Pillars of Eternity - [Honest] I'm not a thief.

[Dracos]

First off, thanks to El Cideon for gifting me this.  Right awesome of him.

Pillars of Eternity is perhaps the best spiritual successor to the baldur's gate series since that time.  And given that's what it set out to do... Success.  It's a traditional party of adventures game with its own custom system that feels D&Dish, but isn't using any of the rules or spells or monsters so it doesn't have to pay licensing fees for its kobolds, I mean xaurips which are totally not white skinned kobolds.  The art is lovely and it really does evoke a similar kind of experience with dragons and gods.

It is also a buggy mess with poor load times.  This really needs to be said up front.  I could not functionally finish the game without editing data files to fix main flow quests that were broken.  I can count the stronghold bugs that I saw in the several dozens.  I'd often get distracted moving from area to area (My bad for not mapping the game to an SSD but still).  The game had problems, even 6 patches and many months after launch. 

Pillars of Eternity is an interesting beast as a game with few modern compares.  Its a type of experience that isn't gotten many other places.  They put a lot of work into background, lore, the story, and the theming.  And you know what?  Despite the morality going between black and grey and almost never seeing white?  They did not end with a "Oh world gonna suck, wanna cry about it?" ending like oh so very VERY many large-scale fantasy games.

Overall...I liked it.  The art, the characters, and the big moments shone well.  Especially, Kana, who was just so optimistic.  The narrative angle they took with building your character background by parts and actions was interesting and I daresay unique, though it didn't stop me from being an amoral psychopath who was simultaneous Mr. Good Guy.  The review title quote was made before killing everyone in the building, taking their stuff, and then robbing their neighbors nice and quiet-like.  I got +1 honesty rank for it too and a big honking diamond I carried around the whole game.

But I've gotta slug at its flaws, because they really do bear note.

The stronghold is flawed on many levels.  It is buggy, sure.  But it is also mathematically incoherent, mixing multiple forms of time tracking and generally pitching as a money sink in its entirety.  Only fairly late in the game would a given tax collection barely outshine the salary and thieves going on in the same period.  Basically, it seemed that a player that ignored it entirely was almost better off.  Not doing anything past unlocking it meant you'd probably have another 50k to throw around during the game, which is enough to top outfit one more character.  It wouldn't block you from the bonus dungeon either and the treasure within, which frankly is most of the strongholds reward value outside of narration.  It's lovely when decked out and its nice building it there, but you're basically alone there with your friends you pay money to keep it safe when you're not there.  The Events it unlocks rarely give anything that isn't really inferior to what you'd be carting around at that time and are annoyingly easy to miss.

Time is always moving, which makes not paying attention when a load finally ends a pain.  It can easily go a day and 'Oh, you ignored the supplicant, PENALTY', 'oh valuable adventure has expired'.  Seriously time movement was a pain, especially because it was so rarely relevant to anything but just messages of not getting to do things.  Quests didn't care about time.  Plot didn't care about time.  Merchants and people didn't.  Just the stronghold's event system and its time that went both on real time and on quest completed (A total mess of continuity).

Enchantment and Crafting generally seemed a waste.  Enchantment particularly waved Superb at you the whole game (which was super awesome) but...you can only ever enchant two things as superb.  And only if you kill all the dragons.  Otherwise no things.  So what are you really using?  You're really using one of the two dozen or so item quest drops that are superb, and then putting some piddling finishing enchantment like Flame Lash on them that you've been able to do since the very beginning of the game.  Don't get me wrong, they can be a good 25 or 50 percent more effectiveness, but there's no point in holding back or even planning.  Using something?  Fling whatever piddling effect fits and call it a day.  Once you get to the next quality level (Normal, Fine, Exceptional, Superb), toss it out and don't look back.  Have some Exceptional weapon that's just that good?  Fine, give it Superb.  Just that one, though.  Crafting is also sort of in the same space of feeling mostly pointless.  Might have been the difficulty.

I admit, did Easy as they suggested.  Was there for the ride, not the challenge.  Even so, in it, about 20 percent of the foes come in 1 and 2s, that basically are totally helpless to a full party without using any skills.  It made their system sort of pointless, especially poor chanters that could literally never get things off (even when they didn't bug out and stop gaining chant levels).  When things were a challenge, they were mostly a challenge of find where in the giant spell list the counter for this horrible debuff lived.  Lots of 'I cure one ailment, which you will almost never care about' spells.

The writing...  was good at points.  Ham-fisted a little, but I get the story they were telling.  Shame about the world of complete asses they were telling it in?  You get 3 factions in act 2 to buddy with, and let me tell you, they're all pretty shitty.  One I just straight up murdered on first meet up.  They stepped, and basically went, "You're our servant now." and I blew their heads off.  The entire group.  Didn't stop them from still being a big city player and also involved in many quests, despite the burned out wreckage of their main base.

There were a LOT of:

"I am doing this completely terrible thing, but it is justified to fend off this other guy because he's a MONSTER."
"I'm sorry, I'm just going to start stabbing everyone here and when the entire place is a river of blood, then we can start seeing if we can find some sense of right and wrong."

  The game has a lot more things end with "And shit went to crap anyway" than it does with good options.

And in part, that's a bit of their writing point.  It's not Good guy vs Bad guy, but Science, Innovation, Progress, versus Tradition, Faith, Certainty.  A lot of the writing is based around dealing with uncertainty, trouble, irrational situations, despair, death by accident, death by terrorist, etc.  It didn't resonate, but I could see where they were going for through and through, and they got there for the most part without people having to act like little 'motivations don't matter' shits.  Yeah, I'm glaring at DA2 from over here.  The characters, both NPC and not, generally did a great job of following through on their character motivations.  Frankly, the main cast are the stars of the show, and a much more interesting set of stories than pretty much the entire rest of the game.

Anyhow, it was an interesting play, and I thank El-Cid for it.  Overall though, if you try it, be prepared for the bugs.

[Kaldrak]

It sounds intriguing. I'll probably pick it up when it goes on sale.