Obsidian's Tyranny RPG is built on more than 600,000 words

The first in a three-part video series on Obsidian's upcoming RPG Tyranny reveals a bit more about the dark fantasy realm that's been crushed under the boot of the evil Kyros the Overlord, and also offers up what might be seen as a caution for RPG fans who don't like to read: More than 600,000 words have gone into making it. 

You won't read all 600,000 of them at once, but Obsidian hopes it will give you incentive to replay the game multiple times. “The writers really had to push themselves on this game, because we have to tell the story in so many different ways,” lead producer Matthew Singh explains in the video. “We have to always be anticipating what the player is going to be doing. A lot of our conversations have to be written multiple different ways.” 

Obsidian offered more insight into that depth during a 30-minute walkthrough of the character creation system at Gamescom, embedded below. “We designed the game to be one you can play multiple times. At the bare minimum, there are four major storylines through the game, but within each of those storylines, there's a lot of different permutations and variabilities,” game director Brian Heins explains during the demo. “One of our major questlines, there are actually eight different possible playthroughs of that major questline, just based on different choices you make in different areas of the game.” 

One other interesting bit of trivia revealed in the dev diary by lead level designer Constant Gaw: Kyros the Overlord, the iron-fisted conqueror of the world whose will and whim you enforce as a Fatebinder, is in fact a woman. No wonder evil won, eh? 

Tyranny is set to come out later this year. Find out more at tyrannygame.com.
 

Andy Chalk

Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.