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Pillars of Eternity - Review #4 @ RPGCodex

Discussion in 'Game/SP News & Comments' started by RPGWatch, Jul 15, 2015.

  1. RPGWatch

    RPGWatch Watching... ★ SPS Account Holder

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    [​IMG]The Codex can't get enough of Pillars of Eternity. This time old Watcher Prime Junta has reviewed the game:

    The big-picture similarities between Pillars and the IE games are obvious, and many featured already in the Kickstarter pitch. Top-down isometric camera. Six-member party. Real-time-with-pause combat. Class- and attribute-based character system. Swords and sorcery. Elves and dwarves. Dragons and dungeons. Looks that take you straight back to Icewind Dale or Baldur's Gate 2. Pillars also has the feel of selecting and commanding units down well. Selecting a unit or a group, moving, rotating a formation, or picking a target has the same crispness and feel of immediate feedback as in the originals. The user interface has a number of small but subtle improvements, such as better support for quick keys and the ability to shift-queue commands. Switching between Baldur's Gate 2 and Pillars is almost seamless. The characters respond instantly, and there's the same pleasurable and "connected" feeling of direct control. This is where the game succeeds best, and it accounts for a lot of the praise it has received. [...]

    The Infinity Engine games made great use of one of D&D's best features: magic. By the time BioWare began making its games, the ruleset had been played for over 20 years, and it was massive, flexible and polished. It offered plenty of tools, from opening locked doors to protecting yourself against the petrifying gaze of a basilisk, to sequencers releasing a number of spells at once, or preparing contingency spells that automatically fire off others in specific situations.
    It is not without its flaws, however. It is extremely limited at low levels, and tends towards instant-win or instant-lose effects in the mid levels. It has a quite a lot of spells which are as good as useless, and only really hits its stride at late mid to high levels, when you have a significant amount of spellcasting oomph available, both in range and quantity. That's when the famous 'mage duels' start.

    The growth curve of Pillars magic is the opposite. It is highly useful and has a lot of variety straight out of the gate. Where Baldur's Gate mages would rack up a few dozen misses with a sling on an average day, Pillars' level 1 casters are already full participants in encounters. By the time IE game magic would start to really hit its stride, towards the end of Pillars, underlying weaknesses start to emerge, and it never develops the depth and emergent complexity of a Baldur's Gate 2. There are four main causes for this: the core resolution mechanic, status effect impact and duration, the inability of the AI to exploit the synergies in the system, and limited counters. [...]

    Even with its flaws, Pillars of Eternity is a remarkable game. It was made in a short time with limited resources, yet it is as big, sprawling, complex, and detailed as the games it references. The world is deep, fully-realised, and more believable than Forgotten Realms or most other swords-and-sorcery settings. The gameplay is rich and varied, with massive scope for experimentation and creativity, and if you crank it up to Path of the Damned, challenging enough to keep you on your toes for most of the ride. The writing is up to Obsidian's usually high standard. And there's a lot of it: masses of quests, monsters, maps, dialogues, items, abilities, and much more.

    Baldur's Gate would likely have been forgotten had it not been for Baldur's Gate 2 and Planescape: Torment. If Obsidian can build on Pillars' success, improve on the areas that need improvement while maintaining its strengths, Path of the Damned can point the way to Path of the Incline. Pillars is a first, somewhat faltering step to reviving a near-stagnant genre. A few years ago, the very idea of a Baldur's Gate 2-scope, top-down, isometric, party-based cRPG from a major studio seemed like a pipe dream. Whether this new flowering can survive between the siren song of a mass market and the grumbling of the grognards - let alone come close to making both groups happy - hangs on the followup. For some of us, Pillars delivered. Others are still waiting. The space it and the other big-ticket Kickstarters has helped clear benefits us all.​
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Jul 20, 2015
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