Pillars of Eternity: Hero Edition

Pillars of Eternity is visually pleasing and technically sound. Game mechanics aren't great but get the job done. Where it all falls apart is story telling. The quests are boring, the characters are boring, the world is detailed but boring. Choices don't feel meaningful and tension dwindles rapidly after the prologue. There are only handful of games I did not finish after starting them. I'm afraid, this is one of them.

With PoE2 alongside Microsoft's acquisition of Obsidian killing any future for a third entry in the series, I thought I'd review where it started. I've heard the second game is better in every regard I'm gonna' speak of, but PoE1's soured my opinion on Obsidian and now I won't see it for myself. This game's blatant nostalgia-bait. Unlike the 2 OGs (Baldur's Gate 1 & 2) and other near-perfect classics like Planescape: Torment, it's missing soul. Ironic, given the themes. The writing is excessively flowery to the point you're dreading the next paragraph, while the most writing-intensive of the aforementioned titles - Planescape: Torment - says more with less in a single beautiful sentence instead. The world is interesting, made bland and shoved down your throat by the annoying prose. You bet every detail you'd pick up yourself has 200 words, 175 of them extraneous. It hand-holds you in a way Disco Elysium doesn't. The hand-holding doesn't extend to the gameplay - you'd better be ready to read a novel every time you want a simple explanation of game mechanics. Because it's nostalgia-bait, it has the Baldur's Gate 1 style of difficulty so you'd best crack open the thesaurus. The devs keep patching out creative solutions to problems. Find a spell interaction that might make two, worse spells great together? Too bad, fat chance patch 1.x.x arbitrarily nerfed 'em because they want players to be miserable. The party AI is abysmal. The extensive (and even custom scripting for) AI in Baldur's Gate? Can't have that, the AI has one of three modes and you'll deal with it. If you hate micromanaging your party, that's too bad. There's no way to grind levels, you'll progress how the devs tell you to and you'll like it. Due to the way the game implements over-leveled enemies as barriers to fully exploring zones, you'll be back-tracking a lot. It's somehow still very linear. I don't have many good things to say about this game. Wait until a 90% discount to buy it.

Back to school.. old school.. and everything that is aweseomness about it. You want deep rich story line? Lore? excellent characters and environments? this will be the best thing you have seen on the front in a long long time. great game through and through this game requires you to think for yourself

This was more about the excitement of revisiting the Infinity Engine of old than about making a modern, memorable experience. PoE does a grand job of recreating the engine, feel and look of the classics, but it falls flat on its face for story and pacing. The sense of urgency is not there. The tiny level cap at 12 (expandable only to 14 with the White March) means that you'll likely be at max level when you're only 3/5 of the way through the game's main quests. This results in the game changing from an RPG to merely an adventure game with tactical real time combat. I played it when new, only to be crippled by Savegame deleting bugs. I came back to in in 2019 and played it fully. I still had bugs, albeit new bugs. Disappearing NPCs, Stuttering floating text etc. It's good, but it's not amazing. I have no desire to buy the expansions nor the sequel based on my experiences here. The 'story' had no sense of urgency, and no emotional connection to the main character. You're dropped in as the chosen one, yet again, but nothing you do nor say has any impact on the events of the world in any real way, just end game flavour text.

I was pretty hyped about this game when it came out, in fact I was so hyped that I bought it for full price what I usually don't do. To me this game was just one huge dissappointment and let me tell you why: Like probably many of you I played BG: 1 & 2, Fallout 1 & 2 and PS:T and I loved those games. They were release before I started playing video games but somehow there is some mysterious magic about those games that I loved. Unfortunatly, PoE has nothing of it: Let's start with the combat: while the combat is fine, the interface is horrible and much worse than in BG but you kind of get used to it. The biggest problem is that you either get completely smashed in fights or the fights are incredebly easy. I don't know exactly what is wrong with the leveling system but somehow the stats don't work like they should. The dialogues written reasonably good and the graphics are beautiful, however there is one unforgiving flaw in this game: The game world and the story are incredebly generic and bland. There is so much lore in this game that half of the dialogue is just explaining about the world. But the lore just isn't interesting: it just looks like a copy of a copy of Lord of the Rings to me. That is a problem also BG had but in PoE it just ruins the game. It's not build like an actual world people would live in and it looks like they made some sacrifices to being politically correct than to create an actual living world. A very good example for a credible game world for me is the Witcher 3 where the fantasy is directly based on eastern and middle european folklore or the very intelligently designed and interesting world of PS:T or Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. So if you haven't played any these games: BG1,2 , PS:T , Fallout 1,2 just don't bother spending 40 € on this game. If you played all of the classics and want more the game might still be something for you but certainly not for me.