What’s Obsidian been up to?

The famous rpg developer Obsidian is known to us for games like Planescape Torment, Icewind Dale, Fallout New Vegas, Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 2 and Pillars of Eternity, among others. Obsidian has been working on a new RPG called Tyranny, which will be released this year. Tyranny’s idea in short is that the world has already been overrun by the bad guys, and the player(“Fatebinder”) is working for the overlord, wandering around the world delivering justice(or something like that) however he sees fit and the world should react to the player’s choices(especially near the beginning) in abundance.

I also heard that there will be no classes in this game, so that the players can build up their characters more freely, much like in Skyrim for instance. Tyranny being an Obsidian game, there will of course be different factions with which the player can either become friends or enemies with, and I for one am interested in how well they will succeed in making the factions and their reactions to the player function. One thing that sounded really fun to me was that the player gets some sort of special attacks depending on which factions they are siding with. The player will also get so called combo attacks that are done with their companions. The stronger the relationship, be it good or bad, the stronger the combo. But enough for the details, you can read more on Kotaku, from where I first read most of this info! In conclusion Tyranny has an interesting setup, decidedly different from the regular fantasy game’s good vs. evil setting, where the player is usually assuming the good guy-role. Of course the idea is not sensationaly unique but it’s nevertheless intriguing and I’m sure Obsidian will use this to the best of their abilities to make us an awesome game.

Obsidian has also been told to have started their work on Pillars of Eternity 2, but that project is still quite new and thus there is not a whole lot to say about it yet, but if anything, Pillars of Eternity 2 should be at least as epic and time consuming as the first one. While researching information about Obsidian’s latest movements I also stumbled upon Gamepressure’s interview with Obsidian’s CEO Feargus Urquhart, and he stated that: “there’s a small group of people within the studio that’s working on something completely new, but he didn’t want to share any details yet. What’s worth noting, though, is that the names of Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky came up while talking about this project. Feargus didn’t say that directly, but he pointed out that it might have something to do with the prototype based on the Unreal Engine”. Now this is definitely interesting and I for one can’t wait to hear more from this new, so far secret project! I won’t engage in writing more details about the games mentioned just now, because I don’t want to give out any flaky information. We’ll just have to patiently wait for more news from Obsidian. Nevertheless these are certainly exciting times to be an RPG fan!

Play with Passion!

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