Didn't like Pillars of Eternity's writing, how good is this one?

[ThatLynx]

Hey, as the title says. I couldn't get into PoE at all, even though I tried for almost 30 hours, and the main reason for that was the game's writing. I generally like text-heavy games (I loved Planescape Torment for example), but there was soo much humourless information here, and except for a few companion dialogues it almost felt like I was reading articles on Wikipedia or something.

I usually like(d) Obsidian's writing though, and I wonder how Tyranny compares to Pillars in that regard. The game sounds pretty interesting, but would you say it is more lively written?

Thanks in advance for your answers. ^^

[.//slayer]

I only finished Chapter 1, so take my opinion with a grain of salt, but Tyranny's writing style is as humourless and information heavy as PoE's, if not more so. Which is more, Obsidian tackles more "serious" issues in this game, including fantasy nationalism and separatism, and since this is also a brand new setting, be prepared to consume a LOT of facts and background info about the main characters, rulers, gods, history, etc.

I'm the opposite of you - I enjoyed PoE, but didn't like Tyranny. However, the main reason for that was that PoE's combat felt much better for me, and Tyranny is lacking in that regard (being simpler and less varied overall). The writing seemed good, but then again, I liked PoE's style.

[Batbro]

One major improvement in Tyranny from PoE that's so good they're bringing it back in PoE2: green lore text. Frequently, when an NPC makes reference to a historic person, concept, or event in the world's lore, or anything else you might need a quick refresher on, the relevant text will be highlighted, and you can hover over it or click on it to see a quick 1-2 paragraph summary of it.

I loved Pillars of Eternity, but it was pretty dense and had an awful lot of exposition to dump. I find Tyranny a lot easier to get into, and the text highlighting was definitely a big part of that. The other part was the amount of role-playing freedom offered is FAR wider than PoE's, so conversations were a lot more actively engaging, and less "click through all the options in sequence."

[ThatLynx]

I think it's great they're trying to establish a rich lore in their games, but it was just too much at once for me in PoE, and it never seemed to stop. The longer I played, the more exhausted I felt, since I tried to remember as much information as possible and yet still often couldn't follow (nor enjoy) the dialogue topics. I should probably also mention I'm not a native English speaker, but the game's translation in my language is pretty flawed, so I didn't want to use it. I think this text highlighting feature you mentioned, Batbro, could be just what I need.

I think I'll give Tyranny a try, it sounds promising enough to me. Thanks for both of your opinions. :)

[Rowley]

I'd say that Tyranny is quite well written and tries to remain internally consistent with itself at every turn. Some people complain about the exposition dumps, but I never found them particularly offputting, especially as whenever there's a key concept being introduced or reintroduced (such as historical areas, notable characters or events) it's hotlinked and you get a reminder of "Who the **** this guy is," if need be. A lot of the game is dialogue, though it isn't spanning walls of text at every turn.

Trying to keep all of the information in mind shouldn't be much of a problem, as the game's story is fairly fluid even if you don't remember the significance of every little thing--I will confess that it was a little overwhelming at first diving straight into things, but it didn't take long before everything was clear.

[Dorok]

The writing in Tyranny is pretty different than overall writing in PoE1 Vanilla.

I don't disagree with OP PoE1 writing isn't that good overall.

There's some key aspects making the difference:
- First point, Tyranny use tooltips in dialog to learn and remind important lore aspect. The double adventage is to avoid burden dialog with lore more informative than interesting to read. And it's to allow check again major lore stuff when you want check it in a next dialog.
- Tyranny writing is cumulating intriguing aspects. Some generate NPC comment providing hypothesis, and it makes player wonder and build hypothesis too, so this increase curiosity and attention. There's elements that will be explained only through a different play path. And there's probably element not explained in the game so it's a bit unfair, but it still helps increase curiosity and attention of player.
- Unlike in PoE1, Tyranny writing doesn't try build very realistic personalities that could come from your real world. The positive is characters are focused on some originality they are all special and it helps grab attention. For sure some personalities with be build with some clichés, but for most players it will work better than long personalities building which is quite a challenge in a context of a game.
- The topics are more concrete and more easily linked to modern topics so potentially grab more players. War, Law and order versus rebelling an betraying, racism, slavery, chaos versus order, more. At reverse most PoE1 topics are very abstract, the SF gods hardly evoke religions, the vague attempts to use animancie to cover science topic is very hard to follow as it looks too much like medium charlatans, the topics medium/speak with dead versus charlatans is hardly evoking modern topics, and more weak topics covered.

That's the main aspect making Tyranny writing quite better than PoE1 writing, at least overall, strongest parts of PoE1 are probably stronger than strongest parts of Tyranny.