IGN, 9.2/10.
Polygon, 8.5/10.
PC Gamer, 88/100.
GameSpot, 8/10.
Giant Bomb, 4/5.
Eurogamer, Recommended.
Trusted Reviews, 3/5.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun, scoreless.
TIME, 4.5/5.
Ars Technica, Buy.
Forbes, 8/10.
Videogamer.com, 7/10.
The Telegraph, 4/5.
GameInformer, 7/10.
The Wrap, scoreless.
PCGamesN, 7/10.
USGamer, 4/5.
Push Square, 7/10.
Hardcore Gamer, 3/5.
The Sixth Axis, 9/10.
Twinfinite, 3.5/5.
God is a Geek, 9.0/10.
Digital Trends, 8.0/10.
Bit-Gamer, 90%.
BleedingCool, 8.7/10.
Xbox Achievements, 88/100.
The Verge, scoreless.
CGMagazine Online, 10/10.
Mirror, 5/5.
EGM Now, 8.5/10.
IBTimes, 4.5/5.
We Got This Covered, 3.5/5.​

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GB: Tyranny is set in the transitional era between the bronze and the iron age of its fictional setting. How much will the setting be influenced by that period of our own planet's history, and how much will the presence of powerful magical forces and fantastical creatures make it diverge? How will that influence the plotlines and mechanics of the game?

Brian: Tyranny is a fantasy RPG rather than an historical RPG, so it’s influenced by this period in our history but doesn’t try to emulate it. I decided to set the game at this transition point for a couple of reasons.

First, it creates a plausible reason to explain why Kyros was able to conquer. Creating bronze weapons and armor was expensive. Often you had to trade with neighbors to get the metals needed to alloy bronze. It took skilled smiths to reliably mix the metals in the proper ratio to create bronze hard enough to serve as weapons and armor. Both of these meant that most nations could only afford to outfit a small number of soldiers with bronze weapons or armor.

Iron weapons had the advantage of only needing a single source of metal to create. Once people figured out how to smelt iron ore, it became much cheaper to outfit a larger number of soldiers. Early iron weapons weren’t better than bronze – they were often heavy and brittle. A bronze sword might bend or grow dull in combat, but it wouldn’t shatter. However, when you can outfit ten soldiers in iron for the cost of one soldier in bronze, you’re able to bring a much larger force to the field.

This was one of the things that allowed Kyros to conquer. The Overlord controls the secret of smelting iron ore, so has access to a cheaper source of weapons and armor, and can outfit a much larger army than any other nation that tried to resist.

Secondly, Bronze Age warfare was more up-close and brutal. There weren’t guns or firearms that allowed you to kill enemies from a distance. You fought at sword or spear-length, or hurled javelins from a shorter distance. For a world where evil won, I wanted to capture some of that feel in our combat.

GB: Will Tyranny feature random encounters with enemies, or will most combat encounters be deliberately placed within the game? Random or not, will enemies be static in regard to their level/power or have you incorporated level scaling into the game?

Brian: Combat will occur with placed enemies, as with Pillars of Eternity. Some combats can be avoided or modified through dialogue options, but we don’t have any random encounter systems in place. We had ideas for systems along those lines during development, but ended up cutting them when we didn’t have the time to bring them to an acceptable level of polish.

There is level scaling in the game. Tyranny has a more open, branching structure than Pillars of Eternity did, which means that there are many different ways for players to travel through the world. The same area needs to support players arriving at level 5 or level 10, and provide them with interesting and engaging combat when they do so.

Enemies will scale within a level range, and their level becomes fixed when they are revealed by fog of war. So if you see an enemy and they are level 5, then leave the area, gain several levels and come back, they won’t suddenly increase in level. They’ll still be at level 5. On a different playthrough, if you went to that same area for the first time at level 8, the enemies would be a higher level.

The goal with this scaling is to keep combat interesting and not something you can just ignore on difficulty settings beyond Story mode. So far from our playtests its working out very well.
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Matt Maclean, Lead Narrative Designer: The dark setting was one of the original pillars of the game’s design. ‘What if evil won?’ was the question asked in the earliest pitch documents. So ‘evil setting’ was an owner mandate from day one and as far as design constraints go, that’s a fun burden to have around your neck.

Our inspirations included The Black Company, the Fallout series of games (Obsidian created Fallout: New Vegas), and the ‘What if evil won?’ question was unavoidably read as ‘What if Sauron won?’ so there’s always a little Lord of the Rings in any modern fantasy, though I’m proud to say we don’t have elves or dwarves or a lovable midget race of any kind.

For my own interpretation of the question ‘What if evil won?’, I’ve always assumed the answer would be ‘sounds like real life.’ Evil wins when people learn (or are shaped by ignorance) to accept it as required and normal. So most of my own inspiration for Tyranny has come from real life. I’ve never read a book or seen a movie with a fictional villain as fascinating as Alan Dulles, Qin Shi Huang, or Kim Jong-Il.

GR: Did you take any ideas from books, games, or movies for this environment of evil winning? Which and how?

MacLean: The Black Company was very influential, with is an excellent show of a world wherein the cast of characters know the stories and myths of the magical bigwigs but are only semi-aware of how it all actually works. Black Company also had a great sense of soldiers-as-people and it didn’t fall into the brash-hero/peasant-savior nonsense that most fantasy novels can’t help but repeat to death.

Myth: The Fallen Lords was also a big influence, with its grim take on the true cost of being a hero. Myth was also inspired by Black Company, and like Myth, Tyranny features magical sociopaths with personality-driven powers set alongside grim, desperate regular folk trying their best not to die.

A world wherein there’s one big evil dude on top really only works when it’s sold with great big lies that get the average person invested in the evil (or just dependent upon it), instead of willing to resist it. And for evil to win long term, it also needs to be immune to self-implosion (since we’ve all read enough fantasy literature to know that evil defectors are involved in 9 out of 10 evil regicides). So with that in mind, I’ve found most of my inspiration comes from non-fiction: fascism, American exceptionalism, drug cartels, capitalist corporations, and militaries through the ages have all provided a great deal of inspiration as to how evil wins.

GR: Do you have a favorite faction to write about/for?

MacLean: My favorite faction to write was the Scarlet Chorus, mostly because it’s a faction of grumpy jerks and I’m a grumpy jerk, so it’s a perfect fit. More a lawless mob than a ‘proper’ army, the Scarlet Chorus is made up of folks forced to join or die, with the masses kept in check by aggressive gang leaders who rule as despots until they are challenged and dethroned. The folks in this bloody motley have to be rough, jaded, and darkly optimistic to make it through the day, so they’re all tinged with sass and deceit, and that’s far more fun than writing honest villagers.

Kirsch: The Disfavored and the Scarlet Chorus are fun for different reasons. As the most militaristic and viciously patriotic, it can be enjoyable to test the Disfavored’s limitations—what a soldier will do for their unit, how they balance their emotions and needs against the needs of the legion, and how their personality measures up to the expectations of the legion.

When it comes to the Scarlet Chorus, this is more fertile ground for creative exploration. No form of psychological manipulation, physical torture, or all-around weirdness is off the table when the Scarlet Chorus is concerned. We’re talking a Fury Road magnitude of diversity and strangeness. Since every gang has its own rules and twisted leadership structure, there isn’t what you’d call uniformity in any gang of Chorus rats.

GR: The short stories suggest there's more to these factions than just burning and pillaging. Will we learn their backstories in the game? And is this indicative of how the narrative and role-playing will run in Tyranny?

Kirsch: If you want to understand the armies of Kyros, there’s no better entry point than the soldiers and Archons. Talk to everyone, take the time to ask questions and figure out who these people are. Even the Chorus understand that their way of life is unsustainable, and that someday the survivors will have to pick up pitchforks and boat oars for their intended purposes. If you’ve explored every dialogue option, we’ll know that we’ve done our job.​

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Lantry is a Sage of the School of Ink and Quill. He’s a man of letters and numbers, a student of magic and nature, and an archivist obsessed with the accurate accounting of important people and events. His school is famous throughout the Tiers for amassing knowledge from all throughout the known world, but the Sages are even more famous for rarely sharing this treasure trove of learning with outsiders, despite their claims of preserving knowledge for the betterment of mankind. The Sages revel in knowing a little bit about everything, and Lantry is no exception – in his long years he’s learned the Sage’s traditional Preservation magic, as well as the arts of Healing and Concealment – styles of magic long ago pilfered from other Schools and Guilds that the Sages now boast as their own.

His life’s work has been contributing to the Chronicle, the running archive-of-all-things built over the ages through the long work of hundreds of Sages. Lantry uses his arcane training to witness history where it happens, as it happens – for him, magic is a tool to gain access to the battlefields, backroom dealings, and hidden ceremonies that most have to read about after the fact. For Lantry and other Sages driven on this pursuit often seem to live very long lives – a fact most Sages will laugh away as the byproduct of loving your work, but is in truth the mystic side effect of decades of use and practice of Preservation magic.

As a student of history, Lantry has a certain adoration for Kyros, for no one has the power to define the unfolding march of events quite like the Overlord – nobody in recorded history even comes close. So when Kyros’ armies came to the Tiers, Lantry was one of the Sages to argue for surrender – but his was the dissenting voice among the elders, and the Sages fortified their library stronghold of the Vellum Citadel in defiance of the Overlord. Old enough to know a suicidal plan when he hears one, Lantry fled the Vellum Citadel before the full force of Kyros’ wrath descended upon the Sages, in the form of an Edict of Fire that turned the mountainous archive into lava-soaked ruin.

Combat Role

Lantry was designed to be an efficient support character and a “jack-of-all-trades” of sorts. Being a well experienced Sage and learned traveler, he is the only companion to possess three unique talent trees. While these paths of specialization are not as deep as with other companions, they allow Lantry to be far more diverse in the development of his abilities.

Lantry is also an experienced spellcaster, which further adds to the flexibility of his kit. While capable of performing a number of roles in the party very well, we expect many users to find Lantry’s ability to heal, buff, and support the party to be extremely valuable.

In Combat, Lantry is skilled at wielding thrown weapons. He favors a set of iron throwing knives etched to resemble writing quills.

When designing Lantry’s talent trees, we wanted players to really feel like Lantry could fill nearly any gap in the party structure. Lantry’s Preservation tree focuses on supporting the party from the back line by buffing allies with renewing magic, healing them, and even bringing them back from the brink of unconsciousness. His Sage tree excels at emphasizing the use of spells and abilities that debilitate foes to aid the party. Finally, Lantry’s Quill tree shifts him into a deadly offensive thrown weapon specialist.

Below are some of the abilities available to Lantry:

Charged Throw: Lantry gains the ability to passively channel magical energies into his Quill as he throws it. Charged Throw makes Lantry’s thrown critical hits trigger explosions of arcane energy, damaging all nearby enemies.

Quillstorm: Raising his hands to the sky, Lantry forms a writhing cloud of arcane quills. With a wave of his hand, each quill is sent raining over his enemies, cutting deep and causing a lasting Bleed effect.

Stance: Mage Slayer: Lantry’s knowledge of workings of magic have also taught him how to quell it. While in this stance, each of Lantry’s attacks can silence enemy spellcasters and apply a lasting penalty to their magical abilities.

Watcher’s Judgment: The wrath of a Sage brings with it many levels of magical debilitation. With Watcher’s Judgment Lantry can charge his weapon and unleash a burst of energy on impact. This attack severely diminishes the enemy’s defenses against magical attacks. If Lantry can perform this action from stealth, the enemy is also Paralyzed.

Renewal: Lantry uses Sage magic to restore the party’s weapons and armor to pristine condition, increasing the protectiveness of armor and the ability for weapon’s to penetrate enemy defense.

Second Breath: Producing a small vial from his garbs, Lantry moves to a fallen comrade to revive them in battle.

Lantry has the answer to nearly any problem. Abilities like Renewal and Second Breath are largely helpful and can sway the tide of battle or even help to find victory in the face of defeat. With so many options available to him, one of the greater challenges when playing Lantry is simply deciding which area of the battle he is needed most and how to get him there. While a well-timed Silence attack might prevent a powerful spell from being cast, there may also be an ally nearing defeat who could use healing. Positioning Lantry on the battlefield where he is both safe from danger and can respond to as many opportunities as possible is key to playing him effectively.

Through flexibility, support, and high impact decisions, Lantry is an invaluable companion and a boon to any party.
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PC role-playing game Torment: Tides of Numenera will also be released on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

Torment publisher Techland confirmed the news to our friends at Eurogamer Poland today, along with word that all three versions will launch simultaneously in early 2017.

Torment's console port was greenlit after the success of Wasteland 2 on consoles, Brian Fargo, boss of developer inXile told EG Poland.

"Wasteland 2: Director's Cut success and the gratitude expressed by a lot of fans after this release made us begin to plan the Torment: Tides of Numenera for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One," Fargo said.

"We're especially excited to work with Techland, who - as a fellow developers - know exactly how to execute such a release without compromising the quality."

Console versions of the game will get their public debut at Gamescom in Cologne, in just under two weeks.
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Boredom and monotony. Unceasing repetition. The mind is sedated, lulled to sleep among the endless waves. No hope. No relief. [...]

On paper, The Great Whale Road seems like a perfectly interesting little game; it's basically a cross of The Banner Saga and King of Dragon Pass, staged in the historical setting of the North Sea around the year 650 AD. You play the newly selected leader (male or female) of a small Danish settlement; storylines for the Picts, Franks, and Northumbrians are promised to follow later in development. As the chieftain, you have to manage the economy of your settlement while simultaneously playing through a linear storyline of political frictions and intrigue. You have to decide how to distribute your people's manpower between diplomacy, trade, warfare, or any of the various ways of gaining food; you need to deal with a variety of random events, from pirates to the plague; and you have to lead your warband into turn based battles against your people's enemies. During the winter months, you rest at home; during the summer months, you set sail to trade and parley with your neighbours. Sounds good, right?

And yet, in the current state of the game, none of these elements are actually fun. [...]

Should you go play The Great Whale Road right now? Absolutely not, you'd be bored stiff! But should you buy it right now? Well, perhaps. The game is coming off a failed Kickstarter, and the Early Access income would probably be helpful to Sunburned Games in their efforts to deliver a complete and hopefully entertaining experience. If the idea of a Banner Saga/KoDP hybrid with lots of stats and random events is inherently appealing to you, and you have money to spare for a game that so far delivers nothing except some pretty 2D screens and a half-complete campaign full of shallow and repetitive gameplay, then you might as well throw some funding at this project. Support your indie developers! Just keep in mind that none of the promised features are actually guaranteed to ever make it into the game.​

Everyone who joins the Chorus gets a new name. The name “Verse” was a compliment from the Voices of Nerat, who – in one of his crazier, artistic moments – heard music in the shrieking and howling of battle. He said that hers stood out louder than anyone else’s, and contained too many parts to be easily defined.

Verse has a special knack for learning the combat styles of others. She could spend five minutes watching a grizzled veteran wield a spear and know the form as if she had used it across a hundred battles. During the war, this talent manifested in an unexpected fashion. During a battle with the defenders of Apex, Verse suddenly froze in panic – a totally unheard-of reflex, coming from seemingly out of nowhere. The Scarlet Furies fighting alongside her died in battle because of this spasm of hesitation.

What happened next was stranger still: Verse felt the deaths of her sister Furies like a part of her mind getting ripped apart, and she stumbled from battle possessing knowledge of the battle stances and weapon acuity of her sister Furies – an unintended, almost parasitic reflex that fascinated and disgusted her.

Verse hates herself for the hesitation that stayed at her hand, and feels revulsion for everything that came after, which casts her instinctive need to challenge others and prove herself in perhaps a sadder light.

Combat Role

Verse was designed to blend between melee and ranged combat with ease, acting as a highly mobile single target damage dealer. Verse’s talent trees support this synergy between short and long ranged combat and allow her to perform the roles of melee assassin or ranged archer on the fly. Verse also possesses unique combat stances that allow her to further match the party’s needs in the heat of the moment.

When designing Verse’s talent trees, we started by splitting them by Melee or Ranged combat specialization. Deep in each of Verse’s trees lie talents that place strong emphasis on one style or another. Talents at earlier tiers are focused on value for both melee and ranged combat, maintaining synergy for users interested in a hybrid approach or those that enjoy switching styles frequently. Verse’s Duelist tree features a twin blade strategy geared around rushing through the fray and unleashing flurries of deadly melee strikes on weaker targets. Her Skirmisher tree is built around escape tactics and long range devastation via bow and burning arrow.

A few of Verse’s notable abilities:

Know Your Enemy: A talent which allows Verse to study her enemies in combat. This allows Verse to become increasingly more deadly the longer that a combat spans, increasing her Dodge and Parry each time she is struck by an enemy. As a quick thinking fighter, Know Your Enemy helps sell the idea that Verse won’t fall for the same combat trick twice.

Rush: As a Scarlet Fury, Verse is no stranger to sprinting into danger with a wave of Chorus allies at her back. The Rush ability gives players the chance to send Verse like a streak of lightning through the enemy ranks, drastically increasing Verse’s movement speed for a short time and making her immune to engagement.

Killing Spree: After felling a foe, Verse will enter a Killing Spree where she attacks multiple times with each of her basic attacks.

Burning Iron: Verse launches a single arrow doused in oil and flame. When it strikes, it ignites her enemy, burning them for Fire damage over time.

Unbound: Verse performs a spinning attack and vaults through the air to a safe location. A remnant of one of Verse’s fallen sisters appears in her place to face her foes.

Verse is a first and foremost a deadly assassin, her ability to dispatch high priority targets and remain mobile on the battlefield makes her well suited for the task. Abilities like Killing Spree and Know Your Enemy give Verse the momentum to tear down nearly any foe. While Verse is capable of dishing copious amounts of damage, she is notably more vulnerable than iron-clad counterparts such as Barik. Those with Verse in their party should expect to keep a keen watch to prevent her from getting in over her head. Abilities like Unbound and Rush are great offensive and escape abilities, though if on cooldown, Verse loses her mobility advantage and is left vulnerable.

With her highly active kit and powerful single target abilities, Verse feels like a storm on the battlefield, aggressive, relentless, and apt for dispatching key foes.
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The original Bard's Tale trilogy had a character progression system closely tied to your starting class, plus the fascinating idea of evolving into different types as you reached higher levels. A budding Conjurer could progress down that track, or change professions and learn to be a Magician, Wizard, Sorcerer, and ultimately an Archmage. We are retaining this strong class-based focus in The Bard's Tale IV. We’re also opening up this more in-depth character progression to all the classes, allowing each class to specialize into their own set of sub-classes. By merging the sub-class concept into a tree structure, we are better able to give each adventurer meaningful and impactful choices each time you level up.

Each class has access to its own unique skill tree. From here, your adventurer is able to learn how to wield new gear, gain attribute points, learn new abilities, and gain passive effects. Basically, your character can be fully described through their skill tree. At a glance, you can tell a Sorcerer from a Wizard, a Thief from an Assassin, and a Vanguard from a Commander, all just by looking at their skill tree. Each time one of your Adventurers levels up, they are granted a single point to spend on their skill tree, with each skill costing exactly one point.

While skill trees can have a lot of options, their complexity grows along with the adventurer. The very first view you might have of your skill tree as a Fighter might look a little something like this, showing only a smaller number of skills to unlock.

In the above image we see the player has a few choices to pick from for their fledgling Fighter: learning to wield more advanced one handed weapons, learning to wield great weapons, gaining access to battle standards, wearing more protective armor, gaining bundles of attribute points, learning a new passive, or learning to craft basic potions. You'll notice that many of those choices also carry along with them some increased attributes as an added bonus.

For those of you thinking that's all there is, don't worry. You'll be able to view your entire skill tree from the get go. For simplicity's sake we set the default view to show you only what you have available at a given level, and what's just beyond the horizon. However, you can always zoom out to see the full number of options available to your adventurers as they grow into heroes of legend.

As you unlock new skills, you'll begin to also unlock the next tier of options in your skill tree. That's displayed by the counter under each tier header, with each tier requiring a total number of skill points spent character-wide. The adventurer above, for example, has so far unlocked seven out of nine skills needed to progress to Tier 3. These tiers play a role in a character's growth in a few ways, some more obvious than others. First, it helps create big milestones in the career of your adventurer. Just as you've advanced your progression towards one or more sub-classes and your options have begun to taper down, you unlock a new tier and your available options explode out again. It also provides incentive to each adventurer to acquire skills they might not have otherwise, encouraging exploration within your build. Lastly, it allows us as designers to deliver a more balanced experience because we can better ensure that at least some minimum number of points were spent towards defensive and offensive skills in one form or another during the early stages of the game. What kind of armor and fighting style you adopt and eventually specialize in later on is entirely up to you.
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For those of you looking closely at the skill tree descriptions, which I'm confident many of you are, you might be wondering where you get your combat abilities from. Many of them, in fact, do not feature in the skill tree directly – instead, the place you acquire abilities is actually from your equipment. As you progress down the skill tree you unlock the ability to wield new and more exotic weapons, off-hand items, and trinkets. You may unlock access to a single item, such as a battle standard, or an entire category of items, such as Tier 2 great weapons. These items each have a specific ability or abilities. By wielding a great club you'd be able to use Lumbering Strike during battle, while wielding a battle standard would allow you to rally your allies with the ability "To Me, Brothers." As a certain weapon is used, an adventurer will eventually master its abilities, allowing them to keep using those abilities even without needing the weapon equipped. This will let you naturally unlock a vast amount of tactical flexibility over the course of the game.

And lastly, equipment such as your helm, armor, and boots also play a major role in your character's growth and progression. Through the skill tree you're also able gain access to increasingly powerful and exotic armor, robes, costumes, garbs, habits, and accoutrement. Your gear accounts for a major chunk of your adventurer's attributes. How many blows your character can withstand, how able he or she is to focus the eldritch forces, and their mental fortitude is heavily influenced by what mystic equipment they've found and learned to use throughout their journeys. These items can also grant you unique passive abilities that can help you form powerful combos. Itemization is an important aspect of The Bard's Tale IV and we've only given you a cursory glance, so we'll be touching on it more later.​

• Stats & Skills Matter not only in combat where they provide various bonuses but outside of combat as well, when exploring or dealing with people. It’s a deceptively simple aspect, so let’s examine it in details.
  
  What it means in practical terms is that your character would succeed in areas where his/her stats and skills are strong but fail where they are weak. For example, a perceptive person would notice something others won’t; a brute would be able to move a heavy object, etc.
  
  Obviously, the effect can be minor (i.e. you moved a boulder and found a couple of coins underneath it!), major (you moved a boulder and found a passageway to another area!), or anything in between (you moved a boulder and found a passageway to another area where you found … a couple of coins! T’was a good day for adventuring).
  
  Usually, stats and skills are checked in the following situations:
  • Multiple solutions (i.e. different ways to arrive to the same destination, everyone’s happy and nobody’s upset)
  • Optional content (limited ways to unlock optional content, aka. “gated” content)
  
  Multiple solutions are an important gameplay element, which allows you to go through a game in a manner fitting your character, but it is the optional content that truly differentiates one playthrough from another and boosts replayability (because solving the same problems in different ways isn’t enough).
  
  Naturally, optional content must differ in accessibility. Someone’s old shed should be easy to break into (let’s say everyone with a single point in lockpick, which is 80% of all players). An area that resisted all attempts to get into for decades or centuries like the Abyss should force most people to turn back to preserve the setting’s integrity (let’s say only 10% of players should explore it). The rest of the content would fall somewhere in between.
  
  This approach greatly upset some players who felt that they were punished “just because they chose the ‘wrong’ stats”. Some RPG players are notoriously obsessive-compulsive and won’t rest until they create a character that can get the maximum amount of content, which does require reading online guides and meta-gaming like there’s no tomorrow – the fastest way to kill all enjoyment and ruin the game. Of course, the counter-argument is that failing repeatedly (considering how easy it is to make a character ill-equipped for what you're trying to do) is an equally fast way to kill the enjoyment.
  
  I’m not sure there’s a way to “fix it” as those who want to get maximum content in a single playthrough will continue to metagame no matter what. The moment you tell the player "sorry, buddy, you need to be this tall to ride this", some players won't accept the failure and would want to know this kind of info in advance. Not many people see it as "you win some, you lose some" design. Anyway, I'd love to read your thoughts on this matter.

• Non-Linear & Replayable
  
  First let’s define what it means. Linear design is easy to understand: you move from A to B to C, always in this order, which takes away the freedom of choice completely. Then we have the “Bioware design”: do 4 locations in any order, which as an illusion of choices, much like dialogues where you get to say the same thing in 4 different ways.
  
  True non-linearity requires two things:
  • Multiple ways leading toward the endgame location (i.e. branching questlines), so you never have to travel the same path if you replay the game
  • Very few “required” story-telling nodes (locations, conversation, events) the player simply must visit or trigger in order to progress.
  
  The positives are clear. Now let’s take a look at the negatives:
  • The game will be short because you’re taking all available content and splitting it between multiple paths and filter it down via mutually exclusive decisions. AoD has over 110 quests, which is a lot, but you get no more than 20-25 per playtrhough and that’s if you leave no stone unturned.
  • The game will be even shorter because it’s easy to miss locations and content. Throw in the gated content and non-combat gameplay and it will be even shorter.
  
  Not surprisingly, "the game is too short" was complaint #3, right after "the game is too hard" (#1) and "too much meta-gaming" (#2).

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Fallout 1.5: Resurrection is a new, old-school Fallout. It's a modification for Fallout 2 with a completely new story taking place in the Fallout universe. The plot is set in the time between Fallout 1 and 2, east of the future NCR in New Mexico. That means you won't visit the original places. Instead, you'll discover entirely new, creative locations that allowed us to have more freedom with the story.

The player’s character wakes up, heavily wounded, in a dark cave, not knowing how it got there, or who it is. Thus you start from a scratch, searching for your past, which is darker than it might seem on the first sight... We won’t give away any more details about the story, not to spoil your game experience. Though you can count on surprising twists in plot and unexpected finale.

As big fans of Fallout, we've tried to take the best from all of the classic Fallout games. Easter eggs and jokes, with which Fallout 2 was literally overfilled, have been folded into the background. Instead, the great atmosphere of decadence and hopelessness enjoyed by so many in the first Fallout game returns. The world is still chaotic, with only a few, small, independent communities connected by tenuous trade relations. The wasteland is an unfriendly place where law is on the side of whoever has the biggest gun.

The name "Resurrection" was chosen for two reasons. Firstly, resurrection is a theme tied closely to the main character who, at the beginning of the game, practically rises from the dead. Secondly, our modification represents the resurrection of good old Fallout. We didn't want to re-imagine the entire game system. Instead, our aim was to bring back this classic RPG in its original form. Many remember that feeling when they first played Fallout; until you completed the game, you journeyed through interesting locations filled with fascinating things. Even after several play-throughs, you continued to find new, exciting stuff. Players could really get into such a game, so that's exactly the kind of game we've endeavoured to create.
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A few weeks before Fallout 4’s release, Autumn Leaves, a Fallout : New Vegas Mod was published on Moddb and the Nexus. It featured a colorful cast of excentric robots, in charge of a forgotten Vault where a strange murder happened. Sounds familiar ?

Maybe, to those who played Far Harbor’s “Brain Dead.”​

First off, both quests begins with a discussion through an interphone with the caretaker of the Vault, a headwaiter robot with a rather distinguished persona. The big mandatory Vault Door opens, leaving the player up for the exploration of said vault.

The main quest itself, which consists in investigating the murder by checking the crime scene, and speaking to every robot in the Vault.

The mysterious death of the prime financier of the Vault, who - in both cases - worked alongside Vault-Tec to build the special place.

The importance of voice modulators in the plot, to distinguish the robots between themselves.

The sexytime moment.

And of course, the mandatory “Let’s discuss paintings with a robot.”

Then, there’s the Neural Interface Matrix in BD versus the Neuro Comp Matrix in AL, the presence (and relevance to the plot) of a robotic expert in the Vault, the feel of the central atrium, the quasi-exclusive robotic cast confronted to a murder, the misleading piece of evidence (Keith/Rolland), among others.​