Thanks for the link. I was missing the Kickstarter item and pet. An account refresh solved the problem, and the game shows 4 DLC now as it should.

Many many thanks OneFiercePuppy for the very generous gift! You made one Goglodyte really happy! +1

I am glad it is here, because it is far better than e.g. DA:I - but I hope it will do well enough to liberate Obsidian for something better.

This game comes across to me as a scared choir boy worshipping Infinity Engine fearing for his mortal soul.

Infinity Engine for sure is not even Jesus - and even so, Jesus is quite merciful, it has been understood, so...

I just miss the humour, originality, greatly written characters, just that ...charming impishness of Obsidian.

On hard criticism, party AI and particularly party member interfaces could have been much better if really properly stolen from BGII, not just insipidly worshipped!!


Edit: grammar.

Someone has to have the guts to say it (why always me?):

Pillars of Eternity is a great game, but it's such a "successor to Baldur's Gate," as The Matrix Reloaded was the successor of The Matrix . I do not want to cling to bugs, because at the beginning of BG probably had more of them, but:

1. The world is very average created, gloomy, unreliable, plot is mostly presented in books (not the very best way
2. The game is written in a bad style, it just bad reads
3. The story is carried out in a haphazard manner, especially by those changes perspectives and visions "in the first person." Sometimes completely get lost in these apparitions of the protagonist.
4. Fatal town, on the background of Baldur's Gate, one of BG2 or even Sigil (compared to Torment, because in my opinion this game is a lot closer to Torment than BG) appears to be a boring ghost town, where most of the npcsthat were not into the interaction
5. Horrible buildings in the city. While in the BG you could visit with 200 cabins, here it's about 20, each of which is as big as a dungeon
6. Even so, there is no need to visit because of the stolen loot which is a garbage
7. Difficulty does not increase the strength of your opponents, but only their number. At the same time, however, their struggle is not (almost) at all exp. I do not see the motivation to fight at a high level.

I've been in this city probably 3-4 day and every day after I turn off because bores me ransacking cabinets where there is nothing and perform tasks for the faction that is ... like a boorish, a German RPG Gothic type.

For me - after all - a disappointment. The game is very good and the good that was, but it definitely overhyped by reviewers. At the moment I give 8/10 and this is mainly due to sentiment to Infinity style.

... And dozens of negative reviews on Steam, not to mention those on GOG? :D Yah, you're a hero.

Let me start off by saying that I didn't like Baldur's Gate. I loved Planescape Torment and I loved Icewind Dale. Let me also add that Obsidian did not promise a new Baldur's Gate, they have promised a spiritual successor to BG, IWD and Planescape. That's 5 games when I include the sequels. Now I strongly disagree with your assessment that the game is closest to Planescape - if anything, that's an area Obsidian has failed to deliver in. Planescape was more than just walls of text.

If you call world of Pillars 'average', you need to read more ;-) Or playing more fantasy videogames will suffice. There are no big holes that I have found in the plot, everything makes sense and it supplements the game's exploration aspect very nicely. And, above all -
- it's well written. No, seriously, what's in the game is well written, definitely better than 99% of other games I've ever played, and as far as I'm concerned the writing beats Baldur's Gate, hands down. Definitely the original, dunno about Baldur's Gate 2 - I found that game so dull that I could never get past first few hours into it. And they don't use the silly good vs evil thing from DnD anymore, that was dreadful.
Thank goodness, I always prefer quality over quantity.

Yes, you cannot steal random shit from strangers while they see you. ... That's a good thing. I'm sorry, grabbing everthing as Baldur's Gate presented it made no sense. Now people actually own things and get upset when you steal them.

Yeah, it's great. They have single-handedly resolved all issues with cheating enemies on higher difficulties by changing their numbers and composition to be more challenging, and they have resolved griding by reducing exp you gain from monsters, thus making stealth viable. One of my favourite changes about Pillars.

Seriously, from the sound of it, you didn't want a spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate - you wanted Baldur's Gate. From the getgo, Obsidian has made it clear that that's not what this game is going to be.

That may be a localization thing; in English, at least, it's quite well-written and reads well. Sawyer and Avellone are quite competent writers; this isn't their first rodeo.

Sure it does. You have to go to Path of Iron difficulty, but it does increase the strength of your opponents. And even though you don't get exp (directly) for combat in PoE, you *do* get loot. As spoiler-free as possible - if you take the violent approach to the quest chain you get in the first town, you should see, as I did, that you get about 10,000cp in money and stuff. That you can then invest just a little later on, when you open up the personal stronghold.

The rest is just personal preference so it's not like I can convince you of anything XD

I finally got to fire it up for about 2 hours on Wed. Oh, how fun! A combat system easy enough to dive into but with enough complexity for me to have to do some studying up on to learn. Nice music! Digging the beginning. Intrigued by the world descriptions.

Perhaps will play another hour or two tonight.

Cheers!

Since everyone's doing it, I'll give my two cents as well:

I tried playing Baldur's Gate once. It didn't click with me. Didn't help that I went for a bard with only two "once per rest abilities", so after two battles it was just a matter of luck on the dice. You probably want to school me right now on what I should have done to play the game right, but here's the thing, that's another problem with Baldur's Gate, it doesn't explain a goddamn thing. It's made for D&D players, and if you're like me and never played D&D in your life, then you'll be completely lost. Even a simple thing like how lower Armor Class is better I found out by accident online.

I was afraid about Pillars of Eternity, but gladly it is much more intuitive, I imagined I was out of my depth by choosing normal difficulty, but after a few rough patches I feel now like I understand the combat enough to face anything. I actually feel more prepared to go back and give Baldur's Gate and its cousins a try.

So, Combat: Good for beginners, I imagine good for veterans as well, if you had a bad time with the genre before don't let it steer you away from this.

Story: Good, I guess. It's no Planescape: Torment, that's for sure. I just got to Defiance Bay, I hear it gets better from here.

To be fair, Defiance Bay comes pretty close to Amn in BG2. A central hub with tonnes of quests to do and dungeons. Amn and BG2 did not have 200 cabins to enter. It had a number, but they're not just empty places with nothing in them. They're either tied to an NPC or sidequest. Remember the murder investigation quest in BG2 that got you exploring a few places that eventually leads to a bigger plot? Or that kidnapping-cult quest in the sewers that BG2 had which lead you into a mega dungeon. I didn't even mention the power struggle you have to go through and the choices you have to make in the Underdark city, another big hub.
BG2 doesn't have that crappy fetch and kill mmo sidequests like so many modern rpgs have. Whatever it has, it's definitely quality with a backplot attached to it. BG2 is a bad example for quality over quantity comparisons, that should be directed at DA:I, a game so filled with mmo-sidequests.
Defiance Bay has that Amn like charm to it. And they're dungeons in it just like Amn, Catacombs for example, or the smaller quest hub Sanitarium. I've played the beta, and in Dryford a small village, you get another dungeon etc.

Reply if you were playing a non-English version: yes, there's been a lot of criticism of the localisations.

Reply if you played the English version: When speak like Yoda you do, surprising your opinion is not. :-P

Well, it looks like my Eder has been coasting around with an additional 10+ deflection rating and near +20 Fortitude due to the bug before the patch hit. Not gonna restart but definitely replaying with proper stats this time. Only had the bug after the harder fights, so everything should be manageable.

Hahaha ;)
I'm so sorry. My English is not good enough I guess, but in that case actually I was too lazy to post about PoE again, so I googletranslated my last message from polish gaming board ;-)

I played the polish version and it is written like quite uninteresting novel. I don't even mean "amateur", it is rather "hard" in reading like, I don't know, Joyce's "Ulysses"? In comparison Baldur's Gate or Torment were translated professionaly and were enjoyable like adventures of mighty Harry Potter :-)

I need to check the english version if you said so, I hope it really is better + I can polish my english then :)
Actually, you may be right in that point. I was really counting on Baldur's Gate or - at least - at something close to Baldur's Gate, with its mechanic and stuff. And then I've got something quite new.

So if you suggest that I'm disappointed a little bit - yes, you may be right. But I'm not only disappointed because of the changes themselves, but also because of their quality.

But there is no quality in buildings in PoE. They are boring. It wasn't a compliment when I said that they are like a dungeons. I meant that almost every single building in Baldur's Gate has its secret hidden inside. And in PoE there is none (ok, sometimes, but they are not as enjoyable as in BG).

Also you completly changed the meaning of my opinion about exploration of buildings and stealing. In Baldur's Gate you also couldn't steal everything! But there was a reason to risk or try, since in PoE there are books and lame swords at the bookstands mainly.

Pretty much everything I have encountered in the game felt, at least to me, as a change for the better. Take the experience mechanics that you have criticized - in Pillars of Eternity, you only get XP for killing like 7 or so of each monster that you encouter, and even that's not too much XP. You'll get the most experience for exploration and completing quests - and I really like that approach, because I'm already thinking of soloing the game as a thief. I could never do that in old Infinity Engine games, because vast majority of experience came from slaughtered opponents - not so in Pillars. I have a paragraph like this for just about every change present in the game.

There's loads of quality in them - pretty much every building contains NPCs which either deepen the lore of the world or give you quests. I suppose the difference between us is that I really enjoy the game's lore and I really love many of its quests which often actually make me think on how do I wish to handle them - I believe the game has done well to rid itself of Good and Evil aligments. I guess you owe it to yourself to try the game in English, as the Polish translation obviously doesn't do it justice.

I'm so sorry, I suppose I misunderstood you. I always just ignored stuff people had stashed in their homes in RPGs, aside from books, that I have red all that I could find in Pillars. So you might be right, but it's not like I would notice - it's not like I would make a big deal out of it either.

Been away from the site for awhile and just noticed I not only got the collector's edition in the mail, but also received two digital copies.

Does anyone know if all of these are tied to me...or could I gift one of the digital ones to someone and perhaps the collector's edition? I just plan on keeping the Royal Edition, gifting the Hero Edition and the boxed CE. Is this okay to do, or a morally gray area?

Does anyone know when the PoE add-on comes out? I realized the other day that I have such little time to play games that I can only really afford to play it once.