I agree with you on the lore and story side, in my experience it was a wonderful ride.
Then, while the dialogue with the companions are great (although I dislike the chanter), their very limited number is annoying (not even one of each class).
Then again, regarding the class, I appreciate the effort of 'unification' as everybody can fight, use good weapons etc .... there is a blatant lack of depth : for instance the different clerics in Icewind Dale had far more diversity than the generic one in PoEt who has a given set of spells.
Then again, spells are a mix bag of clearly useful to clearly useless (now the last patch fix a lot of things so it may not be the case anymore)

And other thigs.

Bottom line, I really enjoyed the game, but those numerous little lacking aspects doesn't really motivate me to play it again (not to mention re-dling the full installer to get the latest patches)

If you put most of your party's generic skill points into Stealth, you can skip much more than half the combat in the game. I'm not done with it yet, but it feels like about 20-25% of the combat so far has been either mandatory or downright difficult to avoid (counting combats which spawn on opening secret areas and the like, which I assume you'd be doing in an exploration playthrough).

You do still get a little experience for killing things,[url=by the mechanic of getting rewards of experience points as you fill out your monster journal, which you only fill out by fighting and killing things][/url] and of course you get to loot their lifeless husks, so there's still incentive to just murder everything. But you can explore a lot and only fight a bit.

Am I good waiting for the expansion before playing it? I'm kind of doing the same thing for Witcher 3.

Thanks for the reviewing! I do think it makes sense to post this in the general forum, as it allows people who don't own the game to more readily see a review (when otherwise they might not think to check the game-specific forums for reviews) and have that influence their position on the game.

rtcvb32, please, post your reviews in general (future reviews, but also past reviews if you feel like digging them out and re-posting them.) Depending on how many you have, maybe scatter them rather than post them all at once, but regardless, I certainly do appreciate and encourage more gog-user reviews on the forums. It's very useful when people start having more and more reviews because it allows others to have a more comprehensive idea about their perspectives and feedback. "Oh well I shouldn't listen to what fenixp is saying about companions because we aren't looking for the same thing" or "ahh rtcvb32 says that PnC adventure is lame and I've noticed he/she and I have almost the same exact taste for adventure games." The reviews start to mean more, or less (which means more.)

about companions: mostly just looking for more review on them overall

Do you know how many there are available and do they fill the spectrum of classes? Were companion choices more out of necessity of filling a role or did you have enough choices that you were more picking who you wanted with you and their class/role-filling was secondary and that worked, or what? I know you can create your own if you don't like the ones provided, but that is not something that appeals to me at all because of the personalities of companions already created, I want to experience as many of them as possible.

Well... There's always Witcher 2 which was excellent in branching main storyline. Then again, budget for W2 and PoE is quite different as well.

The game is a whole experience - there's nothing hinted at nor anything glaringly missing. However, if that's not what you care about and just want the whole package, yes, Obsidian has confirmed an expansion, so waiting might be a good idea if you're not necessarily in it to support Obsidian.

There's 8 pernament companions in the game, out of which you can take 5 at any given point in time. No, they do not fill the whole spectrum of classes, there's no monk, barbarian and rogue, so if you're unsure while creating a character, feel free to pick one of those three.

As for my choice of companions... Basically, I have only ever switched one because I liked the other one more and two companions remain completely unexplored to me, waiting to be picked in my next playtrough. In other words, choice of my party was my own, I didn't feel like I need to take any of the 3 waiting for me because the game would become unbeatable. I was also playing on normal difficulty tho, things might be different on hard.

I wouldn't say it lacks in depth, even if it's not as deep as Dungeons and Dragons. For instance, I do like how different classes handle significantly differently, often even with different mechanics leading to similar tasks (like how Cipher vs Wizard spells work). I'd say it lacks in options, it doesn't allow quite as many crazy combinations and different builds - but that's to be expect out of a mostly new RPG system, and as you can see, even that is hell to properly balance. It can only get better with time tho.

The complementary right for a single bump is gone now.

I got the boxed collector's edition, just don't really have the time budget to play games more than once nowadays.

I'm still quite early into the game, as I've only just reached Defiance Bay. I completed all of the quests I could find in the first village, explored nearby wilderness locations, got my keep and cleared out the first five levels of Od Nua. So far, the game is good on the technical level. There are a few nuisances (e.g. having to suffer four loading screens just to rest in my own keep). However, something is missing. I'm not getting the epic feeling of Baldur's Gate II. The loot is overabundant and unremarkable. Raedric's Hold was good, but not as good as De'Arnise Keep. I still haven't seen a "wow" moment like getting marooned in a hellish plane of existence until I can find a way to get back, or delving into sewers to find the temple to some forgotten god, or entering an innocuous-looking door and finding myself facing a demilich or a group of powerful sorcerers, or infiltrating a city full of enemies and double-crossing everyone, or pursuing my enemy through hell itself... BG2 was full of such moments. Maybe PoE is closer to BG1; I haven't played the latter.

I've played around ten-fifteen hours of it, before putting it aside the time that all patches and fixes completes it, so I can't do a full review like you. But I do have my impressions of it, and I'm afraid I'm not that ecstatic about it.

In brief :

1 The overall feel and atmosphere is absolutely outstanding. Playing it just for reviving the Infinity Engine experience is obligatory for old school gamers, and younger gamers interested by the genre.

2 Reactivity is pretty much non-existent : you can do an orlan scientific mage, a human slave monk, a cleric or whatever, you will have the same story experience. So replaying it storywise isn't an option. Nor replaying it for the class variation given that you have a full party with you and you can create npcs, so not much point in replaying the game.
=====> Huge downfall for me. An rpg without replayability is... just an adventure as you said, not an rpg. It lacks choices and consequences.

3 Combat is samey-samey after a while, lacks tactical choices and doesn't use the best of the real time with pause experience. I'm playing aarklash legacy right now : there is a character you can use as a tank if you want, but no engagement system. That means that you can do the tank thing (one character in front and all the other throwing their DPS), but you can also do things differently following the situation : you can send your rogue behind ennemy lines, make everybody retreat,...
====> Great mobility in a rtwp system is absolutely fundamental. Without it, it feels restreint and bland. Doesn't help that the encounter design has sucked, for the first act at least, always the same trash mob everywhere.

4 Writting is very mixed : some nice quests and compagnons, others pretty bland, but a major, major problem of exposition : it's damn too long, too heavy and poorly done overall. far too many backer characters with unispired stories, far too many uninteresting book or lore entries, far too few use of the scripting sequences (awesome idea by the way),...

Overall, I think it's a nice first generation Kickstarter game, with a good structure to build on, but in and of itself, it's just a good for what it is game. I will maybe change my opinion of it, once entirely completed later, but I doubt it.

Glad to see you enjoyed, it, FenixP. I tend to agree with MacArthur overall though. I was very neutral toward the game after having completed it, but do see a lot of potential for the expansion and any sequels. So I hold out hope that it will get a lot better.

The engagement system though... ugh. Did not like. Not much of a fan of the Endurance/HP mechanic either, as it just makes it completely pointless to revive your character in battle if they hit 0 Endurance. Otherwise you're just lowering their HP pool that much faster. Better to just leave them down until after the battle is over.

I still haven't finsihed PoE. I got bored with it at the third act, which is a shame really, as till then it was pretty good.

I don't think the game is supposed to feel epic. Pillars is a lot more grounded than many other fantasy RPGs, it doesn't even do the whole "dark and gritty" thing which is so popular, and I think it benefits from that. That's one of the reasons why I'm not a fan of Forgotten Realms, at least as portrayed in BG games - it doesn't feel like an actual world, it feels like a rollecoaster ride with a bunch of attractions thrown around for the player to see. Of course, I have a lot of other issues with the setting, so that might just be me. Pillars of Eternity, on the other hand, portrays a world which to me feels extremely believable, based on a very interesting premise. Even if the setting is based on generic high fantasy, there's not many worlds which have pulled this level of consistency in their world building, not many worlds have pulled me in quite as much.

The items could be a lot better tho, that's true - I only remember one from the etire game.
I strongly disagree. While I was also initially disappointed in how little the game world reacts to your chosen race and background, this feeling got quickly replaced by surprise at how well it reacts to your choices and behaviour during the game itself. Building reputations is a big deal, as is how you treat your companions and how do you deal with many situations the game presents you with. I can only report on this further after I finish it for the second time, but know for a fact that every companion has at least three endings based on how you treated them in the game and whether you completed their quests, and most have even more than that, not to mention endings for the individual locations and factions. There are also 3 classes which are not represented in the in-game companion, so that should ensure some mechanical replayability.

I agree that mobility is important, and it's funny that you mention rogues in particular - they have ability which allows them to turn invisible and ignore engagements to get into favourable position (or get out of a shitty one). As for the rest, well, yes, the game forces you to think very differently from other rtwp RPGs - first you have to think about how to disengage, second where to move. And the game offers such a ridiculous range of options to force disengagments that I never found it to be an issue - it just added more tactical depth to individual situations and you can actually use engagement mechanics in your favour if you're clever about them. And... Well, I like games which force me to think differently.

I do, however, agree that the encounter design was mostly bad, and while no dungeons overstayed their welcome, defeating some mobs just became muscle memory. Add to that the reversed difficulty curve of the game getting progressively easier and swarming you with resources, you won't get a favourable result, especially for the endgame. Nonetheless, the end is just so easy that I didn't have to think about it at all, so ... I basically just skipped all fights, which are at least short. I have enjoyed it most of the time tho, and I'm hoping 1.5 fixes it with balance changes.

Eeeeh... It's a risk-reward situation. Do I res this character, or can I manage for the rest of the encounter without him? Do I risk further health loss, or do I just leave him where he is? The focus here shifts a lot from per encounter basis seen in Infinity Engine into long-term considerations. I'm a huge fan of that.

NIce to hear :)

That's something I'm looking forward too when I will go at it again.
I think it's going to take a good year though for a real rework of the balance, class skills, and encounter design, if you take Wasteland 2 as an example.

I am as well, but I found the reality (in my runs at least) didn't live up to that. Very rarely was there ever a question of whether it would be worth it to res that downed character. And despite Obsidian's attempts at eliminating the 'degenerative gameplay' of the IE games where you rested after every battle, I found the limited camping supplies to be a complete non-issue. So you could rest up whenever you needed anyway (and if you ever found yourself short of camping supplies, it was easy enough to run off to an inn and get more, as well as rest there for bonuses - even if you were in the middle of a dungeon). I don't know, I just found the mechanic didn't seem to accomplish its purpose.

I would like to reiterate that although I was decidedly neutral towards the game (yes, I'm aware of the irony in that statement), I still see huge potential in expansions and sequels. I'm confident that Obsidian will come through, but PoE itself just didn't hit enough of the right notes with me.