Tyranny: Bastard's Wound - On Believable Evil

RockPaperShotgun asked Matt Maclean of Obsidian about the challenges of writing Tyranny and explains how they have incorporated player feedback into the expansion.

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Another problem that Obsidian needed to solve was - in a society where evil has already won, how do you then give the player something to do? The solution here was to turn the knives inwards, to have the fighting shift into infighting as thoughts began to turn away from final victory, and more toward who would reap the most spoils. But this led to another issue; the need to contextualise the maelstrom of inter-factional politics that the player was about to be thrown into.

The result of this was the Conquest mode, a text adventure that takes place before the game begins proper, which provides an overview of how the war played out, and let's the player make a few choices that influence how various factions perceive them as the game begins. Interestingly, Conquest mode was one area of Tyranny that proved difficult to build, and one that MacLean worried, "for the length of development", would go down badly with players.
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