this classic will kick your ass
When this game was new I loved the shit out of it for some reason. Ten years and three hundred hours of playtime later I don't get it anymore. The game has become pretty boring to me and I struggle to get through my third playthrough because the story doesn't intrest me anymore. It lacks soul ironically. There is so much grit and melancholy and very little fun compared to the baldurs gate franchise. The game mechanics to be fair are quite well made and there is a lot of freedom for building a unique character. Aside from that I don't enjoy the game anymore it isn't appealing anymore to me.
Pillars of Eternity introduced me to old school Rpgs. After having played Skyrim and the like, this game intrigued and overwhelmed me with its complexity and drew my attention to older games like BG and Planescape Torment. Ideally this kind of game can absorb you and make you escape reality for a few dozen hours, and so this game did and continues to do. It is also highly replayable with me hitting some 300 hours of playtime soon.
The game has its fun moments, but I think it is a terrible game in a lot of ways. The biggest problem is that it is repetitive gameplaywise and visually boring. Then there are some smaller annoyances like getting stuck on terrain in crucial moments and the story being told in very dry dialouge (The story is also not good imo, though I didn't play to the end) At some point there was a difficult combat encounter that let me to quiting the game and not picking it up again.
The game shines the most in the disciplines of story and presentation. The graphics were ahead of its time. Gameplaywise though it can be lacking, especially in terms of character-progression and -building. There is only one character you can play and only one playstyle (sword and basic magic), so I would't really call this an Rpg, it is more of a narrative driven open world game. Despite having read all the witcher novels I never really got hooked to it for some reason. Anyway it is of high quality and has a lot to offer contentwise.
