The Queue: Tyranny no escaping that for me

Playing Tyranny again, because it’s really one of my favorite CRPG’s and in the wake of Baldur’s Gate 3 and other popular CRPG’s like Wrath of the Righteous and Rogue Trader that allow you to play a morally questionable character Tyranny really lets you do that.

If anything, Tyranny lets you play as the villain. In fact, it really plays around with the banality and sepia tone of evil — you can play as a bureaucratic cog in an evil machine blindly and loyally following a corrupt and vast evil or as a rebel setting the world on fire just to watch it burn, or a whole host of other options. You can be sincere in your good intentions but helpless to avoid getting your hands filthy because there are sometimes no good choices.

I think one of the reasons Tyranny ended up forgotten despite selling something like 500,000 copies on launch is because the game feels unfinished — you get to the end of a 40 to 50 hour playthrough and there’s a kind of confrontation with Kyros. They are the evil Overlord who has conquered most of the world and who has sent you to the last remaining porti0n of the continent as yet unconquered by said Overlord. But you never really get to fight Kyros, and the game ends on a huge cliffhanger.

You can choose to keep serving Kyros, despite Kyros trying to kill you, or outright rebel against your former Overlord, or you can work against Kyros while pretending to serve him. Or you can literally tell everyone to pound sand, declare yourself Overlord of the area. And you can make so many choices that range from dickish to outright terrifyingly evil.

The game is unlikely to ever get a sequel, sadly, so in the end you never get to find out what happens next. But in a world where people are always complaining that games don’t let them play truly villainous characters. This game lets you play every potential shade and flavor of villainy from totalitarian cruelty to chaotic murder fiend to bleak, inhuman bureaucracy. You can even play as a good person trying to do the right thing, but wow, is that harder. Yes, being good is hard mode in this game.

I went and listened to the aforementioned song.

I felt a faint wisp of what might have been sorrow, but then again, could have just been existence. Who knows? In the end, it doesn’t really matter.

Short answer — no.

Medium answer — no, because I don’t feel like those quests were intended as a completion of anything.

Longer answer — it’s fairly clear from the tone and tenor of the quests that the Kirin Tor is essentially done as we have known it. No more will it be a world spanning magical nation that travels to face and confront threats to the world. The city as we have known it since Wrath of the Lich King is no more. The hierarchial structure, the Council of Six, none of it remains and whatever Kirin Tor we’re going to have going forward is essentially a brand new entity that has yet to truly decide what it is or what role it intends to pursue.

As a conclusion to the Kirin Tor as an organization? It did well enough. But it mostly failed in really giving us any sort of idea of what, if anything, we’ll see moving forward.

In essence, the Kirin Tor is dead. Whatever we’re going to see going forward, whether it uses that name or not, will barely be a continuation of the organization that once empowered Guardians to defend all of Azeroth. Based on the dialogue between Aethys, Kalecgos, Jaina and Khadgar, I expect we’re going to get a lot less of them as power players and a lot more of them as a think tank and training ground for future generations of Mages. Maybe they’ll even open up their ranks to other kinds of magic.

I have truly failed as a writer because I have never had anyone compliment me like this. Red, wear this moment with pride.

I don’t like Age of Ultron, but I don’t hate, say, Ultron himself — James Spader does an amazing job at playing a newborn AI that is having sincere growing pains and an almost Oedipal hatred for his creator (although I can’t get used to it being Tony Stark instead of Hank Pym) and I still kind of remember being shocked that Quicksilver died. It’s not really any actor’s fault, and while I’m not a Joss Whedon fan, I don’t even blame him for it.

It’s how bifurcated the movie feels. That whole bit with Thor and Heimdall? That was shoehorned in at the last minute against all logic, never goes anywhere and wastes a lot of time. The inclusion of Klaw ends up not really going anywhere and just mostly serves as a means for Ultron to get enough Vibranium to make Vision as well as plate up a new body for himself.

Switching Ultron’s mania from Wasp in the comics to Scarlet Witch and making it more surrogate dad than creepy stalker didn’t really work for me either. In the end, to me the film feels disjointed. There are a lot of good things IN it, but they don’t come together in a way I can really feel satisfied with.

Well, the reanimated corpse of Interplay still owned the rights to BG:DA and BG:DA2 as of 2023. When I got those games on my Xbox, they were literally on sale for the only time I’ve ever seen them go on sale and even then it was like a 10% sale at most.

As for why it’s so pricey on PC? Well, keep in mind that it wasn’t originally released for PC — Interplay was in the middle of its spectacular disintegration when they hired an unknown game studio called CD Projekt Red to make a PC port of the game, and canceled said port almost immediately. So while it seems kind of insane to play nearly full price for a nearly 30 year old game, keep in mind the first port was only released in 2021.

Okay, that’s the Queue for me this week. Hopefully things calm down for the world and also my own quickly disintegrating life. Take care, everyone. Hug your loved ones.