Pillars of Eternity: Hero Edition

Okay, first off: I've been playing RPGs for a darn long time. I've started with Baldur's Gate, Fallout, Planescape Torment. I am probably most influenced by Baldur's Gate II, because that has easily become one of my favourite RPGs ever. Much like HoMM 3 is for almost all people on gog one of the bestest Turn-based Strategy games. With that in mind, though, I can not give this game 4 or even 5 stars. The story itself, for the main character, is really, REALLY, really good and very deep. It made me think a lot, because it, if you let it, really makes you think about "What happens when we die?". And it shows a lot of different possibilities to not leave you utterly depressed. The story is well told, it is very, incredibly, philosophical, but it can also end up being rather dry (which is why a lot of people thought Planescape Torment wasn't that good, the main story behind the game was deep, but the rest was a bit shallow), and it can feel a bit dragged-out. However, what the story of the main character is missing in emotion and drama, the quests for your followers have in abandon, they all have very strong reasons to do what they do, on the contrary to your own character. One is seeking his lost brother, one is trying to find a cure for what is a very weird form of split personality, one was used by his god and is now seeking for answers why his god still abandoned him after he did all he was told to. Your followers stories are great, but they are literally ALL done after three quest-steps. And they only occur after a certain amount of rests. They don't seem to react to traveling with you much. they comment to what happens in the main quest, but aside from that ... they seem to only ever advance in their quest when you rest x times. Wasted potential. As is all of their side quests basically having 3 steps. I could tell you a TON more of what is wrong, but I can't write much more. It's a good story, yes. If a bit slow at times. But game-wise? Average.

To start things off, I'd like to make it clear that I love rpgs, they've been my favorite genre ever since I was first introduced to Dungeons and Dragons as a young lad. And among them, Baldur's Gate has always been the shining jewel. Not the best story sure, that's Planescape, and not the most complex, that's Neverwinter Nights, but a mix up of so many different elements to make a masterpiece. Charm, clever writing, great characters, and being able to play how you want. This game is NOTHING like that. Things start well. Character customization is deeper than these times may have gotten one used too, and it's familiar for old rpg fans. Until you get to the attribute system and face the game's first "fix". The core system of the game is inherently immersion breaking, all in the name of "balance". Your wizards become the strongest in the party, your tanks the smartest, and when it comes to skill checks it's ridiculous. From there it gets worse. Combat is in one word, awful. The engagement system is broken, AI is laughably stupid, and biggest of all combat does NOT provide experience. Restricting ways to play is NOT acceptable, especially not for a game claiming to be a return to the old days. More to add, wizard play has been heavily nerfed compared to the old IE games, due to all spell casting being restricted to actual combat. Want to prepare yourself, cast that buff before hand? NOPE, can't do it. The story, while uneven, is okay, but lacks any kind of charm or really clever. It also suffers from trying to hard to be deep, instead of just letting it play out naturally. And characters while well-written, are rather bland, and mostly unmemorable. In conclusion, I wanted more than anything for this game to be the next Baldur's Gate. As it is, it's lacking in areas that were perfectly solved over 20 years ago. If you really want a modern rpg experience, I heavily suggest Divinity Original Sin, Shadowrun Dragonfall, or the recently released Tyranny(which solves issues here, and is amazing).

I am a long time CRPG player making my way through Icewind Dale, Balder's Gate, Dungeon Siege, Aarklash Legacy and a variety of others over the past 30 years or so. After supporting this game during the kickstarter and then buying it here on GoG I must admit I'm not very happy. There are a variety of gameplay problems that get in the way of my enjoyment: 1) The leveling/skill system is not very satisfying. There are too many similar skills, the system is too convoluted and the way it actually impacts combat is too opaque to the player. They really lost big time in trying to replace the D&D ruleset. 2) The enemy tactics are too primitive. Enemies can be easily pulled out of rooms by simply sending in a pet and making them chase you back to the party. I consistently could fight one opponent at a time by simply parking my party at the end of the monster's chase distance and pulling one away from the others. Monsters also don't seem to work together very well. They don't seem to understand how to cover each other, how to protect more vulnerable party members, how to time their skills for maximum effect, how to use cover, or even how to use spell/weapon range effectively. That paired with just disastrous pathfinding and movement makes most encounters look more like a three stooges episode than controlled combat. I actually defeated the king's entire castle with a group of level 1 self-generated characters on normal. It was kind of fun killing monsters that could defeat my party is mere seconds if I fought them as the developers intended by pulling them around corners, or trapping them behind walls, or simply hit and running them to death. The AI is just too sad and broken in this game. 3) The story is just too wordy and annoying to dig out. It's nice they tried to add careful writing to the game but it just wears on you to have to read page after page of prose. Too much prose that has absolutely nothing to do with the story. No, I don't want to read dozens of random people's dreams. No, I don't want to read literally hundreds of tombstones. I'm sorry guys I don't want to have to click on literally dozens of wooden single line speaking creatures to find the one that has something useful to say. It's almost like a pixel hunt and that isn't very good storytelling. The combination of annoying story mode, half-baked leveling system, and terrible opponent tactics make this game a big disappointment.

I understand why a lot of people love this game. Graphics are good, music is fine, it has a lot of fan involvement, but... what about gaming experience ? Combat and magic system ? Too meaningless dense it makes it unfunny. I like to think twice when i game, but this micromanagement is just tedious. When you design something new, a good goal is to be better, not just different... But the real sin of this game it is lacks soul. What made great Infinity games was the high amount of fresh and meaning content. This game shares a lot of very very talented writing with tons of meaningless text. It makes dificult to find the Isle of Good History in the Sea of ICantCareAnyMore. If Baldur`s Gate where the "Lord of the Rings" this game would be the "Silmarillion". It is 0K to design one weapon and give it a name, an history, there is much to be done with such a thing on the hands of a good writer, but measure plz... when everything has a name, and every weapon has an history there is something going wrong: "unique" turns to "common" , "Legendary" comes free with the next purchase of a cookie and interest crumbles to dust. Hopes high, Obsidian can do better. Sadly, much better.

I really wanted to like it. I got myself in the right mood for a long and exciting RPG experienced, told everyone to leave me a lone for a couple of days, got a supply of frozen pizza, soda, and other junk food. Then started the game. My initial impression was a bit mixed since there was too much lore damped on the player at the beginning, but I plowed forward. I started performing quest, got to recruit characters, levelling up and it felt good for a short while. But after 15 hours of playing, I lost the drive to continue. The game felt tedious, boring, unexcited. Why is that? There are many issues. First, too much unimportant text. It is as if Obsidian thought that since people loved Torment they must love to read. The problem is that a lot of text is low quality with little depth. So I quickly learned to skip these recurrent walls of text. Next, issue is the fighting system. Once the fight starts it is extremely hard to see what is going on. There are so many spells which all look similar, too many different abilities that are hard to visually differentiate, that makes it very difficult to figure out what is going on without spending a lot of time. Compare it to BG1&2 or NN1&2, where one could easily learn mechanics by playing the game. Relatedly, the game is overly balanced. All abilities are unexciting, different classes feel almost the same. This makes leveling really boring. Next issue are items. Gone are powerful, somewhat unbalanced items. Now, you need to spend 5 minutes to decide whether the item you just received (which supposedly is "legendary") is better than your average sword which you upgraded to fine quality. And there are tones of items which all differ only marginally from each other... And then we have loading times. Once you get further in the game, you start planning how to do quests just to avoid staring into loading screens. I swear at some point 20% of my gaming time was wasted on that.