+
Lore
Plot
Art style
Characters
Cypher class
Soulbound items
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Limited and sometimes bad voice acting
Combat
Character building
Way too much exposition not enough substance in most dialogues
Pacing
Act 2 bloat
Bugs, Bugs, bugs
Memory leaking = long loadings
Lack of resolution or satisfaction for some of the quests
Graphics are below avarage
Annoying Kickstarter npcs
Sneaking
Resting
D&D itemization and magic
Bare minimum party AI

Pillars of Eternity has some of the best worldbuilding I have seen in a videogame, coupled with strong character writing for the recruitable party members. Learning about the world both through experiencing its major events and the perspectives of the various characters drew me into the game from the start. What did not pull me in at first was the combat. Combat plays in real time with you being able to pause at any point in order to issue commands to you party members. I found this system incredibly clunky at first, but as I grew to understand it, it became much more enjoyable.

Looks and sound

The music and art presentation are amazing and are what kept me wanting to play at the slow start. The small text events have some pretty good ink drawings, the areas looks well designed though a bit similar. The character potraits are extremely well drawn. The music in general has a sort of Elder Scrolls feel to it but I actuallt prefer this to ES music. It has some pretty memorable tracks. The voice acting isn't fully done but what is there feels natural and professional. I liked Eder, Thaos, Durance and Pallegina's voices in particular

Combat
When I first played Pillars I found the combat quite boring but on subsequent playthroughs on higher difficulties I've grown to enjoy it more and more. There's a good variety in how to build your party. My one complaint is how there's little thought in the 'trash' fights

Story and Worldbuilding
At first glance the story and worldbuilding felt generic. blank slate gets knocked unconscious and wakes up chasing after the antagonist in a world that felt like generic fantasy world. From the second act it starts feeling more unique and interesting with the third act making this one of my favorite worldbuilding projects. The antagonist was pretty interesting, the backstory with him and the watcher was well done. The way the companions were integrated into the final confrontation made their questlines more meaningful imo. The worldbuilding involving souls and gods was the part that sold me on Pillars as a setting.

Overall this is a pretty good game. This was the first isometric real time with pause RPG I played and is what made me interested in the genre/subgenre as a whole

i liked it :]

the gameplay i cannot talk about much because i played on easy mode. there are a lot of modifiers and different types of resistance that my brain kept sliding right off it, and i am nothing if not a deeply lazy person so

but the story is great. the aspects of multiple-choice past really sucked me in, i liked all the companions - especially aloth my beloved..., the world of eora is so beautiful and detailed, and you get a TON of background options, all of which play into dialogue (some, of course, more than the others, but it is still incredible variety). the expansions are also quite good. also its a minor thing, but something about how lgbt characters were woven into the world really got to me... some background npcs whose memories / thoughts you can see. it just felt so natural and i rarely felt as comfortable and accepted in a game, even those geared towards lgbt romances like dragon ages of the world

i do think that the backer-written characters suck though and take you out of otherwise well-crafted world with great writing. but they are clearly marked so at least you can ignore them

edit: finished a replay on march 31 and while it still slays and i love iovara its kinda a bummer how few priest dialogue options there are </3 maybe it's better for other priests but if you are a waelite Fuck you

Not an Infinite Engine Fan
I never got into the Infinite Engine games. I’ve tried– god, have I tried– but I’ve bounced off Baldur’s Gate and Planescape: Torment about a dozen times collectively and I’ve scraped other similar titles too, like Arcanum. I eventually finished Planescape: Torment but that was in spite of the clunky and dated PC control scheme and the overall jankiness that’s shared among other CRPGs of its vintage. Most damningly, I’ve never been a fan of the look of traditional western fantasy. It’s very bland to me and absurdly dorky and those IE games are no exception.

So when Obsidian, developer behind one of my favourite RPGs: Fallout: New Vegas, made Pillars of Eternity as a throwback to that era of computer role-playing games, I was a little curious since it would be modernized and maybe some of those rough edges would be sanded down. Plus, the artstyle looked pretty decent to me with a fresher look and more ethereal colour palette. PLUS– and I think this is what sold me on it– the game allows you to play a werewolf from the getgo. You can choose to play a druid who has the ability to turn into a were-animal during battle for some primo lycanthrope action.

General
So I bought it and played it found out that a lot of problems with how the old games felt and behaved were improved in PoE. The general play of Pillars of Eternity (combat, navigating) is quite comfortable and– side note– this quickly became my favourite integration of being a werewolf in any video game. However, over the course of a playthrough, many problems revealed themselves...

Combat
The combat, although pretty good, is very busy and its hard to keep track of all the different resistances, buffs and all the minutia of battle. As the game went on, I got better at quickly identifying enemy weaknesses and internalizing all the spells at my disposal. My handle on combat got a lot better and a lot of nuances and strategies revealed themselves to me, but that took a long time. I didn’t feel like I actually got combat until the last leg of the game.

Customization/Levelling Up
Maybe the worst aspect is the character growth. On level up you get a bunch of skill points to spend on five field skills and there isn’t a strong inclination to choose any of them. One skills grants you and upgrades the Second Wind ability which is a one-time revive ability in which the higher the skill level, the more you recover. Another skill is exclusively for lockpicking. The class skills are usually not that interesting either. Each couple levels you get the ability to choose a new combat skill and while they’re not benign, it’s hard for me to be hype about some passive that gives 10+ to Deflection or one extra use of Knock Down per encounter. Furthermore, you only get a handful of these upgrades over the course of 11 level ups so your final build will have only a handful of these minuscule improvements. The character growth is profoundly unsatisfying.

Story
Obsidian is known for their writing but I found the main thrust of Pillars of Eternity to be uninteresting. Granted, I did play this on and off for six years so take my words with a grain of salt but even in consistent sessions of play, I didn’t find the main villain captivating. Obsidian has a reputation of having great writing and Pillars of Eternity holds up to that standard. This is a non-linear story bound together with rich theme and tone. The companion cast is very good with Grieving Mother, Sagani and Durance (as misanthropic as he is) being excellent characters. The dialogue trees are bountiful and provide the most opportunities for player expression.

Player Expression
In contrast, the on-field verbset is truncated compared to the classic era of Infinite Engine. I never played much of Baldur’s Gate nor Neverwinter Nights but as I understand it, those games weren’t so stringent with player action. To use an example of Pillar of Eternity’s rigidness, there are several moments in the game where you will enter a room, and player control will cease, the camera will pan over to an NPC stepping forward, and a dialogue will begin and there’s not any way around it. You can’t burst into the room and throw a fireball. The dialogue has to happen and it also effects your ability to prepare like setting traps. That wasn’t common in the old IE games. There was also a moment where the game wouldn’t let me preemptively attack a group of enemies by casting a spell up a cliff which felt like the game wagging their finger at me for trying to be sneaky.

Overall
In the end, PoE wasn’t the all-time new classic CRPG I expected. It feels surprisingly small even if it objectively isn’t, but again that can come from me ignoring a lot of the world to focus on the Watcher’s main objective. It’s less Fallout 2 and more Fallout 1.

I did have a special time with PoE, though, because this was the first time that I really tried to roleplay a character. I wasn’t Me in the PoE world, I was Artoxas– a snooty noblewoman who hates the idea of taking handouts and finds herself becoming a more compassionate and considerate person while dealing with her role as the Watcher. There are other, better role-playing games out there but I don’t know if they would have served my ambitions with Artoxas as well as Pillars of Eternity. Did Fallout 2 ever let you play as a prissy noblewoman whose opening move in most fights is to turn into an eight-foot werewolf? No, it did not.

This was my first RPG of this style (BaldursGate - like RPG or not sure how to call it), and even that I liked it, I understand that is not for everyone.
For me the game got so much better when I turned the difficulty at minimum, it was annoying having combats so frequently and the combat system was a bit too complex for me (or I did not have the patience to fully enjoy it...). Same for the level system, I tried at first to understand it and choose the correct options for my characters but in the end I did not paid so much attention to it.
I was way more interested in exploring the different scenarios, some of them really beautiful and interesting, worth to check every corner.
The story was also a bit difficult to follow some times, because there seems to be so much names, locations, past events and lore in general that can be a bit overwhelming.
For me this was one of those games where the first 1/3 or 1/2 of the game is great, and you start doing all the side quests, and paying attention to the game mechanics, but then it starts to lose interest and you end up rushing the main story.
But even will all of this I enjoyed most of it, it was good to try something different, but I don't think I will play this again, maybe Pillars of Eternity 2 after some long time.

I enjoyed this both more and less than I expected. it's a great game to pick up if you are not experienced with or into crpgs. I was not sure of the combat, to begin with, but I found it really enjoyable all throughout, even though some parts of it felt fairly unnecessary, such as grimoires and the scrolls, at least at the difficulty I played at. but I wasn't ever getting annoyed and felt like I could overcome most challenges, even if the game was not really difficult. My main problem with the game is that there is just a crushing amount of lore. I love fantasy and adequate amounts of lore, but at the old ancient age of 22, I find it really difficult to get all the details. when you don't even call humans, "humans" in your story it is a sign of starting to go too far. the journal does heavy lifting but still moments in dialogue just go over my head 80 percent of the time. luckily the main throughline of the story was interesting and felt like it connected to other side stories, especially with your party who are all wonderful and have interesting stories, some of whom even fairly touching. I'm sure the extensive amount of lore is interesting and written in excruciating detail, and the bits and pieces I got are interesting and stray from generic fantasy, and it's impressive considering the smaller budget of the game. I guess it's just not for me at this point. still had a fun 30 hours with this and would recommend it as a testing place for modern crpgs.

The story of Pillars of Eternity takes place in a vast fantasy world populated by people of various races and faiths. The game has a medieval theme, but also features firearms, which are often used by both the player's party and their enemies. The world of Pillars of Eternity consists of several dozen different locations, including forests, dungeons and ancient ruins full of dangers and nasty surprises. We also spend a significant amount of in-game time visiting cities, such as the city of Defiance Bay, which consists of several large districts.

During our travels, we meet many NPCs who give us tasks to accomplish and in some cases even join the party. The game offers players a great freedom of choice. It is up to us alone to decide whether to negotiate, sneak past the guards or fight our way through. A distinctive feature of Pillars of Eternity is the system of so-called scripted interactions. When the hero or party needs to perform an action other than the standard options, such as combat or dialog, a separate screen is shown explaining the situation and offering us possible options.

The gameplay is based on the classics of the genre. The developers used a real-time combat system with an active pause feature that allows players to stop time to issue commands to party members. Character development is based on the experience we gain during our adventures, and the game offers a huge arsenal of weapons, armor and items that can be bought or found.

Another feature of Pillars of Eternity is the opportunity to manage your own castle, which you get a few hours into the main story. First of all, the castle needs to be rebuilt so that it can regain its prestige, so that its defenses are intact. As we develop the castle, we gain access to new quests and merchants. Furthermore, the castle offers a number of additional activities and functions. We can imprison captured enemies, receive envoys or send our soldiers on errands.

Pillars of Eternity's visuals are reminiscent of classic cRPGs. On-screen events are presented in the isometric view that characterized, for example, RPGs of the late 90s and early 2000s. However, compared to older games like Baldur's Gate and the Icewind Dale series, the graphics look a bit better. The game offers an average of 60 hours of gameplay.

A deep crpg in a fantastic setting.

Pros:
- Fun real time combat (I think they added a turn based option, though that might be sequel only)
- Great setting with deep lore .
- Great story with twists i didn't see coming - which is a rarity
- Good graphics and visuals
- Well written characters / interesting companions
- Cool spell casting systems, reminiscent of D&D spell casting (would have preferred mana, but the system overall is pretty great)
Cons:
- The magic visuals could be better, but they are good.