the player's foreknowledge and not foresight, it also added up to the most multifaceted. Not only did you need to recover spells but even the muscleheads in your party would need to clear the hefty penalty to their physical attributes through fatigue / exhaustion.

All three of these most satisfying examples share an integration of the resting mechanic with other facets of gameplay. You or your companions' skills might affect others' healing / recovery times. Kingmaker's camping especially rewarded you for bringing along multiple characters competent as lookouts, hunters, cooks, etc. and if I had to be honest, Jaethal the undead inquisitor's most pervasively useful ability was simply her immunity from fatigue letting her dive into all too frequent ambushes fresh as a rotting daisy. And, in each case such roleplaying and strategic choices mitigate the entropic drag of the game world on your own schemes and plots, the resources automatically decaying or consumed, the inexorably encroaching enemy forces.

Conclusion: a resting mechanic is nearly guaranteed a pointless waste of both developers' and players' time for a traditional plot-driven Adventure game or RPG in which the player actively moves the plot forward by his actions. In order for rest to have a meaningful impact, there must be a world outside your adventuring party which progresses while you are inactive. There must be events not_at_rest. As a prelude to death, sleep carries no threat unless the universe keeps swirling in the darkness outside our feeble fires, hounding us with every unconscious breath.

Piano / Forte! (A Dimension of Sound)

"One thousand cars and a million guitars
Screaming with power in the air
We found a place where the decibels race
This army of rock will be there"

Judas Priest - Ram It Down
_________________________________________________

"And whomsoever shall be found
Without the soul for getting down
Must stand and face the hounds of hell
And Rrroht inside a corpsy shell"

Vincent Price, in Michael Jackson's Thriller *
_________________________________________________


Though its most memorable moments tended to come from its more tech-driven episodes, The Twilight Zone only rarely qualified as SciFi. I'd speculate that, as Paramount would with ST:TNG forty years later, CBS just found it cheaper to reuse the copiously superfluous cowboy hats and fedoras it had lying around its studios than to pay to build the more unique cardboard rockets and fishbowl helmets by which to ennoble a SciFi production. Looking at it now, the whole series seems anything but a lavish affair (at one point they were even denied the cash for film) and it shows. We might praise the stark realism or the poignancy of one episode after another in which a lone protagonist wanders about an empty town (or an even emptier alien planet) but let's remember it precluded paying extras. And the deserted alien planets were quite depopulated of props and decor as well.

What it did have was sound, from Serling's narrated bookends to details like the sharp pinprick noise of eyeglasses shattering on concrete, to immortalized one-liners like "there was time now" or "it's a cookbook!" More than one episode centered on ventriloquism, of all things, but then it's rare for the real world to provide such sinister props pre-made for a televised thriller. In fact, the show had at times more in common with old-school radio dramas than with the more lavish visuals of its successors, with much of the plot expressed through dialogue instead of action. I had the fortune earlier this year to catch a marathon running through not only the big hits but some of the less popular episodes, including Sounds and Silences, in which a big fat loudmouth is sentenced, in standard Serling style, first to one aural extreme, then the other.

It hit closer to home for me than for most, since I happen to be just a tad sensitive to incoherent noise. When I was young and my ears even sharper, I was even annoyed by those supposedly ultrasonic vermin-repellent devices. (Please try not to draw the obvious conclusion.) I've occasionally gotten up in the middle of the night to close my bedroom door against such noises as... my refrigerator... from six meters and two corners away. Advertisements, with their deliberately intrusive, attention-grabbing flood of white noise, still drive me into a frothing rage. I'm the type to stop dead while walking and track the wind as it hits the trees or the side of a building. Though active noise control has remained slightly too expensive for my tastes, I've come to view a good solid pair of ear-covering headphones as essential to sitting at my computer. My stance on voice chat noise pollution in games is well documented, and it's not too far from my stance on voice chat noise pollution in the physical world.

So in context it's no surprise that so many things remind me of a song I once heard, or that I keep returning here on the blog to the topic of audio in computer games. Watching and listening to Sounds and Silences made me more attentive to how sound was used back in the days of radio and the first grainy, barely discernible flashes of the cathode ray. To some extent we can still hear the same quality these days in a well-narrated audio book, because regardless of technological improvements the main problem still lies in conveying intent. Good narration will relate apprehension and tension by halting, ponderous sentences, will rush awkwardly through relating shameful events, will threaten in a stony monotone, letting the microphone do the work of amplification. Where televisuals fall short, well-placed sound effects will not only color an event but will mark different phases of the action or provide new information. (You -know- the glasses have broken before you ever see the shards.) And, perhaps most importantly, good music is more than filler. It sets the mood and provides nuance.

As far as games go, I more or less started off this blog by complaining about the non-massive nature of MMOs, microtransactions as legitimized cheating, and the decay in game music quality. And I never let up on them. For a long time after Y2K, sound degenerated, as far as I can see for three main reasons:

1) Video cards continued to rule the tech specs while sound cards plateaued fairly quickly. It might shock younger gamers now to see old game boxes from the '90s advertising the number of sound channels a particular title was capable of occupying, right alongside its polygon count. Or Diablo 2 advertising itself for having hired an orchestra. As everyone started getting the same quality sound cards and sound stopped being a mode of conspicuous consumption, companies also invested less and less in what was no longer a selling point.

2) Graphics really did improve. Tremendously. Thus, much like TV shows stopped conveying information via sound in favor of displaying it visually on ever-larger, ever higher definition TV sets, video game sound became more vague, relegated to the background.

3) For ten to fifteen years companies were tripping over each other to widen their market base from obsessive wer-nerds to the mass market. This meant providing more instant gratification, simplifying and dumbing down everything from controls (there were no noteworthy 3D strategy games after Homeworld) to cultural references to level design, to shrinking party / match sizes in multiplayer and eliminating secondary roles in class-based games.... to, as a matter of course, music. It was especially noticeable in online games where you could at times still hear the more recognizable, launch-quality music even as newer patches added more generic white noise. But it was not unheard of for companies to actually go back and vandalize their own previous work, scrapping more interesting original tracks to replace them with blander, more generic, more forgettable, lowest-common-denominator fare.

And sure, it hasn't all been bad. The Secret World, a game from 2011 which failed miserably as a game but dressed up its failure via surprising artistic panache, recently held its yearly Samhain event, part of which treats players to a collection of radio dramas from the days before video killed such stars. While it's unforgivable of Funcom to charge its customers subscription fees for public domain radio as a timesink, I do have to thank them at the very least for their selection, which includes not only the infamous War of the Worlds broadcast but The Thing on the Fourble Board (**) Give it a listen. It's twenty minutes of sane, didactic, low-key narration punctuated by a few precision strikes of otherworldly presence. And you will know it when you hear it, trust me. In turn, TSW was one of the few games which managed to emulate that old-timey radio drama attention to sound. Its colorful yet still nuanced NPCs set a delightfully mundane backdrop against which its various boogey men can boogety-boo!

In fact, horror games and horror themed segments in general have invested more in sound. Shrieks, groans, creaks and ominous footsteps add a great deal to their suspense, especially since they so often need to hide their boogeymen until the last second and can't bank entirely on graphics as other genres do. But, banking on a contrast with eerie silences unfortunately leaves no room for a real soundtrack. While voice acting has always oscillated in quality between titles and sound effects have had their high points, music consistently diminished. My recent jaunt through System Shock's introduction reminded me how much more expressive that '80s/'90s synthesized backdrop was. While some series (Heroes of Might and Magic, Divinity) were lucky enough to latch onto a good composer from the start and clung to them as selling points through many reiterations, most did not, and they really should've paid more attention to how effective a well-integrated, memorable soundtrack can be in other media. Don't believe me? O.K., three, two, one, let's jam. And it's not like animation was new by that point.


But I am happy to note some signs that music might once again be considered a distinctive element of game design and not simply white noise to fill the background silences. Justin Bell's sound direction wasn't bad in Pillars of Eternity but still largely generic, unintrusive medievalism. It wasn't until he really cut loose two years later (2016) in Tyranny that he put out something worthy of having his name mentioned. What's more, I've been seeing some amusing signs of companies reversing the old trend of downplaying music after release. Stellaris' more noticeable tracks seem to come from its later DLCs like Synthetic Dawn (2017). Warframe, launched in 2013, has some surprisingly engaging tracks... most attached to content added since 2015-2018.

MAKE SOME NOISE !

Yes, music can sometimes intrude on other gameplay elements (those thunderous old '90s tracks were partly meant to cover up the lack of other sound effects or ambience) but intruding can also be a good thing. The Tristram theme did as much for the original Diablo's popularity as any other of its high points, and many a mediocre game has remained fixed in gamers' memories for its soundtrack. And there are endless ways to mitigate the potential nuisance factor. Set it in-character or in an appropriate locale. The sea shanties in PoE2: Deadfire were more immersive than half its chauvinistic abortions of storytelling put together, the Sleepless Lullaby along with Lilith's monologue or the Siren Song rendered their little corners of TSW unforgettable, no-one who's played STALKER can forget the NPCs randomly breaking out their guitars and We All Lift Together defined Fortuna better than any other location in Warframe. V:tM-Bloodlines made its night spots come alive with Isolated, A Smaller God, Lecher Bitch... and appropriately enough, Come Alive... and nobody and I mean nobody was complaining about Bloodlines' music being too intrusive!

MAKE SOME FUCKING NOISE !

Even completely out of character, let music symbolize your setting instead of just underscoring it. Even a twenty-second flute solo can stick in your customers' minds years afterwards for marking their call to adventure. I sure as hell have never met that wailing banshee in Tyranny's soundtrack in all my replays of the game, but she fits her imaginary world every bit as perfectly as The Thing on the Fourble Board's inhuman meowling.

It's not unreasonable to assume that people still remember that often painfully jarring 8-bit tootling from 1980s computer games for its sheer nostalgia factor... but let's not exclude the possibility that they memor it for being memor-able. Yeah, that's a quality we really should get back around to recapturing.

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* You know, on one hand I'm disappointed that after three decades that's still one of our most satisfying portrayals of lycanthropy. On the other hand... might as well enjoy it!
Aaroooooo... AAAHAHAHAHAHAHA !

** Shockingly enough, that is, officially, a word.

You Encounter a Level 17 Green-Eyed Monster

"Bin ich mutiger
Töte mich und iss mein Herz
Hab ich dein Weib

Töte mich und iss mich ganz auf

Dann iss mich ganz auf
Doch leck den Teller ab"

Rammstein - Eifersucht

Champions Online, among its other failings, tends to copycat superhero comic book tropes more slavishly than its predecessor City of Heroes did. So, naturally, you spend some time in an alternate dimension where a tyrannical empire grinds the world under the heel of giant robots suspiciously reminiscent of the X-Men's Sentinels. It's a decently long story arc (and a pain in the ass to solo as an undergeared newbie, let me tell you) where each mission tends to revolve (thematically if not practically) around the Sentinel copycats: evading them, halting their production and generally cowering in terror of being stomped on. Then, in one of the last missions, you get to reprogram and pilot one of them, zapping tanks and tanking helicopter missile barrages.

Stomping around the city as a mecha terror while tiny, insignificant soldiers pelt you with equally insignificant pop guns would've been mildly amusing in itself. What makes it significantly more satisfying is the preceding missions' buildup, the frustration of scampering about in the shadow of such colossi.


I also criticized Spellforce 3 for its quaint but ultimately failed attempt at melding RTS and RPG mechanics, but it did a few things very right. Throughout the campaign you occasionally fight big tough Swamp Thing looking demons called Devourers, each of which more or less qualifies as a boss fight initially. Imagine my delight upon discovering that my black magic spell shrub's capstone is the "summon devourer" ability.

Not only does a massive, life-stealing, self-resurrecting meat shield with PBAoE damage rank as fairly overpowered in preventing attrition for your other forces, but it's just so damn gratifying to have your character learn to harness one of the grandiose forces of the world around you.

Spellforce 3 likely copycatted Warcraft 3, and if there's three things Blizzard Entertainment has done well over the decades, it's
1) dumb down better games' concepts
2) advertise
3) manage its audience's expectations. When the opening War3 cinematic showed the magma golems "infernals" smashing down like meteors from the sky, it perfectly built up the mystique of one of the "ultimate" abilities to... do exactly that, in-game.

Games have rules. A good, consistent game world functions according to a set of defined rules. Rules accessible to all participants. Those big, bad boss-level abilities or badass gadgets should not exist only as props for NPCs. They work best as emblems of heroic apotheosis, as signs that the hero has conquered and mastered that which once stood as his greatest obstacles. Yes, show NPCs using them and then allow the hero to capture or learn to use them. If it's a level 21 ability, then let me reach level 21 at some point and get it. If it's an admiral's flagship, then let me reach the rank of admiral at some point, after many trials and discombobulations. Don't just give NPCs nondescript energy blasts and glowing effects, but actual abilities from player skill trees, tools and transportation purchasable by players themselves. Build up the player's envy at others' displays of power, then stage a context-appropriate pay-off at the next level-up.

In my last screenshot commemorating my first playthrough of the highly memorable RPG Tyranny, my character's wearing strapped to his back a weirdly-shaped glowing blue-headed oversized mace. It's Peacemaker, the legendary weapon of Graven Ashe, Archon of War and General of the elite iron-clad Disfavored legion. It makes a highly visible prop hoisted over his shoulder whenever you encounter him. As luck would have it, my character specialized in two-handed weapons and I spent most of the game allied with Ashe's mortal enemy (until he made an unreasonable demand) and thus eventually wound up graving Ashe. To the victor went the gaudy spoils. As they should. It was to some extent even more satisfying than proclaiming my own edicts, as it existed within the game mechanics, more... tangible, for lack of a better word.

Multiplayer games have already adopted this mindset by building up customers' envy of each other's gear, but too many single-player games still fail at fabricating and satisfying jealousy. (In that order.) There's something viscerally, atavistically satisfying about not just victory but conquest, about eating your enemies' hearts to gain their rich, tasty courage, about the Highlander routine of taking power at the same time as taking heads. Don't merely abstract it as "experience points" and don't separate the player from the game world by separating player and NPC skill trees. Allow me at the very least to gain the same abilities displayed by my enemies, to mount their heads as trophies on pikes in my yard, and wherever possible allow me to outright take their power as spoils of war. All their base should belong to me.

The Chosen One

"And the babe, all in slumber dreams
Of a place filled with quiet streams
And the lake where her cradle was pulled from the water. 
And we'll all come praise the infanta..."

The Decemberists - The Infanta


____________________________
Possible minor spoilers follow for various cRPGs, regarding whether the player is intrinsically "special" or not.
____________________________

Among the (by now) tired old tropes which computer role-playing games need to ditch, we can include casting the player as a prophesied hero. The Elder Scrolls series has been terrible about it. At least Morrowind allotted you a decent-length introduction as a penniless exile before unveiling you as the next avatar of Vishnu, but Oblivion's very tutorial had the Emperor himself declare your manifest destiny and Skyrim's had you eating dragons for breakfast. The Black Isle / Obsidian / Bioware genealogy has been slightly more dignified, but whether you're a demigod in Baldur's Gate or born with a mystical artifact in your chest in Neverwinter Nights 2, they still managed to slather on plenty of cheese. Even the Grey Warden in the Dragon Age: Origins campaign, though not strictly speaking a fated savior, was simply handed too much inherent, unearned political clout.

Pillars of Eternity's nosedive in quality of writing between its two installments renders it an interesting object lesson. The dumbed-down sequel elevated you to a goddess' champion from the start, whereas being a "watcher" in the first game was merely a confluence of historical threads which could likely have spun around any of countless souls impacted by Thaos' actions over the centuries. You incidentally served as the gods' tool in their faction war while really addressing your own past deeds. The same was true in Planescape: Torment, which certainly gave you a very special background but mostly resolved to you fighting yourself or the consequences of your past actions while the planes kept spinning indifferently around your little drama. This was unfortunately reversed in Torment: Tides of Numenera, which cast you as a pure soul, the last and greatest prophet capable of overthrowing the works of a god. A better example would be Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines, which as "an adventure in mookdom" as I've previously called it here, hinted at you being abnormally gifted to explain your abnormally fast rise in power among your be-fanged brethren but left it at that. Contrast to the more cheesily operatic vendetta plot of V:tM- Redemption with its star-crossed lovers.

Tyranny deserves special mention as within its more thoughtful interpretation of RPG moralizing it also addressed the autopoietic nature of mythopoiesis. When the infamous Voices of Nerat condemns you with his dying breath as "you Archon of misguided decisions" he is warning you of the danger of building yourself up into a figure larger than your own life, of losing yourself in the patchwork destiny you're threading together by each of your actions. And that's really the issue at stake here: your actions.

We're accustomed enough to stories about "The One" from movies and other passive forms of entertainment which strive to make the audience want to identify with the hero on screen/stage. In a computer game, however, the audience already IS the hero on screen, actively advancing through layers of incremental badassery. There should be no need to explain why I'm important. Instead allow me to prove my importance by the actions I as a player undertake, to write the verses to my own legend, to scribe my own Archon's Sigil as I go, not to dance to the tune of some prophecy, unless it's one I myself have been reciting.

An RPG protagonist should be a nobody who becomes somebody, rags to riches, the tale of the act of becoming, character advancement. Even in a completely scripted, linear plot, the role-player should be defined by actively playing a role, not by pre-masticated backstory. If Muad'dib can trap himself in his own web of self-fulfilling prophecy, that still makes a better plot than popping into existence as an insta-bake Kwisatz Haderach at a time and place appointed by others. Let me railroad myself. Don't tell me I'm special. Show me acting special. Let me gradually become a creature of flames, voices and secrets via conquest by agonizing conquest, click by click of the mouse.

Furies vs. Furries

"They call me Superman
I'm here to rescue you"

Eminem - Superman


Dwarf Fortress features a ludicrously detailed list of possible combat actions and injuries. A battle report reads like the intersection of hammers and crossbow bolts with an entire anatomy textbook... plus vomiting and existential angst. Even if they're unarmed, your dwarves will gleefully engage the local wildlife in fisticuffs. Now, fantasy dwarves are a hardy folk by nature and your particular group is assumed to consist of rough-and-tumble pioneering types, so this may come as no surprise. It's a bit more jarring seeing a bloodthirsty troll tear its way through your garrison squad toward a visiting human noble's consort, presumably a pampered, hoity-toity "bit of stuff" damsel in distress... only for said pampered damsel to bite the troll and only after that grab her axe, float like a butterfly around the beast filleting it to near death then finish it off by lopping off half its freaking skull!

Daaaaamn. This chick's a keeper.

Now, Dwarf Fortress was built around dwarves, the fantasy race most notoriously lacking in sexual dimorphism, so thematically it's unsurprising to find bearded ladies acting much the same as bearded gents. Especially true since your stout little underlings are represented by very simple ideograms and text. No character models or voice acting, nothing to identify them as male or female in an intuitive sense anyway. It would actually take extra development time to differentiate them.

So, though it's technically guilty of the same crime, I'm less inclined to blame Dwarf Fortress' forced, one-sided, facetious re-balancing of the sexes on feminist dogma, as it obviously is in wealthier games. Like, say, The Elder Scrolls, for instance, where town guards and mercenaries are as often as not female, because everything boys can do girls can do better, so there! End. Of. Story. We're permitted to give the matter no more thought for fear of transgressing the dictates of the moral majority.

Hmm.
Actually, y'know what? Let's do some transgressin'.

That this decades-long trend is mere feminist propaganda, facetious glorification of women and not any sort of egalitarianism is easily verifiable by counting the villains and heroines in any game which forces female characters into masculine roles. Even the relatively daring and risque Pillars of Eternity, which toyed with the idea of negative female divinities and feminine crimes, kept these conveniently off-screen while pitting, front and center and in lavishly voice-acted groaning detail, a male villain versus two female martyrs, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

It also goes without saying that while filling their rosters with amazons, such entertainment products will make no effort to lend male characters in return the moral high ground, the presumed innocence and entitlement reserved for women, but for now let's focus on the supposedly egalitarian even split between genders among soldiers, town guards and every other violent role in games.

Sounds good at first, I know. It seems a neat way of washing your hands of the question of sexism, while tacitly endorsing the socially acceptable brand of sexism, misandry. How can portraying the sexes as equal possibly be wrong?

Well, as it happens, Pillars of Eternity's poorer cousin, Tyranny, decided to get edgy about sexual roles. In addition to the aforementioned 50/50 split among hired thugs and thuggettes, it also featured an androgynous world dictator, a female-chauvinist-led society (naturally, they're the good guys) and a female-dominated anthropoid race. I've gushed before about how much I like Kills-in-Shadow and the rest of Tyranny's beastwomen. They actually work, conceptually, as female warriors, not perfectly but to a much greater extent than humans. Here, take a look at what came out of a beastwoman's brood-hole:

A litter! A litter of fast-growing, fully mobile cubs requiring less parental investment per unit and carrying a less absolute penalty if that investment should falter, thereby decreasing the evolutionary pressure toward nonstop mothering.

See, the main problem with the sick pretense that women might share equally in danger alongside men is that it's utter bullshit from an evolutionary perspective. Look up a term called neoteny, if you've never heard it, the retention of infantile physical or behavioral features into adulthood. Yes, human males are neotenized. Check even a standard burly, bearded lumberjack's face against an adult chimp's. We Homos are freaking adorable by comparison, thankyouverymuch! But anything males can dish out in the cuteness department pales in comparison to women. Smaller, less hairy, more babyish in their bone structure, giggling and cooing and crying in youthful high-pitched voices and artificially enlarging their eyes with make-up, human females have evolved to elicit levels of protectiveness normally reserved for the species' young - from each other, sure, but mostly from their tribe's males, the less-cute-by-comparison short end of the evolutionary stick. By default, human females don't fight their own battles as long as there's a male around to fight on their behalf, champion their cause.

In a species already dependent on social interaction, women go one better. Instead of evolving for personal ability in the physical world, femininity, in humans, has specialized in social manipulation, in extracting service from males. The male's role in the trinity of "-and baby makes three" is to get bled for everything he's got then thrown under the bus to protect his (presumed (often incorrectly)) genetic investment. The children of men who have accepted this sacrificial role have had a better chance at survival. The children of women who have successfully played on men's protectiveness have also had a better chance at survival. Their genetic material, their predispositions have passed on to us.

Most of this stems from the utterly debilitating effects of our very slow, prolonged gestation and infancy. Human foetuses and infants are needy little fuckers, not only in themselves but extending to their primary caregiver as well. Mothers have, for most of history and prehistory, simply not been in a position to fend for themselves. A less debilitating form of motherhood with a less absolute investment (redundant backup offspring) helps, and if you really want to create a race of warrior women, then you'd also likely be talking about a race with higher paternal than maternal parental investment. For that to hold true, males would have to be certain it's their sperm fertilizing a woman's eggs, as the prospect of cuckoldry puts a huge damper on the benefit of paternal investment.

So you'd likely be talking about a species of fish or amphibian-like egg-layers where the males care for the eggs and young, are smaller and cuter than females and less apt to travel, live longer and tend to put their mates through the wringer before deigning to fertilize their eggs, to ensure they're not stuck caring for sub-par material.

But to return to the example of Tyranny, you can also see how much more consistent Kills-in-Shadow is in her tough bitch nature compared to the much more poorly conceived and developed Verse. While initially presenting Verse as a sadistic, bloodthirsty cut-throat (and cut-everything-else) the game's writers simply couldn't resist also imbuing her with that all-too-girly vulnerability and pathos, yielding a downright schizophrenic characterization: a vicious killer whom you're expected to pity every time her voice acting suggests she's pouting or scared. Ooohh, my sisters, my poor sisters, boo-hoo, my poor sadistic sociopathic sisters.
Bullshit.
-and the simple fact that most people will swallow such bullshit without a second thought speaks volumes as to the steel grip femininity holds on our communal psyche.

As a last note, human reproduction and infancy have not only shaped our evolution but have presented a very clear logistical problem for iron-fisted dictators throughout history. The upper classes need the lower classes to reproduce as much as possible, as quickly as possible. Women's most productive role from the point of view of the wealthy is in producing more cannon fodder, more wage slaves for the good of the only entity above the level of chromosomes which directly benefits from reproduction: the tribal unit or state. The few times women have been forced into dangerous work (e.g. factory work) has been during periods of rapid industrialization or when the male workforce is already depleted. Otherwise, keep safe and keep cranking out those crib-stuffers.
So it makes absolutely no sense for Tyranny's resident megalomaniac Kyros to disagree on this central tenet of empire-building with the likes of Hitler, Stalin, most all religions and the American Republican party. Overlord/lady Kyros, the immortal dictator waging constant centuries-long war on the rest of the world, the strategist thinking whole generations in advance, would in no logical way allow the use of women in combat. Not unless Kyros can conjure babies out of thin air. (I assume that brand of magic's sigils would take two hands to portray. [O<-<-)

Warrior women will occasionally arise in most human societies (and they can make excellent stand-alone characters in fiction) but they only make sense as exceptions to the rule, not replacing the blatantly obvious human norm of female self-preservation and the sacrifice of males in their stead. Actually making women carry their weight in dangerous, unhealthy or otherwise harmful enterprises never enters into the equation. At least not when you're talking about the human species, that species divided into a cute, seductive, self-serving, emotionally manipulative half and the other, male half: disposable, easily dismissed as unlikeable and expected to place itself in danger to profit the cute ones. If you want some other guiding principle, then you'll need to fabricate an alien species for which that principle would make sense. At the very least make them into bearded ladies.
(Or better yet, think up some humans, male and female, consciously attempting to transcend their biological limitations. Including innate male slavishness before female whims.)


'cause I can't be your Superman, can't be your Superman, your Supermaan, your Supermaaan...

The Beautiful Tyrannous People

"If I was beautiful like you
I would never be at fault
I'd walk in the rain between the raindrops
Bringing traffic to a halt"

Joydrop - Beautiful


Spoilers? Yeah, Tyranny.

Much as I like Tyranny and its setting, characters and role-playing quandaries, its visibly rushed production left many aspects pixelated around the edges, including some characters' personalities. In many cases they simply betray a schizophrenia obviously borne upon multiple writers' quills (and takes on each persona.) The bloody-minded, bold and resolute Verse whom you meet in Act 1 for example simply doesn't speak like the jarringly soulful sympathy-hound which seems to crop up randomly from her psyche during some dialogues. In fact a quick comparison of the game's various NPC companions, quest-givers and bosses shows a marked tendency to lend more dignity to or "redeem" characters occupying a favorable social role. Ask yourself which gender of NPC would receive the moniker "Brown-Bottom" and you'll quickly realize that despite a fair attempt at building a world of villains and misery, the writers' prejudices led them to play favorites.

This certainly becomes apparent with the Archons of War and Secrets who bracket most of your campaign. Granted that the Voices of Nerat was very consistently built up as a prototypical irredeemable sociopath, but somewhere along the way we lose track of the fact that Graven Ashe is only meant to look the lesser evil by comparison to his chief antagonist. Gradually, where the brilliant, philosophical Nerat receives a classic mad scientist's narrative treatment, the comparatively simpleminded but fatherly, protective Ashe is spoken of only in terms of his positive qualities. Does anyone even remember, by the end of the story, that Graven Ashe is an unflinchingly genocidal racist? Or that his scorched earth strategy would yield not only the destruction of the Chorus, but the agonizing starvation of whatever's left of an entire territory?

However, the true teacher's pet must undeniably be named Sirin. I refused to even go near her during my first playthrough, as her mind control superpower strikes my chaotic neutral, Pandemonium-bound lupine self as the absolute creepiest thing in the game, beyond Kills-in-Shadow's manic bloodlust, Bleden Mark's omnipresence or even Nerat's... well, y'know, Nerat. There's little in the conceivable multiverse so inherently vile as controlling another thinking being's thoughts (and therefore being) and yet despite the Archon of Song's casual abuse of this Geneva contravention for her own entertainment, we're repeatedly pushed to swallow the notion of her as an idealistic do-gooder lecturing everyone around her on their character flaws.

Seriously? "Won't somebody please think of the children" delivered by a villainess who snuffs out the very light of reason within flesh by a mere syllable? And the only thing my character can respond to her utterly impractical, shortsighted, nonsensical and insubordinate caterwauling is a stale, snappish little "shut up Wesley" designed only to make the mouthy little brat seem even more sympathetic?

Who the hell Maryd this Sue? There's obviously a disconnect between the initial character design and its ultimate implementation, evident in her very powerset. Where the textual description of her powers comes across as blatantly offensive (both practically and morally) her talent trees make her into a largely team-friendly omnivalent buffbot with none of the thematic coherence of the other characters (why exactly does she have a boulder attack and a lightning storm attack?) Someone desperately wanted to make Sirin look good instead of the capricious spoiled banshee her basic character embodies, and hugely overshot the mark. While we can easily accept that every sadistic powermonger on Terratus would envy her abilities, there's absolutely no reason why everyone would be letting the sanctimonious snot browbeat them without mind control even being mentioned. Even the ostensibly scarier demons like Bleden Mark and Nerat get called names and denounced occasionally, at least behind their backs.

Archon or no Archon, Overlord's pet or not, Sirin gets away with more bullshit than the rest of the cast put together, never getting called out on anything and always getting the last word. Leaving aside the cognitive dissonance of the sole voice of benevolence coming from a teenage girl (has no-one at Obsidian actually met a teenage girl?) where exactly did Sirin acquire her ethical guidelines? From a brief lifetime locked in an ivory tower under the tutelage of the megalomaniacal ancient evil world dictator?

Or let's word these questions another way: had Sirin been a male with the same mind-shattering power, how would he have been portrayed?

Beastwoman Smells Guuud

"Won't be hard to pull you underground
And won't be long 'til you love me
And I'll be coming at your back to bring you down
[...]
Leave you with an open wound
Left to die alone like an animal"

Genitorturers - Lecher Bitch


_________________________________
Minor Tyranny spoilers.
_________________________________
While Obsidian's recent RPG Tyranny suffered more than its share of problems, mostly revolving around its unsatisfyingly truncated last act, it offered among its better features the companionship of an NPC roster running the gamut of an evil overlord's minions, lackeys, henchmen, grunts and toadies. Ya got the fanatics, collaborators and conscripts, the bootlicks and backstabbers and the scheming usurpers, and of course no evil overlord's army would be complete without a breed/brand of nominally inhuman monsters to confirm, by proxy, the villain's own place outside the cozy, empathetic bonds of human normalcy.
Meet my trusty bolverk, Kills-in-Shadow.

Though she seems to spend most of her time scratching her hairy pits or even hairier teats, this girl really comes through for you whenever you need some heads bashed in or limbs ripped apart. Her playstyle's a perfect complement for my own mix of squishiness, suicidal aggression and crowd control. Unable to equip any armor, waiting for me to initiate before launching herself into the fray, dashing across the battlefield while knocking enemies on their asses, howling and yelping when she gets in over her head, she'd be a laugh riot even if she weren't both well-written and well-voiced.

Her dialogue manages to play up the moldy old routine of the primitive and/or imbecile musclehead who hasn't mastered personal pronouns (what TVTropes calls "Hulkspeak") while somehow coming across as quite natural, clever and even weirdly... poetic, at times. Beastwoman speech strings varied adjectives around a few evocative verbs to great effect, and belying its initial awkwardness, you quickly learn that Kills-in-Shadow suffers little impediment in communicating her feelings on any number of topics. Often this entails a concise, lurid bluntness. Possibly the scariest moment in my first playthrough came when Kills-in-Shadow confessed getting a bit frisky toward my character -

 - especially since it's not clear whether she intends to ride me like a pogo stick or floss her fangs with my intestines or both in whichever order. As with Barik's particular quirk suggesting a similarity to Vhailor from Planescape: Torment, several conversations with Kills-in-Shadow bring to mind Ignus' freewheeling mania, a loose cannon you can barely manage to keep rolling away from yourself, though unfortunately in terms of gameplay she doesn't seem to ever go as far as turning against you like Ignus could.
Or maybe I just like her too much and consistently stayed on her good side... by bitchslapping her down to enforce pack hierarchy.
In any case, she counts among the various reasons to consider Tyranny a truer spiritual successor to the original Torment than the more kid-friendly Tides of Numenera claims to be.

The success of the character hinges partly on some good voice acting maintaining a quick, excitable, rolling tempo to that third-person caveman routine which prevents it from sounding stiff or dopey. Largely, however, she and the whole beastwoman race were solidly designed from the ground up for both an instantly recognizable thematic place within Kyros' world and for internal consistency. Not as stupid as they seem but for the most part lacking self-control or a measurable attention span, their dialogues reveal an appropriately bestial synesthesia, a hypersensitive maelstrom of haptic, olfactory, visual and aural data keeping their decision-making solidly mired in the obsessive bloodthirsty "now."

They're a welcome slap in the face to furries and their tendency to infantilize the object of their fascination, to every mewling catgirl on the internet, and every vegan werewolf begging for treats. They break modern cliches left and right, not least the more recent bemoaning of racism among fictional elves and goblins. Tyranny's various human societies share an almost universal racist prejudice against these sentient predators, but it's for the most part entirely justified. They prove themselves at every turn to be vicious, impulsively murderous and largely deserving of their gradual extermination. They make Larry Niven's Kzinti look clean-cut, clearheaded and reasonable by comparison. Kills-in-Shadow's on your side after all, the evil, ravenously megalomaniacal side of the story and ironically, it's arguably the most evil and sadistic faction in the game which is even willing to enroll beastmen at all rather than hunt them to extinction. These ain't heartstring-tugging beaten puppies.

As for Kills-in-Shadow, she's quickly earned her place in the roster of truly memorable cRPG henchmen, with the added distinction of being one of the least likeable or sympathetic.

Barik Echoes

"Has he lost his mind?
Can he see or is he blind?
Can he walk at all
Or if he moves will he fall?

Is he live or dead?
Has he thoughts within his head?"

Black Sabbath - Iron Man


____________________________
Minor spoiler: Tyranny, Barik

____________________________


When I evaluated Torment: Tides of Numenera I said it fails to live up to its claim as successor to Planescape: Torment, and I stand by that. Aside from other aesthetics, the various personalities you meet tend to stop short of the monomaniacal stature of the original tormented. Tides' antivillainess can't hold a candle to the inscrutably sadistic Ravel and your companions seem hopelessly hopeful, lacking that pleasingly pervasive expectation of doom, of sliding inexorably down the universe's undertow.

Tyranny's no match for the original Torment either, but its grim setting allows for a bit more thematic overlap. For example, take your (archetypically) loyal walking panzer, Barik, permanently stuck within a tangle of metal slabs and coils wrapped around him by the monstrous strength of a magical storm. (For bonus villain points, you can actually become the proximate cause of Barik's doom during the pre-game roleplaying choices.) Barik's plight gets played off as sort of a running gag in various dialogues, a gag which grows increasingly macabre as you gain an understanding of just how debilitating his "condition" is - culminating in this dialogue:

Torment fans will probably facepalm at that point and wonder how they didn't see it  coming all along. Barik is basically another Vhailor, a modern fantasy version of El Cid Campeador riding into battle indifferent to pre-existing health conditions like death. He achieves this status more successfully than Qara from NWN2 in her role as proto-Ignus, unhampered by NWN2's kid-friendly limitations. Barik will not die so long as his cause lives.

We met the characters from Torment in their decline, the entire plot consisting of a denouement of lifetimes' worth of adventuring and power struggles. There's a lot of potential in revisiting those archetypes in the making, elaborating the kind of personae and plot twists which can make an Ignus or a Vhailor. One can imagine a Tyranny sequel set centuries after the first, coming across a hollow humanoid form of rusted, tangled metal bands which suddenly booms: "I have... AWAKENED!"

Now, what I'd really like to meet is a proto-Ravel, in the process of weaving herself into her power. Better yet, I'd like to play her.

Of Combos and Conjunctions

"You and me, we're in this together now
None of them can stop us now
We will make it through somehow"

NIN - We're In This Together


While Tyranny's tangle of roleplaying choices must occupy the bulk of any commentary, its gameplay mechanics also deserve some mention. Skipping over the skill-based character development for the moment, let's take a look at combos:

Each of your tyrannous companions comes with two reputation-unlockable abilities requiring both you and that companion to act at once. While more powerful than regular skills, they're limited in use (once per combat or per rest) and require you to find an opportune moment for both characters, managing their global cooldown timers appropriately. Kills-in-Shadow's little teleport there is basically what the monk's Flagellant's Path from Pillars of Eternity should have been. Utility aside, they add quite a bit of aesthetic charm to your party make-up, making it look as though your team is really working as a team with each companion adding a bit of flair to your own character's combat behavior. Kills-in-Shadow's jumps meshed perfectly with my own "damn the torpedoes" attitude. After seeing how naturally combos work within Tyranny it seems odd in retrospect that they haven't been featured in every other RPG with NPC companions over the past couple of decades.

So I ended up wondering why, if combos add such satisfying aesthetic and practical options to single-player games with simulated teams, do we not see them in multiplayer RPGs with actual teams of multiple players? After a bit o' cogitatin' ah done 'membered wut you striplins ain't know no-how, dat we dun did dat in da olden days. If I recollect proper, why it were back in the spring of aught-seven when tha witch-king come down from Angmar an' done invadered tha down o' moldy cheese, we peoples free of middlin' earth would use these things called "conjunctions" or "fellowship maneuvers" to give our combat tactics that extra spit-shine:

When initiated on a monster, conjunctions stunned it and brought up a menu of four color-coded skills for each player in the group. Each player could choose to personally regenerate health or mana or damage the monster instantly or over time, but when executed in a particular pattern a conjunction could also trigger AoE effects or group-wide bonuses. The better coordinated your group, the greater use you could get out of such maneuvers. Among other things this lent a more relevant role beyond hitting things to Lord of the Rings Online's rogue class, the burglar, as best able to initiate conjunctions by sneaking up behind enemies to trip them, etc. Groups would plan ahead as to who would hit what color in what order. A couple of instances were even built around them.

My only complaint was that no matter how many times my groups called upon the "Tramp of Doom" it never summoned even a single succubus.

Now don't go buying yourself a LotRO subscription. I'm talking about the gameplay of yesteryear, not yesterday. As online game demographics shifted from the old nerdy crowd who wanted a challenge to casual mass-market brainless trash who want everything dumbed down until they can face-plant their way to victory, LotRO's various features were gradually stripped away leaving nothing but mindless loot-grinding. As of several years ago, fellowship maneuvers were deemed much too complicated for modern gamers and nerfed into irrelevance. Complexity sends millennials scurrying for their safe spaces.

I've been calling Pillars of Eternity and related games the "RPG revival" as a joke but dare we hope that some of Tyranny's ambitions might bleed into the industry at large, and even into MMOs? When my trusty bolverk Kills-in-Shadow and I heft our warhammers and stampede across the battlefield, I can't help thinking how easily she could be replaced with an actual player and how little it would take for coordination to once more become an ideal in computer games.

Just stop pandering to cretins.

Tyranny

"Hear the cry of war
Louder than before
With his sword in hand
To control the land

Leathern armies have prevailed
Phantom Lord has never failed"

Metallica - Phantom Lord


Fall to your kneeeeeeees!
And bow down to your phantom overlord Kyros!

Ahem.
All rise. The honorable fatebinder Werwolfe now presiding.

So there's my first tyrant. Not even level 20 by campaign's end. Skills scattered haphazardly across four trees in a mix of magic and squishy two-hander offense that I could barely make work until discovering the "iron light as air" skill and Kills-in-Shadow's "stampede" combo, at which point I immediately began gavelling copious amounts of rebel ass into submission. Ah, but Kills-in-Shadow deserves her own post.

So how should I start describing Tyranny? First off, buy it. It's worth the money, if barely, even at release pricing. I preordered it because I was pleasantly impressed by Pillars of Eternity and wanted to see to what other use Obsidian would put its newly minted game engine. Unlike Tides of Numenera, which heavily modified the interface for its faux-futuristic setting, Tyranny chose to copy-paste most of it (literally, in the case of item icons) and instead focus on its setting and storytelling for Obsidian's secondary, unadvertised, left-handed side project. Ultimately, this makes it the slightly more interesting, though admittedly less accomplished product.

While Tyranny doesn't necessarily get excessive criticism, I'm somewhat perplexed that the criticism I do see appears utter nonsense to anyone who's actually played. Guessing a great many people saw the basic premise and assumed they'd be aiding a plucky, cartoonishly good rebel alliance topple the conveniently evil empire. While possible but much more difficult to attain than other paths, it's obvious throughout that this game's just not about holding the moral high ground. Denied their absolutist moral relativism, desperate to find something to dislike about the game, critics attack it in facile but nonsensical fashion. For instance, you'll commonly see reviewers deride Tyranny as a 15-20 hour game. Here's my first playthrough for comparison:

Almost 50 hours. I'll admit I obsessively explored all I could and there are an hour or two of AFKing somewhere in there. My second playthrough, granted, took only 35 hours. For a smooth, relaxed and not every involved run you're probably looking at just under 30 hours. I can only explain the idiotic "15 hour" complaints by assuming these people don't read. Much of your time as fatebinder is spent learning about the world you inhabit, largely through dialogues which can seem a bit tedious as they're overly-fragmented. To those especially who decided to hate Tyranny as soon as they discovered they weren't Luke Skywalker, I'm sure learning more about tyrannizing must've seemed an onerous chore. Then again, I'm guessing these are the same cretins who never read any of the lore books in the Elder Scrolls games.

Equally moronic the complaints about lack of replay value. Tyranny means to offer role-playing as it should be, with branching paths and an expression of the player's own personality through the accumulation of decisions big and small. While a far cry from the freedom of a sandbox game, Tyranny makes a damn good show of outdoing its competitors in appending repercussions to your choices. You get four main paths (including joining the rebels, though they're hardly as cuddly/saintly as most players would like) but they're hardly obvious and many decisions will cause entire zones to open at completely different times in the game (or not at all) to the point where you'll still be tripping over your poor life choices in the "conquest" introduction three quarters into your campaign. Even the basic "grab the loot" is occasionally played as a choice between greed and obedience, with some macguffins also doubling as overpowered combat items in their own right.

You get more divergence by the first act of Tyranny than you would in an entire playthrough of most story-based games. Where your decisions would usually only spell a marginally different cinematic by the end, here they're constantly with you, carrying on from zone to zone, affecting your journey as well as the destination.

Aesthetics-wise, Tyranny sticks to an appropriately dark palette composed mostly of grays and browns, its sound/music is at times brilliant (especially the opening theme) and it manages to own its location themes of shattered landscapes, army camps and corpse-littered battlefields. The basic premise behind your character puts most other origin stories to shame. Your title of "fatebinder" in Tyranny is basically that of a judge - a battle-judge with lightning eyes and a license to kill (everything) but a judge nonetheless. You'll spend quite a few dialogues administering Overlord Kyros' "peace" deciding whether to use your dictatorial fiat for right, justice, law or greed. While in the Neverwinter Nights games for instance courtroom scenes were inescapably tacked-on, forced and irrelevant roleplaying in a maelstrom of hack'n'slash, Tyranny manages to integrate them because this is your character's freaking life!

The setting itself is equally interesting, dodging most fantasy tropes (no elves or dragons or heavens or hells) in favor of a gritty militaristic culture clash drawing largely on Roman expansion at the close of the bronze age, with provincial bronze falces clashing against legionnaire iron. This is given in-game relevance as well, with iron gear excelling in basic armor and armor penetration while bronze counterparts compensate slightly with speed and accuracy.

However, for all its good points, it's clear that Tyranny was left unfinished. Customers were legitimately dissatisfied with the ending, which abruptly truncates the last act before it even gets started as though the development team suddenly woke up one morning to realize they'd run out of money. Many of the accusations of "15 hours" can likely be traced to being hit in the face with the end credits when the adventure was just ramping up. Aside from leaving you with a fistful of stories that seem like they never got past their introduction (Bleden Mark is just the most obvious) this damages pretty much every aspect of the game.
The skill-based character progression runs out when you finally start figuring out what you're doing, for the simple reason that you run out of enemies.
While the first two thirds of the game feature carefully measured item advancement making you work for your gear upgrades, the last part bombards you with insanely overpowered loot seemingly out of nowhere.
The magic system has you collect modular spell components and combine them to yield a pretty wide variety of effects. Excellent! Then you're cut short just as you're getting enough "expressions" and "accents" to start making the most interesting combos like bouncing, piercing, stunning magic missiles.
As concerns dialogues the whole thing seems ridiculously front-loaded, as if the writers initially assumed they'd have more time. Even the basic disposable redshirt skill trainers in the first couple of zones are very eager to tell you their life stories in minutely detailed and verbose text trees, but by the end of the game the objectively much more important Big Boss NPCs can barely manage a paragraph or two of villainous monologue as you execute them.
In fact, for a game so dependent on writing, this thing desperately needed better editing. Characters' tone and speech patterns change abruptly, at times dipping into too-modern vernacular or seemingly being slapped together by separate writers. Even honest-to-goodness typos crop up here and there.

Someone fucked up the budget and/or production schedule. It happens. It's happened to a lot of very good games. For all that, Tyranny's a memorable piece of work, not least for its more mature take on the basic premise of playing the evil side. Graven Ashe and especially the Voices of Nerat's parting words to you, your pen-pal mentor's comments about the mythopoietic nature and growth of power in accordance with fame, Tunon's Lawful Evil Neutral adherence to his own rules, the portrayal of the various rebel groups' sneaky, backstabbing viciousness, it's all good stuff. Perhaps even more so than Pillars of Eternity's last-act conclusions about divinity, Tyranny dares to let its characters voice some uncomfortable truths. My favorite so far would have to be Lantry's response to the question "how do you feel about the evil invisible world-trampling Overlord Kyros whose minions almost tortured you to death?"

What is "tyranny" anyway? Is it just a matter of scale or overt power?