After 51 hours of game time, I have finally finished Pillars of Eternity yesterday. And holy crap, what an adventure it was.

See, in my eyes, 'Adventure' is what describes Pillars the best – from humble beginnings, main storyline slowly grows into epic proportions, along with your characters who at the start struggled with killing a bear and at the end obliterate dragons. It's beautiful, it's old-school, it's fun... And it has its own share of issues*. So, let's get going into the land of Wall of Text.

The major appeal of this game is that it tries to recreate what Infinity Engine games did 15 years ago, and indeed, I have never seen a game more similar to the original Baldur's Gate, with bits of Icewind Dale and Planescape Torment thrown into the mix. And it takes the best out of all of them – open world and huge focus on exploration from the original Baldur's Gate, big dungeons with puzzles and a lot of combat from Icewind Dale and focus on unified, central set of themes from Planescape Torment.

Now, when it comes to implementation of all those that have inspiret it, well that's another matter entirely – so let's divide this a little bit. Bear in mind that RPGs are exceptionally complex, so whatever I'm going to write is merely scratching the surface. Feel free to skip the bits you don't care about and only read the ones relevant to you.

World and Exploration
I found the game's world and the lore surrounding it extremely interesting and fun to follow, along with reading all the text I could find in the game. I'm going to elaborate a bit more in the story subsection, so let's look at other aspects of exploration – pretty much every location is tied with or contains a quest, usually more than one, and offers a large landscape that you can freely navigate. Individual locations work precisely as they did in the original Baldur's Gate – you can be told about new ones by NPCs, but to get anywhere, you need to reach edges of every location and initiate travel from there. World looks beautiful and forms a coherent, believable whole and static backdrops most definitely help.

Probably my biggest issue is that while exploration itself is rewarding, you hardly ever find items which would actually be particularly interesting. There's very few unique effects and those which are there are mostly quite boring. At least every unique item actually has a unique story which adds a lot of flavor to them.

Story
The storyline starts off small and personal and slowly grows bigger in both scale and stakes. It's a smooth and subtle progression, game slowly adding new information into the mix, both mandatory to understand the storyline and optional like lore books which make it richer, more complex and tie together a lot of loose ends. And that's the game's storyline in a nutshell, really – it's scattered and requires a decent amount of thought and attention to understand fully. Since Eora is an entirely new universe, it allows the entirety of the game's lore to be more or less relevant to the main plot or major side stories, and so pretty much every piece of information will be used in one form of another at some point in the story. I liked this aspect as it made the whole experience feel focused and nicely tied together.

As for the main storyline itself, it poses a lot of interesting questions, and the game finishes with an ending I'm most definitely going to remember for a long time. At first the game's world looks like your typical high fantasy setting, but it doesn't take much to notice the themes it revolves around and twists it puts into the formula to mix it up. I most definitely liked the fact that this game dropped the notion of Good vs Evil from DnD and instead made the whole world a lot more believable, not quite fitting into categories.

The whole game, from lore, trough companions to random small conversations, is extremely well written.

Quests
Quests in the game are a mixed bag, really. Some are just simple fetch or kill quests while others pose interesting dilemmas and questions to the player. Completing some quests will block out your access to quests of competing factions, and as far as I'm concerned, that's the correct approach for an RPG which boasts consequences – and yes, which quests you complete and how you complete them does impact the ending. The thing which probably disappointed me the most is linearity of the main quest, especially when compared to how other quests can play out. While you can make various choices throughout, they will always lead to the same locations, NPCs and situations. Shame. At least reactions of NPCs and your reputation changes.

Combat
Instead spending a long time explaining this, I'll just say: Baldur's Gate with a decent amount of changes and improvements. The game adds an engagement system which received mixed reception, but I liked it a lot, of course most classes and skills work differently so playing it precisely like an IE game will get you killed. Stealth system is overhauled by only allowing the entire party to be in stealth mode and kicking it out once one member is detected (rogues get separate combat abilities to make them invisible). Resting is limited by supplies which forces player towards resource conservation (some spells and abilities are only useable per rest) and that ties in nicely with endurance system, which basically means that you have in-combat HP called endurance and out-of-combat HP called … Well, HP. When your endurance drops, your HP drops very slightly, and while endurance regenerates between battles, HP doesn't – and when HP reaches 0, you're dead. In other words, combat is taxing, but a character can take a few battles. The game drops turn-based system which BG used in the background and replaces it with fully real-time one.

Personally, I loved most of the changes. Clarity of Engagement system helped me a lot in crowd management and protection of squishies, resource conservation element on the other hand alleviated my issue with IE games where the most efficient way of playing the game was to rest after every encounter (and spend days in 100 meters long dungeon). These changes are, however, not universally accepted as good. Oh, and skill system is a bit weird – class-specific skills are great, but then there are separate skills shared across classes like Stealth, Mechanics and such, half of which feel useless.

Dialogue
Now this bit I liked. First of all, there is no singular attribute which you need to take to expand dialogue options. Dexterity is used in dialogues as much as intellect, perception or might. That's great. There are also checks for your skills and reputation.

Now reputation is another concept I love dearly about the game. It's basically a more complex version of DnD alignment system. Instead of Good vs Evil, Chaos vs Law however, it uses a bunch of stats like Honest, Deceptive, Intimidating and so on which change based on your dialogue decisions. When you reach certain level of reputation, NPCs will react to it (Oh you're that honest idiot!) and you'll be able to use them to your advantage (You know I'm honest, you can tell me). Now that's a system I want to see in more games. It clearly demonstrates how your reputation spreads throughout the game's world, it gives your decisions more immediate consequences and it ties very nicely to RPG character progression.

* I have played the game pre-1.5 patch, which is supposed to rebalance the game. It doesn't seem as major in that department from patch notes, but I might be wrong.

The rest. Yes, there's more. But there's also TLDR!

My brother dislikes this game for the painfully average and bland Sword and Sorcery Fantasy setting.

He thinks it fails at distinguishing it self from the crowd like Demon's Souls, Lord of the Rings, etc.

Replace Pillers of Eternity with, "Lord of the Rings" and you would never know the difference.

And he was spoiled by fantasy setting games that has a clear indentity like Warcraft and Zelda.

Companions
I think the most important thing to note here is that you will not find the instantly likeable characters from the original Baldur's Gate. NPCs in Pillars of Eternity are far less immediately interesting, yet far deeper. It's apparent that Obsidian tried to write actual, believable characters with a lot of personality and depth to them. While you won't get any space hamsters, if you dedicate to exploring those characters beyond their companion quest, you'll find most of them are far more interesting and likeable than they appear at first. They have their own worries, problems and little quirks, they are all changed trough experiencing story of your main character and in the end, I actually cared what they've had to say about a quest or just a random conversation so much that their perspective could heavily influence my decisions.

I suppose my biggest issue with companions are their quests, which are usually fairly short. But don't worry, story and dilemmas of your companions don't end with finishing their quests.

Music and Sound
Music is beautiful. You don't have to trust me on that one, go and listen to it, seriously. It's amazing orchestral soundtrack which actually has its own character. Sound effects are fine, not much to home about. Wizards are yelling as they're wizarding, weapons clank and thud and rumble, everything sort of sounds the way you would expect it to. And the Voice Acting varies from serviceable to great, with most companion NPCs and major plot characters actually falling into the great category.

Graphix
The game is beautiful. Animations and 3D models are all great, all going right down to little details like having custom animations for being dazed, knocked down etc. It all looks fluid, nice and clear in intention. But that's not the most important part – the most important part are the static 2D backdrops which portray terrain and locations, and those are absolutely stunning. They get a bit low-res once you zoom in too much, but that's a minor issue.

TLDR
Pillars of Eternity is great. If you like oldschool cRPGs, get it, you will most likely enjoy the game. It's also so complex that TLDR is difficult to do properly, so I suggest you go, take a look at sections of the review you care about and ignore the rest. I tried to divide it up as much as possible for your convenience.

To be fair, it's supposed to be a spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate, which takes place in the Forgotten Realms setting, which was heavily inspired by Tolkien's writings (just like the beginnings of D&D in general). That's basically what the fans wanted and expected. Isn't that just a rip-off of Warhammer and the Arthurian legend?

Zelda at least does enough to make itself unique and identifiable from the crowd.

And I say there is a strong difference between Warcraft and Warhammer Fantasy.

And yet it manages to twist the setting in some very interesting ways which felt fresh to me (I'm sure all of them are long explored in fantasy literature, but I'm not a fan of fantasy literature so I'm not reading all that much of it. Except for Tolkien.) I really like that about it, it brings traditional and mixes it with something fresh. On the first glance? Sure. Just as you could replace "Warcraft" with "Lord of the Rings" and never know the difference, on the first glance.

True, but I think that something like Forgotten Realms is as distinct from Lord of the Rings as Warcraft is from its inspirations.

Admittedly, I don't really care all that much about Tolkien-inspired fantasy all that much, either, and I have absolutely no real interest in Pillars of Eternity.

It's what I have to put up with my brother. Because I love Fantasy setting. What I said.

I agree. To me that's a pretty good approach to these stories and settings in general.

I also found this part of your review rather encouraging: While I think the traditional good vs. evil can always be very entertaining if done well, constant and relentless black & white morality has a tendency to piss me off in series like Harry Potter and such.

I glanced over the review, but i'm going to be a little.... honest and blunt about this.

The review on the general thread is probably inappropriate. I'd personally have submitted it under the game specific thread (as i have done for a few other games), unless there's something to discuss about the game that isn't tied solely to the game, or you wanted an opinion if you should buy the game and getting general consensus.

But that's just an opinion... I realize Fenixp has been around far longer than me.

I have actually put a dcent amount of thought into this, and I believe general discussion is more appropriate. I'm writing these so people who might not be 100% interested in a game notice them and maybe, just maybe, click them, and because I want to discuss a game.

Now the first point is important, because people who are already reading the game's subforum most likely already have the game since game cards do not link subforums directly. And the second point is important quite simply because I get to talk about a game with more people - even Pillars of Eternity subforum is dying, and PoE is a fairly popular release. Imagine more obscure titles. And thirdly, I'm quite simply posting these because some people asked me to - they serve me, personally, to practice writing so I might as well post them, but it's not essential to me, they can also sit on my HDD. As soon as I find other members of the boards are annoyed with these threads, I will stop posting them, all you have to do is ask.

I would, however, encourage you to post your reviews on general discussions, as I have never noticed a single one of your reviews. See?

I've read some mixed reviews about the combat and the companions, so I'm glad to read such a positive one.
I'm pretty sure I'll play the game, but I'm putting it on hold because I feel is one of those games that will take up all my free time.
Thanks for the review Fenixp!

Excellent review! I am to the point of just clearing my new Keep, and loving it so far :)

The combat is just different from Infinity Engine games, and when a game so strongly rooted in these games makes such changes, a good deal of people are bound to dislike it. I have, for the most part, just found that I need to think about it differently than I think about IE combat and it worked great.

As for companions, I think the first issue here is that companions in BG games and even Planescape were caricatures. They were all an extreme example of what they were supposed to represent, and they were well written extremes to be sure, but that's the territory they remained in. And sure, that makes for some very memorable characters, but not necessarily believable ones.

The second issue is that most Bioware RPGs tend to keep exploration of these characters inside the confines of their character quests - that's where they get their biggest reveals and where the largest chunks of their character development is contained. While it applies to some companions in Pillars of Eternity, most character development for them comes from adventuring with you and reacting to various events in the story. Companion quests are just there to give them motivation, and they tend to be relatively short.

Just going to say that in general I really enjoy your GD reviews and this is no different. A couple of pointers.

So you and others say that this game boasts explorations as a key aspect of the game but at the same time combat seems rather forced or to a degree a large part of the game. I thought that would clash against the idea to leave out XP for every enemy encounter (excluding lore findings). If you want to roleplay a party who's main focus is exploration but also want to avoid combat, is this possible?

You say you like the smooth and cohesion of the main story yet you didn't like the linearity of it, perhaps that's a trade off? I don't know but it seems extremely uncommon for games, let alone a decent RPG to contain a main story like in PoE (your words) but with the freedom of an open world game like Skyrim.

The moral ambiguousness, reputation system, the lore, exploration, companions, music, art design all sound like great aspects, greatly looking forward to start playing but I'm going to wait as I want to complete Dragon Age 2 first (just started Act 3) and give Witcher 3 a try.