Loyalty in Tyranny (2016)

I briefly discussed Tyranny. 2016. Paradox Interactive. in my last post and would like to discuss it a little more in depth. Tyranny is a role-playing-game where you play as a “fatebinder” a high ranking member of the tyrannical government of Kyros. You are sent to the last country to fall to Kyros’s armies in order to bring peace and enforce Kyros’s laws. Now here is where the loyalty aspect and interactivity aspects comes into play. You have freedom in how you interpret Kyros’s laws and can even choose to ignore them for personal gain. You can be completely loyal to Kyros as you go through the game an make decisions as a loyal subject of Kyros or you can work against him and make decisions that are solely for your benefit. So the game is quite interactive in what choices you make and has appropriate consequences for those choices, which makes the player feel like they are truly interacting with this world.

Now after the game was released there was some DLC and a few patches where at the very end of the game you can just make a few dialogue choices and profess your loyalty to Kyros in order to get within his good graces no matter what kinds of character you were playing as before. This can be seen as cheapening the experience, as you can basically get the “stay loyal to Kyros” ending without putting in the work or it could be seen as more interactive since it adds more player choice. I think it’s inclusion is fine since at the end of the day it is still a choice that the player can choose to make or not.

This relates to my interactive story since I also have a few choices that are present at the very end of the game. These choices, if the player chooses them results in them getting a different ending than the one they were currently on track to getting. I am not at the endings of my story yet, however I will need to make sure that the choices are written in a way that they do not seem like a cop out that comes out of nowhere. However the way I have them mapped out is that those choices can only lead to an ending that is close in ideology to the ending that they were going to get without making that specific choice.