Pillars of Eternity: Hero Edition

True spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate I+II. Great story you feel you need to finish, nice graphics and best writing and atmosphere you can hope for.

This is a very very good top down RPG with pause and command functionality. Great soundtrack and cool new stuff like high alpha muskets that you can equip in your secondary slot, fire and return to sword and shield. If it had a down side I would say that it would be pretty easy to breeze through the game relying on dire charm alone, if you wanted to.

I'm a huge fan of Icewind Dale, Baldur's gate, Fallout 2, Planescape, et al. Something about PoE just isn't as satisfying (I have not played any expansion). I don't think it is due to nostalgia goggles, as I'm a huge fan of some titles like Wasteland 2. Parts of the story were exceptional and rare - unraveling staggeringly cool concepts, but I felt shoehorned and apathetic towards the end. Not due to exhaustion, but vagueness. The writing style vividly gives unique personalities to even minor characters. Characters I wish I could've seen more of. Yet, I don't think I will remember it like Wasteland 2. Some of the companions were too simple, too dumb. I felt like slapping them, but there never felt like dialogue options enough to say "Aloth. FFS. Man up" in the appropriate tongue. Only extremely dickish things or nice guy things. Companion personal quests is a good idea, naturally. I just wish they were more than wistful psychological kak. Listening to them became a chore after a while. I've quite a tolerance for long dialogue trees, I enjoy them. Yet, occasionally I found myself spamming spacebar to avoid listening to someone moan about the same old trivialities, that made me question whether I was really enjoying the game anymore. Combat-mechanics wise, overall, it was not a weighing factor. Getting rid of D'n'D rest-spamming was smart. I dislike how the level/spell cap was shown in the version without expansion packs, though. The immersion-breaking gold-bar backer content was an issue at first, even while deliberately avoiding reading it (and those I did read felt uglily shoehorned and out of place, sometimes with thinly-veiled redundantly self-righteous political rhetoric), but eventually I could consciously ignore it. Still, there ideally should be a mod to toggle it. If you have never played Icewind Dale 2, I would recommend getting that rather than this.

This game tried to pretty much recreate the Baldut's Gate / D&D / Infinity Engine experience almost 20 years later and suffers for it. Instead of trying to improve on the formula like what other games have done in the last 2 decades, it not only tried to stay as close as possible to that classic but it also missed the mark too. Some things that were acceptable back in the day just aren't anymore, even for "retro" cRPG titles: clunky combat system, inconsistent balance, lackluster exploration mediocre dialogue and writing. Back in the day that was acceptable because cRPGs were still trying to carve their way into a mainstream audience (instead of the niche market of SSI Gold Box fans). This game though has had 20 years of gaming (video games and tabletop!) evolution to rely upon and still came out with a system as clunky as AD&D (from back in the 70s) and an overall experience that falls short even of the classic titles from the 90s like Baldur's Gate, Fallout, Planescape: Torment... not to mention other games that improved on the formula in the 2000s like Temple of Elemental Evil and Pool of Radiance! I'm not only judging this game by it failing to innovate and improve on the formula - but actually saying that it fails to be as good even as those 20 or 30 year old games! It boils down to the fact that the core gameplay is quite weak while the UI, setting, plot, exploration, combat and balance are mediocre at best. I'd rather play Fallout 1 any day of the week than this unfortunate release that tried to stay too close to its roots and probably doomed itself from the start while at it. Had it tried to expand and innovate upon the things that those classic games did right, it could have been awesome but instead it just recreated the same beaten concepts into a new skin - with a couple nice new things to go along but a disappointingly weak core experience.

This game was very ambitious, but it failed to deliver. First of all it suffers from an affliction all too common in RPGs: exposition dumping. Maybe it's bad storytelling, maybe it's a story overdependent on themes that require explanation. Either way you're constantly being treated to walls of text. And there's the other problem: the narration and dialogues in the game are just uninteresting. The game lacks a meaningful plot, but you can't really feel attached to any of the events. Gameplay is innovative... in intent. There's a large variety of gear, spells, mechanics. It's overwhelming, and not really important for gameplay. The game uses a complex leveling system, with many possible builds, that suffers from the usual Ye Olde Schule vom RPG. Spells are memorized during rest and usable a limited number of times between rests. This hinders spellcasting builds because of their rapidly draining number of spells. To "balance" this out, fighter builds suffer from intentionally hindered skill progression. You'd like to enhance your weapon proficiency? Good, now choose between one of the several focuses, that are TECHNICALLY universal, but practically hindered by the fact, that the weapon proficiencies they improve are not synergistic with one given type of weapon (there are skill bonuses for one handed+shield, two handed, and double wielding). The worst part about this game which has no redeeming quality is level design. Levels are nice, and huge, and empty, and prepare for a lot of backpedaling and many many many loading screens.