mna99: It's surprising that so many people want to bag on PoE1 when Deadfire was obviously the worse of the two games. I'll agree with the following:

-Backer NPCs needed an off switch, though murdering them can be fun.
-Game performance was disappointing at times
-Some of the writing was Community College Creative Writing 101-level fare (looking at YOU, Grieving Mother)
-Even when the writing wasn't perniciously overwrought, they still went out of their way to upset classing RPG/CRPG/fantasy tropes, and it gets to be a bit much at times.
-It was buggy for a long time.

Otherwise it's a pretty solid title, especially for a Kickstarter nostalgia project. Personally I always found the old 2nd Edition AD&D rules set to be awful for CRPGs, so most of the old Infinity Engine games got on my nerves. No amount of kits and other add-on crap could polish the unbalanced turd that 2e was compared to modern systems. It's amazing how well Planescape: Torment turned out despite its own game system.

In any case, seeing PoE use a funky hybrid of . . . I guess 4e AD&D was nowhere near as disappointing. Yes you can have game-breaking character builds so if you want "impactful" character upgrades, they do exist. Your party can snowball out of control pretty quickly. I even managed to run Paths of the Damned with 1 Chanter + 5 Rangers, and they tore stuff apart. It was stupid but kinda fun.

The setting is lore/text heavy, and this is a direct consequence of the developers trying to appeal to the Planescape crowd. They didn't have the budget for more visuals so they had to describe everything happening in text most of the time. Also the game easily could have been broken into two or three episodes on its own with a few more locations to pad it out and stretch out the main storyline, I guess? Anyway that much lore could have lasted them for 2-3 games, is the point. But it all got crammed into one product. Again, it's a Kickstarter, it's not like they had the budget for the content + area design to pad that out.

So by the end of the game, they pretty much hit you with the entire history of Engwith all in one very dense go, and it's possible to slog through it without picking up all the details.

What else were they going to do? Not tell you what's going on? End the first game at Defiance Bay and call it good? The overall story arc was a pretty good idea (see below), they just didn't have the resources to carry it off more-elegantly. So we got what we got.

Now as for whether the plot was good or not - I kinda liked it. Again, these people were obviously influenced by Planescape so instead of making it a game where you're caught up in major events, they made it a game where you're on a very personal quest. No, the plot isn't just that "you're settling down", that's just the exposition to put you in the right time and place to have your life turned upside down in the first 5 minutes of the game.

The plot is that your life gets messed up, and you're looking for the guy who're responsible so he can set it right. That's it. That's the entire plot. And there's nothing wrong with that. The setup is kinda weak compared to Planescape (waking up in a morgue is still one of the best CRPG intros ever) but the execution is good enough. What you discover along the way is of some import if you want it to be, or you can just be like "meh just give me my life back I don't care about this other crap". It's really your call, and that's somewhat refreshing versus your typical CRPG product that makes you a Big Part of Big Things (tm).

Combat was, again, in my opinion, better than your typical BG game because no 2e AD&D. I can't even begin to go into how bad that system was. Contrary to what a lot of people here are saying, once you understand PoE's underlying system, the equipment makes sense, and there's some very very very good gear. It's not all the same stuff, it's just that a lot of the bonuses don't necessarily help your build, so you do get backpack fodder somewhat frequently. Fortunately the enchanting system is robust enough that you can take the weapon/armor you like and set up a good generic enchanter piece of equipment that can outperform most of the game's uniques in the same role.

I get that some people just didn't grok the way PoE1 plays, especially when you get so many people who never really understood Ciphers (or how great they can be). It actually requires some research to figure out the system, and it definitely upsets some old CRPG tropes in ways that aren't always for the best. I'm still not really happy with the whole Str-determines-spell-power thing, but they painted themselves into that corner and stayed there for Deadfire. In the end, you can have very successful spellcasters without focusing on Might so no big whoop.

Despite all the above, you are allowed to dislike the game for what it is. But let's be honest about that rather than making factually inaccurate statements about the game.