Tyranny

Have you ever been curious what Judge Dredd might be like in a dark fantasy setting? Obsidian and Paradox Interactive's upcoming RPG, Tyranny, might just be up your alley then.

Set in the land of Tiers after a great war, you play an officer in the army of Kyros, the overlord who's brought devastation to the world. According to Game Director Brian Hines, the concept for the game sprung from a desire to "tell stories based more on human hate and greed than magic. You're not some farmhand who's given a dagger." In Tyranny, you start from a position of power and are constantly given choices that affect the world and the beings that inhabit it, even in the game's opening sequence.

The game's factions and even environments themselves are shaped by choices you make in Tyranny's prologue sequence. During our demo, taking place sometime later in the game, I saw the same area on two different save files, each had drastically different choices made during the prologue. In the first save, the party came across a village on some flatlands where a tribe was threatening to execute a beastman, a werewolf-looking fellow. In another save, the land had been directly affected even more by the player's choices in the opening so the village was on an elevated, ruined surface, though the same scenario with the beastman was still in play, just with different factions.

In Tyranny, you're a Fatebinder, a sort of inquisitor who wields nearly unlimited authority and can settle tense situations through persuasion or brute force. In the first demo we saw, the Fatebinder told the crowd cheering on the beastman's approaching death that they'd handle the matter and then promptly released the prisoner into the wild. This earned the respect of some soldiers in the village while the villagers, at war with the beastmen, were disgusted and angered. In the other save, the Fatebinder killed the creature and the opposite effect happened, with the villagers approving but the faction of soldiers' relationship with the protagonist taking a hit.

Of course, neither option is "the wrong one." Tyranny is a classless RPG that, according to its creators, is constantly encouraging you to build whatever character you want. The decisions you make will have positive and negative effects on your situation and factions no matter what you do, but I was impressed with how different each branching path seemed during the demo and with the fact that you earn experience points both in dialogue interactions and combat.

The snippet of combat that was demoed also showcased the standard, enjoyable tactical CRPG mechanics seen in Pillars of Eternity, the last game that Obsidian and Paradox worked on, with a few minor enhancements. Characters in your party who grow together will become capable of unleashing team attacks (kind of like Chrono Trigger's combo attacks). The one we saw in the demo had a character catapulting an allied archer in the air so they could rain arrows down upon the opposition.

I left the demo for Tyranny yearning for more details, impressed with the ambition in both its concept and combat mechanics. Living up to that ambition is a sizable order, but we'll find out if Obsidian and Paradox are up to the task in late 2016, when the game is scheduled to be released.