if i could give this game 6 stars, id give it 10. theres genuinely nothing about this game im not intensely in love with.

the gameplay: its so good it hurts. character builds are absolutely fascinating to get into. the core philosophy of building your character is centered around the idea of making any build viable. attributes are always useful for any class, and classes always have a variety of abilities to choose from that can make different builds of the same class feel totally different. the combat is intensely strategic and engaging, giving you so many options for how you want to approach it. the weapon enchantments, potions, scrolls and magic items could all make for a solid game of their own, and thats all on top of the phenomenal character building and customization.

the story: has brought me to tears through the sheer quality of the writing and storytelling on many occasions. the characters all genuinely feel like their own people with their own goals. its fair to say that this clashes with how they just follow the player around, but i think theres enough that the characters do and decide on independently to make it feel right. they always have something to say about what the player is doing or going through, they all have their own deep personal stories that utilize the premise and setting of the game excellently. which, holy shit the premise and setting of this game are remarkable and incredibly engaging. this is, without a doubt, by far the most ive gotten into the main plot of a game ive played. side quests never feel rushed or just thrown in, everything in this game has a worthy story to tell. i cant stress enough how creative and impressive the story of this game is.

the presentation: the 3d graphics/effects and the soundtrack are both just fine, pretty unremarkable in my opinion. but the hand drawn maps and environments are once again, fucking amazing. just, google "pillars of eternity backgrounds" it speaks for itself.

this is my favorite game of all time in every way i care about for video games. i cannot recommend this game enough to anyone who cares about story or strategic rpgs.

+Mostly interesting story and characters
+Good writing and lore
+Good environmental visuals, game is at times pretty

-Story is at times too high concept and hard to follow
-Character stories occasionally end anticlimactically
-Lore is often dumped on you in a hard to parse way
-Music is repetitive and the main combat theme gives me trauma and makes me shake and shit myself

- -The combat system is... not good. I may be spoiled from other CRPG:s with turnbased combat, or the Pathfinder games where you are allowed to choose, but in a lot of cases fights are way too chaotic which means you either end up not using each companions full potential or pausing every three seconds to look over your options. This especially becomes a problem with priests and druids, who always have access to a wide range of spells.

Despite some classes "large" amount of spells, the character building simultaneously feels... insufficient. It could be because I played a monk, but most levelups felt fairly insubstantial for my party's power. This coupled with the relatively few levelups (I may have rushed through a bit, but I finished the game at level 9) made it feel like I wasn't really getting stronger as I progressed.

There is a lot of good here, but the meh and frequent combat made me really tired of this game by the halfway mark.

The game doesn't tell you this but any golden named NPC is a backer reward - there are many of them, they all have have a text dump written by backers and are completely irrelevant.

I didn't know this and burnt myself on inane literal fan fiction.

The game itself teases a very pretty and rich world but suffers from tell don't show.

in the first dungeon of pillars of eternity, there's a moment that really stuck with me. you encounter a xaurip - a classic fantasy racism beastman that trades in aesthetics uncomfortably pulled from indigenous american stereotypes. it indicates that you go no further, that you do not follow it down a path into it's territory. there's no option to convince it to step aside and let you past: you either respect it's wishes, turn around and find another path, or you walk forward and kill it as an enemy. it's a moment with, i think genuine nuance, where the agency of the xaurip is respected, a moment that actually asks the player to respect the culture of this people or defy it, preventing them from taking a empowering middle road where they can do whatever they want if they have high enough numbers.

anyway, in the very next area you immediately encounter a bunch of them that attack on sight and that you have no recourse but to slaughter.

this moment is pillars of eternity in microcosm. on every level of it's construction, it is a game that feels simultaneously genuinely aware of the fraught nature of many of the images it is evoking and the things it is doing, aware of the stain left by games of this ilk in the past, and also resignedly committed to doing those things anyway without the brazen dumb confidence of a game like divinity: original sin 2. progressive and regressive, inventive and derivative, evolutionary and counter-evolutionary, pillars of eternity is the fascinating attempt to harken back to bioware's baldur's gate and the crpgs of it's era made by a game that doesn't wholly see the value in going back there.

i won't speculate on director je sawyer's intent any more than the man has directly said himself, as he has shown real discomfort towards people suggesting his opinions on certain games, but i know from my mercifully brief visits to the fascist haven that is the rpgcodex forums that sawyer is a quite strong critic of how the classic infinity engine games actually played, and despite my fondness for RPGs of that style, i find myself very much on his side. there's a reason these games struggle to find new fans that aren't just going to turn the games down to the lowest difficulty to sidestep most of the actual playing of it as much as possible: advanced dungeons and dragons is not, by any metric, an elegant or intuitive system at the best of times, and while real-time with pause was an elegant solution to just how long combat in d&d can go on for (larian's proud statements that BG3 has an authentic, turn-based translation of 5E rules should absolutely terrify any prospective players), it only raises the barrier to entry for those not already au fe with ad&d's eccentricities.

pillars of eternity feels utterly unique in that it is a real-time with pause CRPG based on rules that were designed for a video game, and not for a very different medium, and as a result it is...actually good and fun. the rules and statistics are far clearer, the resource game is far more sensical, and the pace of encounters is such that individual moves are less frequent but far more impactful, maintaining the weighty impact turns have in a traditional turn-based game at a speed far more under your own control. experientially, pillars of eternity feels closer to FF12 than it does baldur's gate, with a sliding scale of playstyles ranging from making each move with care and precision, to writing full AI scripts for each member of the party and letting battles play out automatically at hyperspeed.

when i play games in this genre, i usually keep the difficulty low and drop it even lower if i encounter friction. but with pillars, i kept the difficulty on normal the entire way through because I genuinely enjoyed the gameplay and tactical puzzles it presented. it helped me to see, for the first time, why someone might prefer rtwp over turn-based, and when i started a pillars of eternity 2 playthrough shortly after playing this, i decided to stick to real-time rather than playing the game's new turn-based mode, because i became genuinely enamoured with this system.

pillars of eternity is in the unique position of being a baldur's gate homage that doesn't feel like it holds any particular reverence or great love for baldur's gate, and makes good on that position by well and truly killing bg's darlings where the system design is concerned. this isn't exactly uncharted territory for obsidian: but despite it's progressive approach to it's combat, it feels much more burdened by it's legacy than either kotor 2 or neverwinter nights 2, neither as caustic as the former nor as quietly confident as the latter. it sits uncomfortably among many of the things it does, inherited and otherwise.

to demonstrate: this is, in many ways, a d&d-ass setting. it's a roughly-medieval setting in a temperate forested coastal region, and yet the dyrwood is not medieval france/britain like the sword coast is, it's far closer to colonial canada both in terms of regional politics and technology. you have humans, you have elves, you have dwarves, and things that are kinda like gnomes but with the serial numbers filed off, you have the godlike, which are a twist on the aasimar/tieflings of d&d, each with their own gygaxian race science bonuses to stats, but aside from the aforementioned fantasy racism with the beastmen, these fantasy races matter less in the actual story than national identities and cultures, which makes one question why the race science stuff is even here. even stepping into the mechanical dimension, most of the classes are reasonably interesting interpretations of classic stock d&d archetypes like fighter, wizard, paladin, etc, but the two unique classes, chanter and cipher, are so obviously the design highlights and work in a way that would be incredibly difficult in a tabletop game but are beautiful in a video game. they eagerly invite the question of what this game would look like if it wasn't obligated to include the d&d obligations within it.

while i can't speak for every member of the development team, i know that for je sawyer, pillars of eternity was not necessarily a game he wanted to make - at least not in the way that it ended up being made. elements like the traditional fantasy setting, the real-time with pause gameplay, and even the presence of elves, were all things that were there to fulfil the demands of a kickstarter promising a baldur's gate throwback from a company that had fallen on difficult times. these things that feel like obligations feel like that because they are obligations: concessions to appeal to expectations and desires forged by nostalgia for a game that obsidian didn't actually make. these aren't the only visible compromises that mark the game - "compromise" being perhaps a generous word to describe the game's obnoxious kickstarter scars - but it is this tug of war between the parts of itself that wish to remain within the walls of baldur's gate, and the parts that cry out for escape, that ultimately defines pillars of eternity.

while maddening dreams and an epidemic of children born without souls is what drives the plot of pillars of eternity, the story is really in the conversations between tradition and very colonialist notions of progress, and the very opinionated characters you converse with along the way. likeable characters will hold quietly conservative worldviews that feel natural for them, people will say the right things for the wrong reasons, or the wrong things for the right reasons. friendly characters will have beliefs that are extremely distasteful to you but are so deeply held that there is no way to use the power granted to you by being the player character to dissuade them from their belief system with a few honeyed words. this is not a game where each element works towards a clear thematic conclusion, one that confidently knows what is right and what is wrong when discussing the things it brings up. it is a messy world filled with ugliness and argument and contradiction, and no clear definitive statement on its themes. it has a perspective, but it is not one held with immense confidence. it is a perspective mired with doubts and second-guessing that feels very conscious and deliberate. in particular, the final hour of the game has a twist that recontextualises the nature of the setting, but it's noticeable just how much of the cast, both in this game and in the sequel. find this not to be a redefining moment of their lives, but simply something they have to let sit in their gut like a millstone. it lets them see with new light things they once valued, but they feel unable to simply cast those things aside.

i have a particular distaste for critiques in geek circles narrow their focus on what a work is saying to only the series or genre the work finds itself in, and ignoring whatever resonance it might have to the world outside the fiction, subconsciously because the author has little experience of that world. and yet, it's difficult to read pillars of eternity without looking at it's relationship to baldur's gate and it's ilk, especially given how it kickstarted (lol) the late 2010s CRPG revival that led to breakout hits like divinity: original sin 2 and disco elysium. it walks in the meadows of the past with an uneasy rhythm, constantly expressing it's discomfort with being there but never quite being able to find the way out. even at the end of the game, there is delightfully scarce resolution to the weighty philosophical questions raised by the final act - the immediate crisis dealt with, certainly, but the game ends on a world that has raised questions rather than answered them, and while you may have your own thoughts and perspectives, there is no great victory of ideologies to be found, no grand, world-defining choice about what to do with the wisdom of the past. it's a game that simply ends with you emerging back into a world that is materially largely unchanged but colored so different by the new perspective you have on it. it is a game that is deliriously inconclusive.

one could word that as a criticism - and indeed, a strict formalist lens would probably find it as such - but honestly, it's what i find delightful and resonant about pillars of eternity. i'm someone who thinks generally very poorly about d&d as a game, but my intermittently weekly d&d games with my friends that have been going on since the first lockdown have made some incredible memories, a world and story and cast that i find myself hugely invested in. despite my disdain for a lot of the recurring cliches and tropes of the genre, some of my favorite stories are fantasy stories. and despite my active distaste for a lot of the decisions pillars either makes or is stuck with, and indeed for some of the creative minds involved in it's production (chrs avellne's characters were substantially rewritten after his departure from obsidian to such an extent that neither he nor je sawyer recognize them as "his characters" but whoever was behind durance specifically is doing such a conscious avellone impression that i would be remiss not to note that his presence is certainly felt) i still enjoy it immensely regardless.

frequently, engagement with art is a negotiation with the parts about it that speak to us and the parts that fail to do so, where we may be able to excuse or enjoy parts that others find to sink the entire work for them, and it's unexpectedly moving to find a game that was so visibly having that conversation with itself as i played it, and rang so true for the relationship i have with the things that inspired it.

it's a game that embodies the sticky and troubling way all the games and stories of it's ilk sit in my mind and expresses them emotively through a story that, in fits and starts, writes quite powerfully on the unique pains and sensation of memory and tradition and progress. it's a game that feels all the more true, all the more real, for it's contradictions, compromises, and conversations capped off with trailing ellipses, leading down two roads to an uncertain future and a depressingly familiar past.

Years ago I got to the end game and had nothing but a ball with it, I shelved it before I beat it. Coming back I don’t know if it’s my state of mind? My mood? Or maybe my taste in games has changed as a whole. After 15 hours I don’t know how anyone can stand for these characters to walk this slow, and the combat is not my taste anymore but if you’re a fan of a good and very articulate RPG and you have 40 hours to kill I would suggest trying it if under $20 or free on whatever platform you have a game pass on.

Has some good ideas but is bogged down by what I think is a purposefully large amount of jank that obsidian inserted into the game to replicate the feeing of older crpgs. My biggest gripes with the game were that the game was pretty buggy, and that loading times were excessively long. There was also WAY too much combat for a crpg; maps are filled with enemy encounters and despite the combat system being pretty okay, about half way through it just felt like going though the motions. It didn’t help that both expansions are combat focused. Other then that, both the story and the companions were well written even if some of them had really short quests.

This is my first venture in the C-RPG genre (as in, the first CRPG I ever managed to complete), and my first impressions are a bit conflicted.

Let's start with the positives: I loved the world, the intricate lore, history, gods, and factions. Although I do feel that the writing takes itself way too seriously a lot of the times: it could have used more light-hearted moments. But overall, I enjoyed my stay in the Dyrwood, and I slogged through the last act of the game (which unfortunately is severely underwhelming when compared to the strong first and second acts) just because I was invested in the narrative, and I had to see where how it would end.

To me, the glaring flaw of the game is its combat system. Obsidian went to great lengths to design a brand-new combat system that actually feels ancient and painfully outdated. With every action there are dozens of stats, systems, mechanics interacting with each other, and the game makes zero effort to make the player aware of any of it. There is no feedback whatsoever, if you want to know whether your attacks are effective you have to read a bestiary (tucked away in a menu somewhere) o slog through an overly verbose combat log. The fact that game areas are plastered with repetitive, uninspired encounters doesn't help, and neither does the pathetic excuse of a reward that are the items you get as loot after these encounters. There is also a mechanical clunkyness that permeates each encounter: for example, characters constantly block each other off and get stuck in doorways, and can't figure out how to go around small obstacles.

The graphical style is charmingly retro sometimes, and other times it's crusty and unserviceable, especially when fighting in crowded situations (good luck telling your characters apart if you ever find yourself fighting behind a couple of trees)

Overall, this game ha set out with the noble goal of reviving an old genre, and I'd say it is successful, at least in part. But in the end, it is faithful to its "ancestors" to a fault.

This game really is the sum of its parts. Evidently made by an incredibly talented team, Pillars of Eternity is polished in so many ways, but weathered in so many others.

The world is interesting, I think, and some of the companions can be interesting, I think. But so much of the dialogue, especially early on when fluid exposition is crucial, feels like a text-dump. In its worst moments, it feels less like you're exploring a world full of genuinely interesting ideas, compelling mysteries, and richly developed characters and more like reading a history textbook about just such a world. That's not entirely a bad thing, but it doesn't always capture the spirit that set games like Baldur's Gate, Planescape, and Fallout apart.

One thing that can't be overlooked: the load times feel bad. It's perfectly playable, mind you, but even on an SSD, PoE is just a bit too heavy for its own good. I understand that there's only so much Obsidian can do, but Baldur's Gate 2: Enhanced, a re-release of one of the now twenty-plus-year-old games that Pillars models itself on, loads effortlessly and instantly on your grandma's laptop. It makes you wonder if the increased visual fidelity that comes with modern tech and development is worth it. Why should it take a full minute to go from what is functionally one 2D screen to another? Maybe in another fifteen years, Pillars will load just as quickly on contemporary hardware. But in fifteen years, will as many people still be playing Pillars as are still playing Baldur's Gate?

The combat is, on most levels, an improvement over the clunky encounters of Infinity Engine RPGs. Ritually pre-buffing before fights is a thing of the past; most spells can only be used in combat, and encounters are balanced around this. Enemies and their abilities are designed with fewer "gotcha" mechanics, so there's little need to research solutions to break some obscure magical protection or exploit poorly explained weaknesses. The resting mechanics are also better tuned to the GM-less play patterns of a video game, making resource management more meaningful. Martial characters have more active abilities, making strategy less automatic for them. Yet, somehow, for every fight I find more fun than the average BG2 combat (and there are plenty!), there's another that is less fun. Pillars is, in many ways, deeper and more tactical than BG's semi-literal translation of AD&D, and it is far and away the better-balanced game. Its combat gameplay is unerringly fair. But in turn, it's markedly less electric.

Not being able to use spells out of combat means that, while preparing for combat is less tedious, there are also no creative applications of spells outside of combat. No invisibility spells to let you steal that item you need, no charm spells to manipulate NPCs in your favor, no reward for learning the mechanics deeply enough to cheese tough enemies. This is one of many ways in which the game streamlines out creative problem solving. If there's an alternative ending to a quest in PoE, it's probably a matter of choosing a different dialogue option or talking to a different NPC. It's almost never a mechanical solution. You're not going to pickpocket or problem-solve your way around an obstacle unless it's scripted in. It's Obsidian, so of course there's usually a solid suite of alternative choices scripted in, but I still find myself wondering: what if they took off the leash? We can already choose what to ride in their RPG theme park, but what if they let us climb on the tracks instead?

The game's original mechanics, spells, and stats, while well-thought-out objectively, lack the intuitive familiarity of more famous D&D rulesets. I sometimes grew disengaged from the mechanics to the point I wasn't able to make meaningful decisions in combat or character-building. Sure, I can intuit that debuff and crowd-control spells are valuable, but I can never retain which ones actually do what, or are more or less effective. Oh, this spell reduces the enemy's might, and this spell reduces their DR, and this spell increases our accuracy... but which do I need right now? Do the enemies I'm facing have a high enough DR that lowering it would matter? Is their might high enough to be concerned about? Am I missing enough hits that accuracy would help? I truly can't tell. I can never feel it. I don't have any frame of reference for how the enemies are statted to begin with, even after filling the bestiary enough to check in combat. Fights against enemies you're sufficiently familiar with to have unlocked their stats are rarely challenging enough to need to examine them. And because of how hectic the combat can be, even with generous auto-pausing, it doesn't always feel possible to suss out which spells have a noticeable impact and which may as well be whiffing through observation alone, or even trial and error.

Not to mention how slow the combat gets when you're stopping to read the log and analyze each move, or how tedious it feels to load a save if you spend all that time pausing and planning only to die. And with such hectic combat, martial characters having more abilities to micromanage--though a massive step up in terms of depth and engagement--also means even more pins to juggle in a crowded circus. Even easier fights can grow tiresome because of how many there are in some areas. I spent most of the game in Fast Mode, and still I wished for a faster mode so I could get through sprawling overworld areas or dungeons full of trash-mobs just a bit sooner. Where in Baldur's Gate 2 you might have cast a Haste spell and torn through lesser enemies in a few seconds, here, any level-appropriate encounter is going to demand your time and your attention, sometimes at the expense of the pacing. Yet, if you're doing the DLC and completing enough side quests, it's easy for the main questline to no longer be level-appropriate. The strange thing is, while being overleveled makes things a bit too easy, I sometimes feel like it's more fun just mindlessly clicking on bad guys and getting where I need to go than it is having to run through the flowchart of buffs and special abilities that I've devised for regular combats.

But then, just when you think you've had your fill of the game for all those reasons and more, Durance will say something that takes you by surprise. Or you'll learn something shocking about the world. Or you'll find a piece of unique gear that gets you excited for the next battle instead of exhausted. Or you'll make it to the ending, which has such interesting choices and engaging themes that you wonder why it didn't frontload more of its best ideas. Or you'll play the White March DLC, which is more dense with memorable quests and worthwhile content than most areas of the base game. In moments like these--of which there are still many--Pillars lives up to its promise. I just wish there were as many of those moments as there are unwelcome Kickstarter NPCs.

I despise this combat system. Other than there being a bit too much text and exposition, the game is pretty much perfect. But the combat system is so boring and annoying, I never had a problem with the old fallout combat system, It was fun and tactical and didn't take up too much time. This game however, almost every combat encounter after an hour of playtime was purely an annoyance, there are so many stats to keep track of and options with builds and consumables and abilities, but to actually conisder any of that while playing requires you to pause the game every 2 seconds. This game is already absurdly long, and so many encounters are easy filler. It's a shame since I loved the lore, characters and aesthetic of the game

Beaten: Aug 14 2021
Time: 28 Hours
Platform: Xbox Series X

Pillars of Eternity is a great game, my rating above surely gave that away, but almost more interesting (to me) is it's place in gaming at large. If you don't know, Pillars started as a Kickstarter campaign, put up by a financially strapped Obsidian, called Project Eternity. Project Eternity was pitched as a return to the Isometric CRPGs of old, the kind of games that Obsidian had built a genre out of back when they were called Black Isle, filled with hand-painted backgrounds and thoughtful writing. It was an interesting pitch, an appeal to fans of an all but dead genre, and one that'd never exactly sold gangbusters to begin with, but it worked. In fact, it not only worked, it both saved the company AND started a new wave of Iso CRPGs, bringing them to a level of cultural importance they've pretty much never had (coming to a head with Divinity Original Sin 2). So that's the scene that Pillars came in on. A successful kickstarter to save a company and a similar set of goals to the DOOM reboot, albeit in a much more niche genre. Where do they take this? Well, right back to Baldur's Gate.

The original Baldur's Gate is an interesting game. Not the greatest of the old school iso RPGs, but certainly one of the most important to the genre, let alone Bioware as a company. It's more interested in letting you explore the world at your own pace than telling you a great story, more interested in being a tone-setter and an exploration of the brand-new-at-the-time Infinity Engine, and Pillars is largely going after the same thing. There's a great new setting to explore, one that's very Obsidian, and very Josh Sawyer; It's full of factions, philosophical allegory, and an ever-present somber tone. If you've played New Vegas, imagine a dark fantasy version of that setting, complete with paranoia and riots and religious persecution. It's really an amazing setting. It splits the difference between the Forgotten Realms of the Infinity Engine games, Middle Earth, and a healthy dose of Obsidian's own obsessed with the past flavor. It's all very... prescient.

The unique aesthetic touches of the setting really shine here. The maps make a gorgeous use of Unity in their attempt to recreate the Infinity Engine's particular viewpoint, and the interesting lighting and color effects really pop in ways that the old games just couldn't do. The particular style of the Glanfathan ruins (that's the old creator race) mixed in with more classic medieval architecture and wide, grassy plains hits a spot not many renditions of a similar concept can. On top of that, there's a bit of Welsh flavor in some of the names that are supposed to be ancient (Bîaŵac, Eir Glanfath, etc), and that kinda worldly flavor is always super welcomed by me. Broadly, it's a very grounded fantasy setting, grounded in the struggles of it's people, the wars they'd lived through, and the longer histories they share.

The story itself is interesting more in it's themes than it's plotting. The first half of the game focuses on setting up the world, but the second half of the game really has some hard hitting questions. I don't want to get into them, because they're spoilery, but I'll just let you know that it apparently heavily references Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor, which is exactly the kind of high brow I like in my CRPGs. It really does a good job of working the themes into the characters too! My personal favorite character was Eder, an early companion you get who'd fought in the last war, against his own god. He's written very much like the farm boy he is, but he's got a real depth to him, a believeable ability for self reflection you don't often see in side characters like him. The rest of the companions in my opinion don't quite measure up, but I enjoyed them all, particuarly Aloth and Durance.

Mechanically, the game stumbles a bit. The actual composition of the dnd-like system they've built isn't the issue, in fact it's a great replacement for using actual dnd rules, since these rules are much more tied to usability in a video game. My issue comes with the encounter design. For the most part, I've got no issues, but every once in a while you'll encounter either enemies that are much stronger than the enemies around them, not bosses or anything just particularly tough enemies, or groups of enemies that can mob you and take you out much quicker than your characters can get spells off. Encounters with spirits are the big offenders here, a group of 4 spirits can quickly turn into 8 and surround your spellcasters, even on easy. This isn't a big issue with the game, but it doesn't feel like a considered decision like the harder parts of, say, Baldur's Gate 2 or Icewind Dale felt. These just come out of nowhere, and when you get past them the difficulty drops back down.

Regardless I still liked the system here. Your stats are easy to understand, the skills all make sense, and there's an extensive amount of range that each class has for its role in combat. On top of that, there's ample opportunity to talk through tough encounters, to find a peaceful solution, and it's not even just by attempting persuade checks every time you see them!! You really have to think through these conversations to get them to go where you want. It's ideal for roleplaying, even if you're just roleplaying "nice person who doesn't wanna do too much combat because it's hard" like I always end up doing lmao.

It's a great game, and a great RPG, and I completely understand why it caused such a huge splash when it dropped. It could stand to modernize itself a little more (see Tyranny for that), but as it stands, it's a great update on a classic forumla, rife with interesting creative decisions, often bearing fruit. And what a delicious fruit it is.

I enjoyed this game, I've played a few CRPGs before but this is only the second one I actually finished after Dragon Age Origins back when that came out. I really enjoyed just exploring the corners of the world and talking to people, reading journals, and finding side quests to do. The main story was great as well, I kind of rushed through the game towards the end because I wanted to play Deadfire.

The biggest flaw for me was the names characters you found that you read their soul and they have some gruesome backstory and are all over the place that don't contribute to the story... Once I realized you don't have to read those I found their presence immersion breaking.

Com uma narrativa relativamente simples e um elenco completo com personagens interessantes, Pillars of Eternity é um dos poucos jogos que consegue passar uma sensação de humanidade e conexão entre personagens e jogador, mesmo com a pouco natural e (em minha opinião) estranha forma de comunicação que é o CRPG.

As mecânicas são sólidas mas apresentam sim grande espaço para aprimoramentos, os quais espero ver na sequência que se passa no arquipélago Deadfire.

Em resumo: Uma história bem contada que calhou de vir com uma mecânica relativamente antiga.