Kickstarter gets a bad rap these days. My own recommendation when it comes to choosing what to back is: don’t. Do not back anything. Kickstarted projects have worked hard these past three years to earn this reputation, from people gaming the system, to churning out disappointing finished products, to outright scams. But if there has been a genre that has greatly benefited, and threatens to slowly erode my skepticism with the sheer quality of its products it’s isometric CRPG’s. With last year’s Divinity Original Sin and Wasteland 2 both being excellent, Pillars of Eternity not only needed to compete with the high expectations of Obsidian’s own pedigree, but also these two excellent games it would be inevitably compared to. I am glad to report that Obsidian has proven to be up to the task, and it can be convincingly argued that Pillars is best of the three games.
Pillars of Eternity was originally released back in March, but due to its timing(It was released the same month as The Witcher 3 and a few weeks after Bloodborne) and life in general, I could only get some free time to play it over the holiday break. I mention this because as of this review, the game is in version 2.02. There have been several changes to the game since release, some of them fairly major. Many of the stats work in a completely different way now. Classes have been rebalanced. Magic works differently. Keep this in mind if you have read other reviews of the game that were written closer to release. However, what really makes Pillars of Eternity fantastic should still be consistent across all versions.
Back in the late 90’s came the golden age of isometric CRPG’s, and Black Isle, a studio owned by Interplay, was the king. They were involved with just about every high profile series: Icewindale, Fallout, Baldur’s Gate, Planescape Torment, and the admittedly disappointing Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader (a game that I still managed to enjoy in spite of its issues.) When Interplay finally threw in the towel, some of the members of the celebrated team would go on to found their own studios, like InXile, or go to work for other developers, but a heft of the creative talent, including Chris Avellone, Feargus Urquhart, and Chris Parker went on to found Obsidian. I mention this because of all the games in the genre that have been Kickstarted and released in the past few years, this is the one that feels the most like those old games.
I initially found myself worried as I booted up the game and created my character, seeing what looked like someone’s D&D campaign world with the names of the stats changed so that they are just outside of what could be considered plagiarism. My fears grew as upon leaving the character creation screen I was treated to expository dialogue that was filled with alien lore I couldn’t possibly know about. As I advanced in the game, however, it dawned on me just how unfounded my fears were. What PoE really offers is an original world with deep a deep lore and history the like of which I haven’t seen since the original Mass Effect or Dragon Age Origins. It is uncompromising in its use of this lore and you will be expected to understand it in order to grasp the nuances of your interactions with NPCs, their motivations, and even to make decisions during quests. This is not optional window dressing.
The world of Pillars of Eternity is suffering from a curse that threatens to rob it of its future, and so the people living there are obsessed with the past. They will reference a myriad of past conflicts, wars, and insurrections. There are stories of new religions, religions that were popular then fell out of favor. Stories of migrations, and of racial tensions. In most RPGs, there is usually one even that things tie back to, but Pillars seems to have a dozen past wars that have been referenced by characters that I can think of off the top of my head. One of my favorite parts of the game is talking to a character who was reincarnated during a series of wars, and fought for one side during one life and then for the other side on his next reincarnation. This deep and clearly lovingly crafted mythology makes for a world that, while based on the philosophy of the old Dungeons and Dragons games, feels alive and much, much deeper than my initial impressions lead me to believe.
The plot itself is tied to this fascination with the past. Your character is a traveling to the Drywood because the local lord has promised new settlers land and tools to come live there. During the trip you are attacked, and end up seeking refuge in a forbidden ruin. While there you are exposed to magic made from some forbidden ritual, which was supposed to kill you. Somehow, you survive and now have the power to speak and interact with souls. This allows you to see other’s past lives, as well as interact with those whose souls linger instead of returning to the reincarnation cycle that governs life and death in this world. However, it is not something your character can turn off, and so they will hear the whispers of the dead constantly as well as slowly start to remember their past lives. This threatens to drive them insane. Your character eventually makes it to the town of Gilded Vale, and finds out that migrants are no longer welcome, and that Drywood is in the grips of a curse that causes famine and new born to be born without a soul. However, at this point your character is more interested in finding out what’s happening to them and how to stop it, and so they set out on a road to do just that.
In an age where RPGs are becoming more and more streamlined in the name of attracting a wider audience, Pillars of Eternity is uncompromising in sticking to its difficulty and complexity. There are no quest markers, rather it’s presumed that you will use your journal and clues from conversations to determine what to do and where to go. You are expected to read between the lines in your interactions with diplomats, criminals, and even during the conversations between the members of your own party. The game tracks not only your reputation, but also your character’s temperament based on the decisions you make, and that will affect interactions with NPCs. This will put you in situations where maybe the best thing you can do is something you don’t want to do, and often those experiences might be different, or come at different points for different people as every player weaves their own story.
Pillars of Eternity’s complexity is most evident in the combat system. The old Infinity Engine systems where you had to pause the action to issue orders to your characters. You will have to make use of this mechanic, and not only once in a while, but you will find yourself pausing the game every few seconds. To go into combat with no tactical thought is a guaranteed death sentence. Even when using tactics you will die, but you will slowly realize how to synergize your party, how to position your characters in formation, and what they need to do to not only be able to take on fearsome enemies, but to also keep each other alive. Beating an enemy after dying several times, playing with tactics, spells, and equipment rather than by sheer over leveling is immensely rewarding, though the other side of this coin is that you may lose hours of progress by becoming overconfident, not saving often enough and then just being careless on an encounter that seems easy.
If you thought this was going to be a straight clone of Black Isle’s greatest hits prepare to be surprised. There are some subtle innovations that make huge differences in the way the game plays. PoE does not use Hit Points, instead you have two different stats: endurance and health. Endurance is the character’s ability to take short term injury, while health is more their ability to sustain long term injury. The endurance pool is depleted during combat, and when the character runs out of they will fall unconscious. Endurance is replenished with spells, items, abilities, etc… you can also revive characters that have been knocked out. It is also automatically replenished when combat ends. Health on the other hand, does go down when you take damage as well, but it does not recover at the end of combat, and in fact there is no way to recover it but to rest. Your pool of health is a lot bigger than your endurance (about 4-5 times as much, I’ve noticed), but if your character gets knocked out and their health is low, they might actually die.
Resting is the only way to recover health, but if you think you are going to cheese the game by resting after every encounter as you used to do in the Infinite Engine games of old you are mistaken. In order to rest, you must have camping supplies, of which you can carry a maximum of four at the time. In addition to this, killing enemies does not give you experience. You will get experience by fighting and filling out a compendium, but that will only provide experience for a few encounters. You will also gain experience from exploring, and completing quests. Brute forcing your way through an encounter by grinding levels was not really a thing in the CRPGs of old, but these new changes places an even greater emphasis on tactics for the encounters not only for that encounter, but for the whole dungeon.
As of this writing, pretty much all of the bugs have been ironed out, except for one I found. This bug causes the “Ok” and “Cancel” buttons on some dialogue boxes to not render. They still work if you click on the space where they would normally be. It is not game breaking by any means. It is not even very annoying, especially since you will see enough dialogue boxes to know where you have to click, but it is strange something like that is still there in a 2.02 version.
To say that any fan of old Infinity Games should pick Pillars of Eternity up is I feel is fairly obvious. It is the type of game they have been waiting for but likely never thought they’d see again. I would go so far as to recommend it for anyone who is expecting a meaningful RPG experience. During the past year we’ve seen the release of RPGs that don’t want you to role play. Role playing games that feel so streamlined and so oriented towards action and spectacle that feel more like complex adventure games. Obsidian understood what the people who backed their game wanted, and they gave them exactly that by going against the trend. They made a game with a deep, rich lore, ample opportunities to role-play and make meaningful choices. It is a game that is challenging and unforgiving in its combat, even more so than some of the games that inspired it. PoE is a blast to play and it has my hearty recommendation for anyone who is an RPG fan.
