Pillars of Eternity: Hero Edition

It's a great RPG with fantastic writing, acting, design. But I wish they would tone done all the hopelessness

The title says the most of it. The game was incredibly well-written, fun, and a great homage to the oldschool cRPGs of my past. However, it was far too short and had a very abrupt approach to the end of the game, with a rather unsatisfying ending. Three stars is as far as I can go for a good foundation with a poor ending and short runthrough.

The review is based on my experience after the 'White March' update. The visuals are nice, the music, sound and voice acting is nice. The content is vast especially with the expansions. New classes are nice. The options and tweaks are there that help to set everything the way you want. I mean, details such as 'colorblind mode' or end credits scroll speed counter really shows that the devs care. Gameplay mechanics are nice, the ones worth mentioning: new health and rest systems, inventory system, no cheesy pre-battle buffs. This is a very solid game, and considering the niche sub-genre it's pretty much a mustplay for lovers of classic cRPGs. It's good enough for an adult man to want to find time to put 70 hours into a playthrough.

The game is not just a disappointment, but a progressive one. Once it starts it builds up the expectations with character building, new system, new world, a purportedly engaging story, and guess what? It all fails. I am left with the sensation that the designers forgot or gave up building the game after half of the second act (+- after Defiance Bay). The combat system is a disaster: if we presume the average age of a PoE player is 27 years old, how would they think we would have the time to understand the combat system? In BG1 and 2 and PST when most of the players were 12-15 years old it was easier to understand. But guess what? Most players had been playing AD&D for years and were used to d20 dice rolls and AC, Thac0, etc. They knew by experience what were the chances of performing a certain Most knew what monsters (are there gonna be gnolls, hobgoblins, orcs, kobolds this time? "hey, someone told me there is a demogorgon in the expansion of BG2") and items (holy avenger, vorpal blade) to expect in the games and played with the monster manual beside them. All this expectation is lost with this new world of Eora (a name which took me long to find, since its nowhere in the game Compare that to BG1 "collection of writings on the face of Faerun" Surprise! even players who had not heard of Forgotten Reals knew what to look for ).At a certain point I lost the will to change the equipment in my characters because I did not want to go through comparing them all. Combat encounters seem like a formality necessary to advance in the story (even dragon encounters are relatively easy), except for the last battle which is almost impossible in comparison. The story is the worst of all. There is no threadline engaging the playerand the main villain makes two short appearances before the final battle. And when did my character become an inquisitor by the way? In PST if I skimmed over a huge amount of text it still made sense, This time I lost track halfway through.

I fell for the hype and the first few reviews. This game is by far one of the worse games I've played. Spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate? Not even close. I have played Baldur's Gate I & II, Icewind Dale, PT:Torment, Dragon Age: Origin, TES, and many many others and this is the only game I've wanted to stop playing after just a few hours. If you like incredibly boring combat, storyline, character development, etc, play this game to your heart's content.