Some of the choices Tyranny had us make could leave one feeling truly despicable. Indeed, Obsidian’s cRPG from last year did a good job at having us play the role of a Fatebinder in the service of an evil overlord. Well worth the time and money, with all its massive events and well-written dialogue, Tyranny still had a number of flaws that held it back from being all it could have been. With its first expansion, Bastard’s Wound now out, I returned to the Tiers to see how this new content stood up.
Being playable prior to completing the campaign, the core of Tyranny: Bastard’s Wound is the eponymous, and appropriately named, settlement and the areas adjacent to it. If The Bastard City, where master-judge-person Tunon made home after the conquest of the Tiers began, used to be a melting pot of cultures, Bastard’s Wound is exactly what the name suggest: a place where people of various backgrounds, who tried to escape the war, desperately dripped towards. Located in a section of the Oldwalls, you will be running through, mostly, underground dungeons for the length of the expansion, going down dungeon crawling nostalgia road once more.
There’s something particular about the stowaway settlement that does give it its own specificity. Upon setting foot inside, you can choose to be a dick and murder everyone, uphold Kyros’ law which forbids trespassing into the Oldwalls, or delve deeper into the issues the settlement has. There are a number of them, all of which can be touched upon through questioning various NPCS. Whether they regard the settlement’s water supply, leadership or rivalries, it paints the picture of a place that seems to simply try to make due on the surface, but which hides much more underneath.
The writing goes by the same high standard of quality the main game had, with a variety of potential solutions for the problems that appear. As expected, one playthrough won’t be enough to see every potential outcome. Companion quests, a conspicuous omission from the original, were also added but only for three of the six companions. They all follow important elements in their background making for some satisfying, if short, stretches of questing. If, however, you’re not too keen on Verse, Lantry and Barik, you’re out of luck as the other three companions did not receive the same treatment.
With no new gameplay mechanics to speak of, Bastard’s Wound banks on its narrative strength. While the writing has been given attention, it leaves enough unexplored. For an expansion focused on part of the Oldwalls, I found little lore that furthers our characters’ knowledge of them in the two playthroughs I completed. And that’s the biggest issue, I find, with Bastard’s Wound: it’s too tame. It has the potential for those massive events Tyranny did so well, but never tries its hand at bringing them about or forging a direction of its own (not at least in my experience). Despite having certain specific nuances, it melds almost too perfectly into Tyranny’s world, running the risk of becoming just a side area. It does add some extra meat to the third act, but doesn’t quite exploit the location’s potential to the fullest.
Bastard’s Wound is, simply put, more Tyranny. Compared to something like The White March, I found it to have surprisingly few things that end up truly standing out once you’ve left the settlement behind. It does add some hours’ worth of good dialogue and dungeon delving to Tyranny’s third act, while balancing dialogue and combat encounters well enough. Be that as it may, it doesn’t shake up the game as much as it could and, perhaps, should, which leaves us with a good, but not exactly vital expansion.
Bogdan Robert, NoobFeed
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| Platform(s): | PC |
| Publisher(s): | Paradox Interactive |
| Developer(s): | Obsidian Entertainment |
| Genres: | RPG |
| Themes: | Fantasy |
| Release Date: | 2017-09-07 |
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