This review contains spoilers
Pillars of Eternity is the most boring CRPG I've played in a while. Maybe it was a sign that I dropped this game twice but I recently decided to finally sit down and finish it.
Honestly it was a waste of time, a lot of the game's problem comes from this obsession the writers had with making sure the player knew the inner workings of the world Eora, its people, its culture, its politics, and its gods. Hell they wasted no time with the excess lore dumps and dropped them right away in the character creator. Instead of giving a basic run down Obsidian really want you know the ins and outs and leaves nothing open to interpretation, There is a saying that less is more and clearly no one writing this game subscribes to that.
Another problem Pillars has is balance, The game is way too balanced that it is honestly unfun. Perhaps it's because I like to break games and feel powerful and like a god sometimes in my rpgs but in Pillars I never once felt powerful at all unless I was overleveled for whatever content I was doing at the time. Which made a lot of combat encounters when I was the intended level feel not only really sluggish but also didn't really promote me trying out anything new since I ended up cheesing what I could when I could. The dlc kicked it up a notch by having a lot annoying enemies and the first dlc having way too much combat encounters. Ultimately it was just a lot of forming choke holds because they work and not trying anything new. Even hitting certain weaknesses didn't' exactly feel particularly strong just did slightly more damage than usual.
The plot suffers immensely from the world building to the point where there really isn't any urgency which I get some people joke about in RPGs, going to do millions of side quests to level up or doing some mini game for something else. However in Pillars it generally doesn't feel like there is any urgency, because the plot is mostly preventing the main character from going insane due to becoming a Watcher. No real time limit or anything just kinda yea the main character might go insane. You can't even really say the main plot is even stopping the Leaden Key or stopping the hollowborn curse since that's just a side effect of preventing your character going insane and not really the main goal. Plot could at least be better if half the writing team had stopped focusing on world building and had instead wrote a half decent plot. No wonder Act 3 has you just talk to people for a bit then do a side quest and now your allowed to go to the point of no return.
Lastly your companions just kinda of exist, many of them don't really have any connection the main plot and the only one that kinda does only ever mentions that he's a member of the villain's cult but his companion quest is simply about him being schizo.
Pillars of Eternity was a very boring game that I really should have dropped it but decided to actually finish it and It was not a very good experience for me.
Honestly it was a waste of time, a lot of the game's problem comes from this obsession the writers had with making sure the player knew the inner workings of the world Eora, its people, its culture, its politics, and its gods. Hell they wasted no time with the excess lore dumps and dropped them right away in the character creator. Instead of giving a basic run down Obsidian really want you know the ins and outs and leaves nothing open to interpretation, There is a saying that less is more and clearly no one writing this game subscribes to that.
Another problem Pillars has is balance, The game is way too balanced that it is honestly unfun. Perhaps it's because I like to break games and feel powerful and like a god sometimes in my rpgs but in Pillars I never once felt powerful at all unless I was overleveled for whatever content I was doing at the time. Which made a lot of combat encounters when I was the intended level feel not only really sluggish but also didn't really promote me trying out anything new since I ended up cheesing what I could when I could. The dlc kicked it up a notch by having a lot annoying enemies and the first dlc having way too much combat encounters. Ultimately it was just a lot of forming choke holds because they work and not trying anything new. Even hitting certain weaknesses didn't' exactly feel particularly strong just did slightly more damage than usual.
The plot suffers immensely from the world building to the point where there really isn't any urgency which I get some people joke about in RPGs, going to do millions of side quests to level up or doing some mini game for something else. However in Pillars it generally doesn't feel like there is any urgency, because the plot is mostly preventing the main character from going insane due to becoming a Watcher. No real time limit or anything just kinda yea the main character might go insane. You can't even really say the main plot is even stopping the Leaden Key or stopping the hollowborn curse since that's just a side effect of preventing your character going insane and not really the main goal. Plot could at least be better if half the writing team had stopped focusing on world building and had instead wrote a half decent plot. No wonder Act 3 has you just talk to people for a bit then do a side quest and now your allowed to go to the point of no return.
Lastly your companions just kinda of exist, many of them don't really have any connection the main plot and the only one that kinda does only ever mentions that he's a member of the villain's cult but his companion quest is simply about him being schizo.
Pillars of Eternity was a very boring game that I really should have dropped it but decided to actually finish it and It was not a very good experience for me.