Fans of RPGs are always looking for games where choices really matter. For years, Obsidian has been at forefront of experimenting with player choice, with ambitious projects like Alpha Protocol and Fallout: New Vegas both filled with fascinating ideas but rushed execution. With Tyranny , Obsidian is going all-in on player choice.

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“ What you decided to do in the Conquest? That was largely decisions about whether to support the Disfavored or the Scarlet Chorus, and they respond to those choices.

Two things make Tyranny super well-suited for this kind of role-playing: 1) it’s based on the Pillars of Eternity engine, and 2) you play as a villain. The Pillars engine was an intentional throwback to 1990s RPGs like Baldur’s Gate, and it gives Tyranny a couple advantages. First, it’s built around text. Tyranny is a video game for people who like to read, and the potential amount of text gives the game’s writers and designers the space to add in-depth options, like spending an hour exhausting every single option in a party member’s dialogue.The Pillars engine is also good in that it doesn’t get Obsidian hung up on trying to have a cutting-edge RPG. This is a deliberate throwback to the era of Baldur’s Gate, with party-based real-time combat and intricate tactics and magic systems. Tyranny takes advantage of improvements to the Pillars engine, particularly with some pretty awesome-looking and playing combo moves between your characters. But it’s also a game that knows exactly what it is, and it doesn’t try to be the new Mass Effect or Elder Scrolls.This all combines with the premise of Tyranny to create a world perfect for making tough choices. That premise is this: the bad guy in a fantasy world has won. The Overlord Kyros has taken over the world, with the last region to fall to his armies being the location of the game, called the Tiers. You play an important representative of Kyros, who had an essential role in the conquest of the Tiers. Exactly what that role was is defined at the start of the game, where after you create your character, you go into a “conquest mode,” where you make the choices deciding how the Overlord’s forces took over.This is where your choices come in. What you decided to do in the Conquest? That was largely decisions about whether to support the Disfavored or the Scarlet Chorus, and they respond to those choices. This is done not just via the units themselves, but also with your party members who come from those factions. They have their own personal motives as well as factional loyalty, and histories with one another. For example, Verse, the Scarlet Chorus companion, and Berik, the Disfavored party member, know each other – but in order to find out how and what it means, you have to build loyalty with both of them – and doing this affects your character’s special combat skills as well.Will this complicated set of loyalties, friendships, rivalries, and betrayals work out throughout Tyranny? I only played a few hours at the start, but it seemed incredibly sure-footed in its balance of world-wide factional politics and character relationships.

Rowan Kaiser is one of the most knowledgeable PC gamers we know. Talk turkey with him on Twitter at @RowanKaiser