Josh Sawyer is the Creative Director at Obsidian, and for about ten years now I’ve been calling him “the most cursed man in the videogames industry”. This is because Josh Sawyer came to Obsidian through Black Isle, and so has his name attached to things like the cancelled Van Buren prototype of Fallout 3 — no, not the soulless Bethesda one from 2008, the one where all we ever saw of it was a main menu mockup — and Icewind Dale 2, which was mostly notable for sinking without a trace thanks to coming out two months after Neverwinter Nights. His bad luck streak continued at Obsidian: designer on Alpha Protocol, one of the most criminally overlooked games of the last twenty years; director and lead designer on Fallout New Vegas, which was most definitely not overlooked but which infamously led to Obsidian getting screwed out of a bonus payment it would have received had it achieved an overall Metacritic score of 85 (it ended up with 84); and then director on Pillars of Eternity and Pillars of Eternity 2, the latter of which is a genuinely great CRPG but if you want to know how it did commercially you just have to look for Pillars of Eternity 3. Or the lack of it, anyway.

This is why Josh Sawyer is cursed: nearly every single game he has been involved with has been an absolute banger of an RPG, and nearly every single one of them has been considered a commercial failure (or got cancelled). After Pillars 2 flopped I think I would have forgiven him for just stepping back into his general Creative Director role for all of Obsidian¹ in between posting reviews of shower UX design on Twitter. But Josh Sawyer is made of sterner stuff than I am, and has instead taken the other road: if every game he makes is doomed to be a commercial failure, then he might as well just make the games he wants to make, commercial viability be damned². And this is how we’ve ended up with Pentiment, a game with extremely limited commercial appeal for something published by Microsoft, but which is one of the most interesting and engaging games I’ve played this year precisely because of that fact.

What is Pentiment? It looks like a point and click adventure game, and it is, technically, in that it’s 2D and you point and click on the screen to get your character to walk there and interact with things. But there are no puzzles in Pentiment — at least, not the classic style of point-and-click puzzle where you have to OPEN DOOR and then USE MONKEY ON PUMP³. You don’t even have an inventory in Pentiment; 90% of your activity is just walking around talking to people, and the bits that aren’t are either scripted interludes that are essentially barely-interactive cutscenes, or else simple one-off minigames where you spin wool or put a broken pot back together. Pentiment is almost entirely driven by its narrative, and figuring out what you have to do to progress that narrative is not difficult.  Figuring out how you’re going to progress it — deciding which of the many strands of investigation that the game presents you with you’re going to spend your limited time to follow up — that is the hard part,

So, what is Pentiment’s narrative about? The game casts you as Andreas Maler, a journeyman artist in 16th century Bavaria. Andreas is staying in the small town of Tassing while working on a commission for the monks of Tassing abbey, and befriends the Baron Rothvogel one morning on his way to work, who is also travelling to the abbey to discuss his own commission with the abbot there. Well, I say “Rothvogel” but this guy might as well be called Baron Deadmeat because it’s quickly established that basically everyone in Tassing hates his guts (including the monks) and so it’s no surprise when he turns up dead in the abbey chapter house. Unfortunately for Andreas his monk mentor at the abbey is found standing over the corpse and is the prime suspect for the killing, and so in order to clear his mentor’s name Andreas sets about investigating the murder to try and identify the true culprit.

There’s a number of very easy comparisons I could draw here, nearly all of which would have some truth to them. Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose, for one, and Ellis Peters’ Cadfael series, for another; from videogames the way Pentiment handles choice and consequences (not to mention its focus on superb art) reminds me a lot of the better bits of the Banner Saga series⁴. The elephant in the room, though, and the comparison that most people are going to reach for first, is another heavily narrative-focused game based around solving a murder: 2019’s Disco Elysium. And there are some striking similarities between the two, although the murder part is the least interesting one. Both Disco Elysium and Pentiment are fascinated with communities — the people in them, and the stories behind them — to a degree not often seen in videogames, which usually only care about people to the extent that they need a vaguely person-shaped thing to crouch behind cover so that the player can shoot them in the head.  But where Disco Elysium’s study of communities was intended to back some whip-smart commentary about politics and social systems, Pentiment’s focus is a little different: as you’d expect, this historical adventure game is all about the history of a community — how it is made, how it is remembered, and how it is recorded.

To achieve this Pentiment splits itself into three acts, with lengthy, years-long intervals between each one. The murder of the Baron takes up the first act as Andreas familiarises himself with Tassing and its inhabitants in the course of his investigation. The options you are given to shape a conversation are not as broad as in Disco Elysium, with fewer choices available (it’s extremely rare that you’ll have more than three to choose from), no skill checks, and just a few passive background abilities like “being good at sums” that occasionally provide special options — and which often don’t give you a positive outcome if you pick them. However the conversations themselves are much lengthier, and often take place over some communal activity; eating meals with the various families in Tassing is a big deal during the first two acts of the game, and Pentiment cuts to a close-up of the foodstuffs on offer while the participants chat in a more conversational manner than we usually see in adventure games. This serves two purposes, both allowing Andreas (and the player) to get to know the people and their place in the community in a much more natural way than the usual approach of working your way down a list of bullet points, while also providing a little bit of an insight into what people ate during the 16th century and the disparity between the haves and have-nots. If it’s not conversations that take place over shared meals then it’s neat little minigames like spinning wool, or cutting Christmas cookies. Pentiment is very big on showing as well as telling like this, giving you lots of little contextual details about the period at the same time as the information required to “solve” the murder. And not only that, but by participating in these communal activities in the course of his information-gathering Andreas becomes accepted by Tassing’s community in a way that perpetual outsider Harry du Bois never was in Disco Elysium.

And that community connection is something that lends the transition between acts even more weight. Andreas is presented with several major suspects for the Baron’s murder and has only a few days to investigate; he can’t possibly run down all of his leads in the time available, and so you have to pick which ones you think are the most promising/likely and prioritise those. When the time is up you’ll have to make a choice as to who to point the finger at, and if you have what looks like a reasonably good case justice will be meted out swiftly — and as befits the 16th century, it is harsh, with a brutal depiction that’s quite at odds with the relatively friendly town life you’ve been experiencing up until that point. It’s the sort of thing that makes you question if you really made the right decision, in fact; one thing Pentiment does that I’m sure will rub some people up the wrong way is purposely not tell the player who actually killed the Baron, and instead leave it up to them to decide what the truth was. It did bug me somewhat that I didn’t get the catharsis of knowing one way or the other, but the game does successfully make the point that ultimately it doesn’t matter who did it, only that you understand enough about Tassing’s history (as well as a lot of the background detail of 16th century European culture) to understand why they might have been driven to it. The case is closed, if not solved, and Andreas moves on with his life.

…only to return several years later to a Tassing that’s substantially different, both because of his actions in the first act, and because of the simple passage of time. Some of the children he encountered on his first visit have grown into young teenagers, but there are notable absences thanks to the infant mortality rate in early modern Europe and the families that he met before are scarred by those losses. They’re happy to see Andreas again, but this time the connection between himself and the villagers is strained as his affluence stands in stark contrast to their worsening fortunes; the underlying tensions between the community of Tassing and the monks of the abbey, always visible in the first act, are in danger of turning violent.  But most interesting of all are their perceptions of the events of seven years ago — Andreas may have been able to piece together some of the backstory and whichever suspect he fingered has largely been accepted as the culprit, but the villagers haven’t had the benefit of experiencing his investigation and so everyone remembers the Baron’s murder slightly differently, and always through the lens of how it affected their own lives.

This is the question that Pentiment keeps returning to again and again: the consequences of Andreas’s actions have long since passed into history and are talked about quite naturally as part of that history – but whose version is the “true” one? Andreas’s is true to him, but that doesn’t invalidate anyone else’s experience, and a big part of history is taking these disparate accounts of the same event and deciding how to represent them — what your version of the truth is. That truth — that history — is ultimately mutable and lies somewhat in the eye of the beholder is the core theme of Pentiment, reflected in several different strands of the narrative. You’ve got the surface level of the murder investigation, where you’re not told the truth about the Baron’s murder and have to make your own mind up; you’ve got the differing recollections and opinions of Tassing’s inhabitants years after the event; and then Pentiment also delves into Tassing’s much more ancient history, with the legends around the saint whose relics are stored at the abbey having been told and retold so many times by successive settlements and cultures that figuring out where they all started, and what the true story of the saint is, is an exercise in futility.

This is one half of why Pentiment has resonated so deeply with me. If it were just a historical murder mystery with well-written and well-realised characters then it’d still be a good game, but it’d be one that I just played and enjoyed and then moved on from, instead of still thinking about it two weeks after I played it. But that’s not enough for Pentiment; it wants to explore the nature of history itself, and while it hasn’t quite reached the same level of rewiring my brain as Disco Elysium did, it has succeeded in making me think about its narrative on a much deeper level than I did for other contemporaries such as Citizen Sleeper.

Ah, but even if you find yourself disengaged from these overarching themes that Pentiment presents you with, then there are still some very good reasons to stick around. It’s worth playing through just to see all of the visual flourishes, as Pentiment is an astonishingly pretty game. The style is based on medieval illustrations of the sort that Andreas is working on in the abbey scriptorium, except with concessions made to consistency and legibility. It’s not so much that the game looks like one of these illustrations come to life, since it’s not afraid to depart from that style in places (mostly in the landscapes), but that there’s little details from them that constantly jump out at you as you’re playing, like the way the women hold their hands or the curve on the abbot’s cassock or the pigs and sheep, which are of that particular “artist had a pig described to them once but has never actually seen one” style of the time. The relationship is made explicit in several places, such as the fantastic interlude where Andreas appears as a living character inside some of the books that he’s using for reference material for his commission. And there’s other flourishes too, like the clock that tracks time being a dial with some great visual representations of the monastic hours of Matins, Vespers and Compline.

One visual flourish that didn’t land quite so well with me, though, are the fonts. Even here it’s not so much a problem with the concept as it is the execution; the idea is that different classes of character have their dialogue written in fonts specific to that class. (There is no voice acting in Pentiment.) The peasants and townsfolk speak in flowing handwriting, written by a pen, while the monks of the abbey do so in illustrated gothic font of the sort that you’d see in a monastery-produced book of the time, and the printer and his family speak in blocks of printing type which are set inside the dialogue box and then removed to reveal the printed words. It’s very cute, and there’s even a couple of neat tricks like the handwritten stuff having occasional spelling errors in it that gets removed and corrected, and ink splotches appearing around the words when a character is angry or upset, like they’re writing with such emphasis that they’re leaking ink everywhere. I really like the concept and it’s a big part of what makes Pentiment such a joy to look at — unfortunately it also makes it something of a pain in the ass to play, since my reading speed is much much faster than the fastest speed at which I can make all of these fancy writing animations play, and so once the novelty had worn off I mostly just felt frustrated as I had to wait around time and again for dialogue to appear.

That’s just a bump, though, and Pentiment is far from the worst offender for wasting my time with slow dialogue speeds this year. At least Pentiment is trying to do something with it, providing context for the class and status of the people you’re talking to and immersing you a little more deeply into its 16th century world. The general level of historical detail is really quite something; it’s impossible to play Pentiment and not come away from it having learned something new about the period, even for somebody like me who has already done a fair amount of reading around it⁵. Pentiment isn’t concerned with emperors or battles, but in how everyday people lived during this time; the closest it comes to real politics are some conversational mentions of Martin Luther’s tracts and the Swabian peasants’ revolt, and it’s otherwise entirely focused on Tassing.  Religion is a huge part of the townsfolk’s lives, but so is tradition, and there are times when Christianity takes a back seat to lightly-rebranded pagan festivals that feel like they’re straight out of The Wicker Man. (Although nobody gets sacrificed.)  The religious life of the monks and nuns at the abbey is explored thoroughly, as is the feudal relationship between the abbey and the town, and even small details about the town can be revealing — Andreas observes that the miller is rich enough to have glass windows installed in his house, which is (again) both a good piece of historical context (that glass windows are extremely rare outside of the cities) and a potentially important clue for his investigation. And the really cool thing about Pentiment is that it never feels like you’re sitting through a lecture about life in the Holy Roman Empire; all of this information is relayed to you quite naturally through exploration, and through conversations. Playing the game, in other words. I’ve not seen a game do stealth history lessons this well since Microprose died off⁶.

If Pentiment does have one non-trivial flaw, it lies in its replayability. That Pentiment is a game designed to be replayed is unarguable, as the first act of the game has five possible outcomes and the second act has three, and you can’t see all of them (and their consequences for subsequent acts) on one playthrough. I will probably replay Pentiment at some point, as I did very much enjoy its narrative and its rich world. However, I was put off from the idea of an immediate replay by two things. One is the dialogue animation time, which I was already struggling with at the end of my first playthrough but which was rendered 100x more obnoxious when I already knew what people were going to say; the game needs a little time to breathe, and for me to forget some of the details, before I can deal with that again. The other problem is a structural change in the way the third act of Pentiment is put together, as it removes the time limit that’s been forcing you to make difficult decisions up until that point, and in fact there’s barely any decisions to make at all; instead you just run down all of the hanging investigation threads one after another, and then when they’re all finished the game is over. While that’s still reasonably engaging as a narrative it’s much less interesting to me as a game, and I feel like it would be difficult for me to get through that again on a replay no matter how long I left it.

Even if I do only ever get the one full playthrough out of Pentiment, though, I think it was still an incredibly worthwhile experience. It helps that it’s a game that overlaps solidly with some of my core interests, but balanced against that is a mechanical structure that would feel alarmingly light if it weren’t backed up by such excellent writing and presentation. The team that worked on Pentiment appears to be tiny even by the AA standards of Obsidian, but every single one of them hit it out of the park here; this weird adventure game about an artist solving murders in the Holy Roman Empire comes across as a labour of love for everyone involved, not just Josh Sawyer.  Pentiment is a tremendous achievement that I was briefly convinced would be the best game I played this year. It might still be, after I’ve had a little more time to digest it. For now, though, it’s at least top three, and a game I’ll remember for a long, long time no matter where it ends up.

The post Thoughts: Pentiment appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Oh, this is not going to be pretty.

The Outer Worlds is a very unfortunate game. For starters it’s continually getting mixed up in my brain with Outer Wilds, which is one of the best games I’ve played this year and not at all something that Outer Worlds particularly wants to be inviting comparisons to. Even worse, though, is that it has had the sheer bad luck to release just ten days after Disco Elysium, a game which has quite literally redefined what I want and expect from my RPGs in the future. If I’d played The Outer Worlds a month ago I probably would have treated it as what it was intended to be: an entirely unremarkable, unambitious attempt to do Fallout in space. Sadly for The Outer Worlds that’s no longer the case. Now I see it as an aggressively vacuous product that failed to impress me in every single respect, and whose obvious desire to be nothing more than an off-brand Fallout knockoff I found outright offensive in the wake of the genuinely groundbreaking work being done elsewhere.

The Outer Worlds is exactly the kind of by-the-numbers RPG I obliquely laid into at the end of my Disco Elysium review. There’s absolutely no vision or original ideas behind it; it’s been assembled pretty much entirely from a mish-mash of off-the-shelf parts that have been put together in the shape of something that superficially resembles a modern Fallout game. It is, quite literally, cargo cult game development: if we just make something with all of the Fallout bits — first-person perspective, a ripoff of the SPECIAL stats and perks system, a button you can push to stop time and headshot people and a conversation system with the odd skill check scattered into it — then surely we’ll experience the same kind of ludicrous success as Fallout 3 and 4, especially since Fallout 76 did actually do something different¹ and blew up on the launch pad as a result. There is definitely a gap in the market for The Outer Worlds right now, for a thing that’s basically just a Fallout game with the branding filed off, and that’s going to be enough for a lot of people. Hell, it might have been enough for me if it had been executed with any kind of flair or panache or… anything that convinced me that it wasn’t just a cynical exercise in box-ticking. For the first couple of hours I was having as much fun as anyone will with The Outer Worlds, but the more I engaged with its systems, the more I peeled back its Fallout-esque facade to try and get at the actual game beneath, the more I became convinced that there was absolutely nothing there.

The Outer Worlds is set in an extraterrestrial solar system called Halcyon that’s been colonised by humanity, with its basic premise ripped off from the old Douglas Adams joke about sending off one colony ship full of humanity’s best and brightest and a second colony ship with its most useless examples²  — salesmen, ad executives and so on. The ship with all the supergeniuses on it experienced some issues during the flight from Earth and turned up several decades late, leaving the second ship to build Halcyon into exactly the kind of corporate hellworld we’ve seen in literally every single piece of cyberpunk media to date, except this time it’s full of 1950s-style advertising jingles. When the first ship does eventually arrive the corporations just leave all of the genius passengers in cryosleep because they don’t want anyone to ruin their fat profit margins. Except for you, of course; you’re the lucky colonist who gets revived by a mad scientist/freedom fighter as a test run for waking up the rest, but unfortunately he can’t actually do that until you’ve jumped through several plot hoops for him.

And those are the poorly-defined stakes of The Outer Worlds. You’re not shown anything of these other colonists you’re supposed to be spending the entire game trying to save and most of what you spend your time doing in The Outer Worlds is almost totally unrelated to it, making it an abstract goal at best that only really reappears at the end of the game when you get the “classic” pick-an-ending choice of helping the colonists or siding with the corporations.  Instead the overplot is immediately discarded in favour of dropping you down onto the surface of a tutorial planet and giving you the objective of finding a power regulator to get a parked spaceship working again, after which you can use it to explore the rest of the solar system to do various odd jobs before encountering The End Of The Game. What struck me about all of this was how perfunctory The Outer Worlds was in getting you started. There’s zero time spent on world-building or scene-setting and you don’t even have to work to get your ship at all; five minutes after starting the game proper you’re redirected into getting this one macguffin component that’s missing (you plug it straight into the ship and it just instantly works) and — as with so much of The Outer Worlds — you have to do a bunch of totally unrelated crap before the game lets you walk away with it, making me feel less like I’m working towards a well-earned prize and more like I’m waiting in a queue for the game to stamp my passport before it will let me leave.

The tutorial planet is, I suppose, not too bad. It does the basic job of being a Fallout-style open world in miniature, providing you with a bunch of quests and locations that take a solid 2-3 hours to clean out and familiarising you with the basic gameplay systems. Said systems have been ripped out of Fallout wholesale and tweaked just enough so that Bethesda can’t sue – there’s no Luck skill, Charisma is now Charm and Constitution is now Temperament, but otherwise the basic character attribute stats work exactly the same way, with the exception that they’re no longer prerequisites for taking Perks. As far as Perks go, imagine the perks from Fallout, except  without any of the wit or charm or possibilities for interesting character builds and there’s only a third as many and the most powerful ones by far are the ones which increase your carry capacity by 50kg because it means you don’t have to manage your inventory quite so often. The rest are all focused around either increasing companion ability damage — useless to me because I didn’t have my companion-focused skills at a high enough level to unlock companion abilities — or increasing the effectiveness of the VATS-replacement time-stop mode.

This at least felt like a decent upgrade from VATS itself; hitting Q stops time, and as long as you do not move or shoot (you can look around) you can remain frozen in time for as long as you want. Moving and/or shooting depletes the purple time-stop resource bar underneath your health bar, and when it’s all gone you snap back into real time. Weapons are 100% accurate at all times in The Outer Worlds — you don’t need to level any of your gun skills to shoot straight — so the location-based damage bonuses of VATS have been replaced by location-dependent status effects. Shooting a baddie in the head while in time-stop mode will blind them, shooting them in the legs will cripple them, shooting them in the torso will stagger them, and so on. Sadly none of these bonuses felt like it was really worth going for them in lieu of just shooting enemies in the head for the innate headshot damage bonus, but that’s particularly easy while everything’s frozen in time so it’s still worth opening up a combat encounter with it, especially if you take some of the perks which refill a portion of the time-stop resource bar with each enemy killed and which allow you to chain headshots indefinitely just so long as you have a weapon capable of killing an enemy with a single headshot (i.e. the sniper rifle).

The final component of The Outer Worlds’ character system are the skills, which feel like the biggest missed opportunity of the game. Again, the skill range is basically a copy-paste from Fallout — you’ve got the traditional Science/Medical/Engineering skills, Lockpick and Hacking and Sneak for the powergamers among us, Long Guns and Small Guns and Heavy Weapons for shooting things and so on — and just as with Fallout each skill has a value from 1 to 100. All of the non-combat skills get checked at some point in conversation, but a lot of the time all these checks do is give you a tiny experience bonus for checking them. For example, you’ll be talking to your engineer companion who’ll be trying to fix something, and you can use your Engineering skill to point out something they’ve missed — but this just leads to an alternate snippet of dialogue and an XP reward. If you don’t use the Engineering dialogue option she still fixes the ship and things play out exactly as they would have otherwise. It’s the barest of sops to reactivity, and even when the dialogue checks do do something it’s the standard, now utterly obsolete effect of obtaining a bigger quest reward, or avoiding a combat scenario. Disco Elysium has exposed just how shallow this mechanic really is, but The Outer Worlds implements it in a particularly joyless, ineffectual way.

That’s not my primary beef with the skills of The Outer Worlds, though. My primary beef is that, for the first time ever in one of these games, how your skill score translates into gameplay outside of the dialogue checks is surfaced to the player. In Fallout there’s a layer of obfuscation between increasing a skill and what that increase actually gets you in game; you have a vague idea that bigger = better, but it’s difficult to see what effect putting five additional points into Repair does besides “makes you slightly more efficient at repairing things”, and you’re mostly just trying to level your skills to the point where you can unlock more powerful Perks as those are the things that have the most obvious gameplay impact. The Outer Worlds rather refreshingly does away with that mysteriousness and concretely spells out what every single point invested in a given skill will get you. This is a good change, and it’s one of the few areas where I’ll actually applaud The Outer Worlds. The problem is that now that you’re able to see what each individual skill does, you’re also able to see that most of them are utter bollocks.

Putting points into a skill in The Outer Worlds has two effects. One is that each point invested will increase up to two secondary stats; so increasing Long Guns will increase your base critical chance and reduce weapon sway, while increasing Sneak will decrease enemy detection range and increase sneak attack damage. On the face of it this is fine, except these stat increases are parsimoniously small, like Obsidian were pathologically terrified of anyone having any fun with their character system. Usually investing a point into a skill increases the corresponding secondary stats by a single percentage point. Often it’s even less — I had a Sneak skill of 130 by the end of the game thanks to a bunch of bonuses from companions and items, but this translated to a measly +80% bonus sneak attack damage. This doesn’t feel good. Of course it doesn’t feel good, to invest skill points and watch things increase by a fraction of a percent each time. Worse is that many of the secondary stats are either completely useless (The Outer Worlds is yet another game that thinks a 10% decrease in weapon sway is interesting) or else non-existent — Engineering and Hack, for example, don’t do anything when you invest points into them until you hit one of the magic skill breakpoints. I noticed that these skills were the ones that were checked in dialogue the most often and so they do give you some benefit but, again, it’s really hard to quantify the benefit of putting skill points into Hack when you don’t know what the Hack difficulties are going to be in advance.

(Spoiler: the distribution of dialogue check difficulties is pretty steady up till around 70 or so, at which point it abruptly jumps all the way up to 100. I’m fairly sure I didn’t see a single check between 80 and 99. Given that you get 10 skill points per level, this is at least one wasted-level up just to be able to pass the high-end dialogue checks. And again, this does not feel good.)

Anyway, skill breakpoints. These are the second effect putting points into a skill has: for every 20 points you invest into each skill you’ll get some passive or (much more rarely) active ability to go with it. The best of these are probably to be found in the conversation skills (Persuade/Lie/Intimidate), which grant a chance to inflict disabling status effects on enemies with every shot that hits them³ — the proc chance is very low at around 5%, but if you have an automatic weapon that’s no problem at all and it’s definitely handy to have a couple of enemies doing nothing but running around screaming during every fight. It’s nice that putting points into your speech skills has an actual combat effect for once. This grudging praise aside, though, the rest of the breakpoint effects are — you guessed it — extremely underwhelming, either unlocking what should have been basic game functionality (companion abilities, being able to dismantle unwanted weapons for parts without having to go back to a workbench, just being able to upgrade weapons at a workbench) or sticking a big multiplier onto a small number (like increasing your 5% chance to scare people by 50%, which is still just a 2.5% boost). I had a heavy Sneak/Stealth/Persuade build, and I never felt like my progression down through the skill breakpoints was having any material effect on the way I played the game. In most other games, hearing the “Level up!” sound effect is cause for excitement as you know you’ll have access to new options and new abilities. In The Outer Worlds you’ll just grimace a bit as all it means is you have to do a bit of stat admin before getting back to the game. Sometimes I didn’t even bother levelling up for a good twenty minutes after the notification appeared because it just didn’t seem like a worthwhile use of my time to do so. That is not the ideal outcome of a well-crafted character system.

So the one good change The Outer Worlds makes from Fallout — actually telling you what your stats do — simply exposes how shallow its character system is. For all that it now surfaces the cause and effect, it turns out the effect of levelling up is now “my sneak attack damage has increased by 4%” and it’s really difficult to see the impact of that in game.  I’ve always thought that in a single-player RPG balance should take a definite back seat to the player feeling like their character choices have a quantifiable, observable effect every time they level up — by all means try to achieve both, but if there’s any doubt whatsoever it’s time to break out the really big numbers. This is something that Fallout 4, for all of its many, many flaws, grasped very well, and it’s why I quite liked that game in spite of most of the rest of it being a hot mess: building a character was interesting. My choices felt like they mattered; picking a perk that increases rifle damage by a whopping 20% feels good. Of course it does, and that’s a big enough number that it was immediately observable in gameplay. It wasn’t that it was particularly difficult to come up with an absolutely broken build, but Fallout 4 offered a wide range of broken builds for me to choose from that all felt like they were quite different and which each had quite a lot of scope for experimentation in terms of upgrading weapons and armour.

This brings me onto The Outer Worlds’ equipment system, which, like so much of the game, has all of the mechanical depth of a child’s paddling pool. Each weapon type has, at most, four variants of weapon available. For Long Guns there’s the Assault Rifle, Sniper Rifle, Plasma Carbine and Plasma Rifle. For Melee Weapons there’s the Sword, Mace, Hammer and Scythe. For Small Guns there’s the Light Pistol, Heavy Pistol and Blaster. Given that you’re not going to be putting your skill points into more than one of these at a time this means that if, for example, you want to specialise in Long Guns you’re effectively restricting yourself to using the same four guns throughout the game. Eventually you outlevel the Assault Rifle you picked up at level 7, which is when The Outer Worlds starts throwing “Assault Rifle Mk2” at you, which is exactly the same gun with some bigger numbers attached. It pulls the same trick with armour, which is effectively just a big sack of damage reduction: the heavy armour I picked up on the tutorial planet has an armour value of 17, but the heavy armour I picked up towards the end of the game has an armour value of 56! Otherwise they are identical in every respect, including appearance. Upgrade options are limited to slotting two or three mods into your gun or armour, or else paying a ridiculous amount of money to level up your guns at an upgrade bench — this is how you make up the shortfall between your level 7 Assault Rifle and the level 20-odd Assault Rifle Mk2, because putting the onus on the player to scale their own loot instead of having the game do it automatically is what counts for innovation at Obsidian these days.The reason the upgrades are so expensive is because there’s literally nothing else to spend your money on in The Outer Worlds; god knows the equipment system is nowhere near interesting enough for Obsidian to be able to actually create interesting items you’d want to buy from a vendor.

The constant recycling and reuse of content is a huge, huge problem for The Outer Worlds. It’s not an uncommon one in videogames, either; I recall The Division had much the same problem, where it showed you every single piece of content it had in the first three hours and then the next twenty were just using the same guns to shoot the same baddies in the same environments, but with bigger numbers attached. The Outer Worlds strikes me as a mid-budget title at best, so it’s a little more understandable that Obsidian wouldn’t have had access to the bloated art resources that characterise your typical Ubisoft game — still, it’s striking how enthusiastically it blows its load on the tutorial planet and saves almost nothing to surprise the player later on. It’s a leafy, somewhat alien-yet-not environment filled with prefab buildings and populated with bandits, dogs and killer robots. Later you go to Roseway, a leafy, somewhat alien-yet-not environment with a much more aggressive colour scheme, filled with prefab buildings and populated with dogs and bandits. After that you go to Monarch, a dusty, somewhat alien-yet-not environment with a slightly more muted colour scheme, filled with prefab buildings and populated with mantis things, dogs and bandits. The only environments that deviate from this template are the space stations that you visit, which are basically just the interior of a really big prefab building populated by killer robots, and the asteroid Scylla, which at least has a genuinely striking skybox but is also roughly the size of a postage stamp. Oh, and New Byzantium, which is a big city environment that only really serves to demonstrate how Obsidian are treating the notoriously-awful Gamebryo engine used in Fallout as a visual and technical target⁴ instead of a cautionary tale; it reminded me of the “town meeting” in Fallout 4 that was attended by all of 7 NPCs because that was all the engine could handle at once.

But hey, at least the quest and companion writing will be good, right? This is an Obsidian game, after all, and Obsidian are the company that somehow managed to give Dungeon Siege 3 a halfway decent story. Well, I’m trying to be scrupulously fair to The Outer Worlds here, and so I’ll acknowledge that the companions are… okay. They have some character, they have plenty of banter when they’re following you around (The Outer Worlds opts for the Mass Effect approach of having two of them tethered to you at all times), and they’ll occasionally interject with comments on whatever you happen to be doing at the time. The thing is, though, this is basically the minimum I expect of any RPG companion writing these days; Obsidian themselves are the ones who have been largely responsible for raising the bar here, and other developers such as inXile and Harebrained have eventually stepped up to meet it. That The Outer Worlds is simply matching what the competition is offering isn’t something I particularly feel like commending Obsidian for — and anyway, the fact that the extremely average companion writing comes across as one of The Outer Worlds’s strongest features is a stark indictment of just how uninspired the rest of the game is.

The quests, though, are possibly the most disappointing thing of all about The Outer Worlds — and I’m not just saying that because Disco Elysium just exposed everything else in the genre for the superficial wish fulfilment horseshit that it really is. Even when judged by the standards that Obsidian would like me to judge it on — those of a Bethesda-era Fallout title — they’re incredibly underwhelming. A good example is one the game throws at you just after you enter New Byzantium: you’re pigeonholed by somebody on the street who says he’s a movie producer and invited to audition for his newest film. “Main character stars in a play” has been done before, most notably by Witcher 3, but it’s usually quite an enjoyable quest archetype where the writers take the opportunity to poke some good-natured fun at theatre (or Hollywood), their own game universe, and themselves. Presumably the writers behind The Outer Worlds have encountered this type of quest themselves — in fact since The Outer Worlds doesn’t have an original bone in its body the only way this quest could possibly exist is if the writers saw it somewhere else — but their take on it is, how can I put this, just a little less ambitious:

• You enter the movie studio, which is approximately ten feet away from where the movie producer originally talked to you. It’s an empty reception area with an open door on one side and a locked door on the other side. You go through the open door and into a lift, which deposits you in front of another door with an intercom.
• The movie producer talks to you and says hey, everyones already on set and in costume and all you have to do is go in and improvise.
• You duly go in, only to find that the “movie studio” is a small room filled with crates and three generic NPC actors. The only concessions to the fact that this is supposed to be a movie studio are the generic camera prop on one side and a cardboard cutout backdrop on the other side.
• You go up and talk to the only interactable NPC in the room, and exchange three or four lines of stilted, unfunny dialogue where he throws in a couple of stale acting jokes about your “raw energy”.
• That being done, the movie producer comes in and tells you you did a great job, and an XP reward pops up on screen. This is the end of the quest.

That’s it. This “quest” takes less than three minutes to complete. It consists of a single room and one extremely brief conversation. It strikes me as the sort of thing a quest designer might sketch out on paper as a way of logically structuring how a quest or dungeon would progress — it’s got an entry point, a route to a node where the main quest activity happens, and then a route back to the entry point so that the player can get back out into the world. It’s just that where a designer would usually then bulk this extremely simple diagram out with a bit of detail, some side areas/NPCs and set dressing to disguise this very simple quest structure, The Outer Worlds treats it as the finished product and just slams that shit into the game. There’s absolutely nothing worthwhile about it — it’s not funny, it doesn’t say anything about either the game world or the real world, and you don’t get anything out of it apart from a small amount of XP.

The movie star quest is one of the worst examples of how lightweight the quest design and writing is in The Outer Worlds, but it’s also not an exceptional one. Most of the side quests present in the game are like this, which is astonishing when you consider that I don’t think I saw a single new one in the entire thing. The Outer Worlds has a quest where you’re sent after a missing factory worker who was delivering medicine to a family in the ruins outside town. When you get there, the family is acting weird and say they’ve never heard of him but also invite you to dinner — I’ll give you exactly one guess as to what the shocking twist is here. It’s also got a quest where you look into what’s happening to the working class proles who have won a lottery for “early retirement” in New Byzantium. Again, no prizes for guessing what the answer is. It’s absolutely baffling as to how these quests are so basic and insubstantial when they’ve been copied verbatim from various Fallout titles. The blueprint for how to do these quests properly already exists, and there’s absolutely no excuse for Obsidian to have stuffed it up quite so badly as they have here. None of the quests have any weight or substance to them; probably the best one is arranging a date for your engineer, but even this seems like a pale shadow of the one in Dragon Age 2. And when your game is being outdone by Dragon Age 2 of all bloody things you know you’ve got a serious problem.

With the rest of the game being so repetitive and shallow Obsidian really, really needed to knock it out of the park with their quest writing. Instead what we’ve got in The Outer Worlds is the single weakest game they’ve ever released, with a main plot that vanishes for 90% of the game’s length and which engages you with a series of totally unrelated side activities that all end with the now-cliched Obsidian-brand pick-a-side resolution, presumably because they need to bulk out the Fallout-style ending slideshow somehow. The thing is, it really didn’t have to be this way. The Outer Worlds rips off a lot of stuff, but one of its primary influences is Firefly. I don’t think Firefly has aged particularly well, but I didn’t know how much I wanted a proper Firefly CRPG until I found myself getting just a little bit excited when The Outer Worlds looked, very briefly, like that was what it might be. Your ship is, well, the Firefly from Firefly. The first two companions you pick up are basically Kaylee and Shepherd Book. The settlements you visit have a very deliberate Old West styling. There’s a very short window at the start of the game where it looks like you’re going to be a proper free agent jetting around the solar system on your own ship and having the option to do some genuinely space-roguish stuff, and I was very, very up for that in spite of The Outer Worlds’ obvious flaws.

Sadly that’s a dream that evaporates the moment you leave the tutorial planet, and instead you find yourself having to chew through the reheated leftovers of somebody else’s quest design, again and again. I genuinely don’t understand how Obsidian have made a Fallout knockoff quite this bad when they themselves set the gold standard for Bethesda-era Fallout games with New Vegas. In fact I was so surprised that I actually went back and booted up New Vegas for a couple of hours to make sure that I hadn’t just dreamed they’d once made a fantastic Fallout game, and it does still hold up quite well. Certainly it has a hell of a lot more going on in terms of world-building, quests, character stats and equipment than The Outer Worlds does, even accounting for the decade-old Gamebryo engine. Despite my comments above regarding Disco Elysium it’s fine to not always shoot for the moon and fall back to making something that’s the gaming equivalent of comfort food, but The Outer Worlds is dreadfully stale popcorn entertainment that doesn’t even… pop.  It’s been put together with a stunning lack of imagination and a chronic want of ambition, and the fact that it’s only the sixth worst game⁵  I’ve played this year is more a reflection of how 2019 has been a year of extremes than it is any dregs of quality to be found at the bottom of The Outer Worlds.

The post Thoughts: The Outer Worlds appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

I must admit to approaching Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire with an unaccustomed mix of resentment and resignation. It’s a feeling that reflects Obsidian’s fall from grace; after Pillars 1 and Tyranny, both extremely flawed games with only the Obsidian-brand reputation and faction systems to really make them stand out, in my eyes they’re no longer the accomplished masters of quest and mission narrative who came up with Mask of the Betrayer, Fallout: New Vegas and Alpha Protocol. Partially this is to do with other RPG developers raising their game, but there’s very little separating Tyranny from something like Torment: Tides of Numenera and Obsidian games have to do rather more to sell themselves to me these days. I had all but ignored the Deadfire crowdfunding campaign, was not really up for another game set in the rather tedious Pillars world, and only really bought it because I was done with BattleTech and Thrones of Britannia really wasn’t grabbing me.

I was therefore quite surprised to discover that Deadfire is… well, not great exactly, certainly it didn’t enchant me the way as Original Sin 2 did last year, but it is a game that, for the most part, represents a very respectable return to form for Obsidian. They’ve achieved this through first having the self-awareness to recognise what the first Pillars didn’t do so well¹, and then coming up with a single (albeit very major) change to the game setup that addresses the majority of them in one fell swoop: you’re no longer some characterless bum mooching around a dreary, samey set of fantasy cities and villages doing fetch quests for entirely forgettable NPCs and organisations, but instead are captain of a pirate ship sailing around a fantasy analogue of the Caribbean (or the Pacific Islands, it could go either way) and dealing with interfactional squabbling between various colonial groups, including an alternate version of the East India Company.

Swapping out your pre-existing world and gameplay mechanics for a more piratey incarnation is not quite the entirely innovative change it would have been a few years ago, as Assassin’s Creed did almost exactly the same thing with Black Flag to wondrous effect. As Deadfire isn’t doing full 3D pirate ship shenanigans — instead choosing to engage in a much more Pillars-esque (not to mention cheaper) method of portraying its ship-to-ship engagements via a dedicated turn-based system inside the existing text adventure interface it uses for its narrative vignettes — it has a ready-made blueprint to turn to for the other bits: Sid Meier’s Pirates!. The Deadfire overworld plays out in a very similar fashion, with you gazing down upon your ship as you sail it around the Deadfire archipelago in real-time. If you sail into another ship you’ll start one of the text-based ship battles, and if you find somewhere to land on one of the many, many islands scattered around the archipelago you can disembark to explore it on foot. You have a crew of anywhere between 5 and 20, each of whom has their own (basic) set of skills, such as Expert Cannoneer, and each of whom can be assigned to man specific stations on your boat matching their skillset. Your crew will also unfortunately require food and drink, as well as a nominal amount of wages, and if their morale gets too low (if you make them spend a month eating nothing but hardtack, say) they’ll eventually mutiny and try and take over the ship. You can upgrade your ship’s cannons and sails and also buy bigger, better models of ship that can both take and dish out more punishment. While you’re sailing around the map your crew will sing in-universe sea shanties to pass the time, and some of them aren’t half-bad — this is another idea that’s been purloined from Black Flag, but it worked awesomely well there and is no less effective in Deadfire.

Really, replacing Pillars’ moribund stronghold of Caed Nua with a pirate ship — a tangible thing that you’re constantly staring at and interacting with and which has a huge impact on the game — is by far the biggest improvement Deadfire makes. I have some issues with the economy surrounding privateering, which we’ll get into later, but even with its flaws it’s about a million times more engaging than repeatedly repairing your curtain walls after they get wrecked by bandit groups who are all inexplicably packing siege weaponry. Deadfire even tacitly acknowledges how awful Caed Nua was by having it get smashed to pieces in the opening narrative by the awakening of the giant adra statue buried beneath it. Said statue is now inhabited by the god Eothas, who was supposedly killed in a much more interesting-sounding game that took place twenty years before Pillars 1, which Obsidian inexplicably decided not to make in favour of incessantly reminding you that you weren’t playing it²; Deadfire lets you import your save from Pillars 1 so you have the same player character, and its excuse for starting you back at level 1 again is that Eothas sucked out all of your soul juice and then accidentally stepped on you on the way to wherever it is he’s going. Some godly intervention brings you back from the resulting coma to find that returning companion Eder has put the pair of you on a boat bound for the Deadfire archipelago so that you can chase down Eothas and get your… soul… back…

…yeah, now that I’ve written it down I’ve just realised that this is almost word for word the plot of Pillars 1, except with nobody antagonist Thaos replaced with a titanic, nigh-indestructible god. The difference between Deadfire and Pillars stories lies almost entirely in the execution, as Deadfire handles the scenario far more deftly than Pillars managed, and while I did end up ignoring the main plot for most of the game again, this time it was at least because the not-main plot bits of the game — the sailing, exploring and inadvertent murdering of anyone who happened to be standing within a hundred feet of my quest objective — were such good fun to interact with rather than the main plot being so dreary I couldn’t stand to interact with it unless I absolutely had to. Obsidian have invested in making almost every line of dialogue in the game fully-voiced and I was actually somewhat surprised at how much difference it made to my suspension of disbelief; they’ve also done rather more with the little story vignettes Pillars uses in place of cutscenes than I was really expecting them to. The plot is still somewhat perfunctory in content, relying on its four squabbling factions and their associated sidequests to give it a bit of flavour, and the ending was disappointingly open-ended and resolves next to nothing, but it’s at least been beefed up enough that it just about holds up under the weight of what it’s being asked to do.

Which, as it turns out, is basically “give the player an excuse to be on a pirate ship so that we can work on the parts of the game that are actually going to be good”. I keep referring to it as a pirate ship but you don’t have to play it that way if you don’t want to; you can just use it as a method of getting from point A to point B and not really bother engaging with the ship-to-ship combat at all, although this does mean you’ll have to occasionally flee from bona fide pirates who do embrace that kind of lifestyle. Most of the ships populating Deadfire’s world map are named targets for some form of bounty quest, however, so if you’re a completionist you’ll eventually end up attacking somebody from one of the more law-abiding factions, and it’s a short step from there to indiscriminately slaughtering anyone unlucky enough to run across your path for the experience and loot. There are also land-based bounties available, as well as uncharted islands to explore and even some medium-sized dungeon experiences full of puzzles and traps that aren’t related to any quests, but are nevertheless thrown onto the map to liven the place up a bit. And it really does work; the sailing and the variety of encounters you can run into make Deadfire’s world a hell of a lot more compelling than the one in Pillars.

Still, while the breadth of content is very nice the thing that impresses me most about Deadfire is its freeform structure, in that there’s next to no quest gating present on that content. What I mean by this is… say there’s an ancient underground temple, and there’s an NPC in the world who wants you to fight your way through a couple of dungeons’ worth of nasties to retrieve something from this temple. Usually you would need to talk to the guy first, and he’d give you the Arse of Nebuchadnezzar (or some equally absurdly-named Macguffin artifact) required to open the door; that or the relevant bits of the dungeon simply wouldn’t spawn in until you’d talked to him, locking it off until you’d gone through the games’ content in the order that the developers prescribed. Deadfire doesn’t do that. Nearly every single dungeon, item, and bounty target is present in the world from the moment you get out of the tutorial sequence, whether you have their corresponding quests in your quest log or not. This is a trick that Original Sin 2 also pulled, and it works equally well at making Deadfire’s world feel far more organic than a typical RPG; more than once I ended up doing a quest backwards, completing a dungeon or killing a baddie, getting some loot that was tagged as a quest item, and then later randomly running into an NPC who wanted me to do that dungeon and handing them the quest item with a jaunty “Oh yeah, I did that already” accompanied by a suitably smug expression.

This appeals to me particularly because I enjoy min-maxing my way through games to exhaust the majority of the content as quickly as possible. By that I don’t mean I like out-and-out speedrunning (although there’s already a 26 minute playthrough of Deadfire on Youtube), but rather that I try and experience as much of the game as I can while optimising my path through it. Deadfire is a particularly good game for this; it’s so inefficient to do a bounty, go back to the quest giver, get another bounty, do that bounty, go back to the quest giver… It’s just so much quicker to board every ship you see and hunt down every combat encounter on the various unexplored islands littering Deadfire, and then go to the bounty NPC, dump a giant bag of heads out in front of them, and let them sort through the pile like pick ‘n mix to find the ones that they want. There’s far meatier examples of sequence optimisation than this to be found in the game, and it really made exploration feel worthwhile and useful knowing that I could tick islands off the list without having to worry about having to retrace my steps back there later to do some special quest-related objective.

Speaking of boarding actions, I should spend a paragraph talking about the naval combat — because I don’t really think it works all that well. As stated earlier, it’s done by way of a turn-based text-interface. Each turn is split into three actions, alternating with the opposing ship each time, and your actions consist of stop, sail forward, turn the ship to present a broadside (which can take multiple actions if you’re sailing a big one), brace to reduce injuries from incoming cannonballs, and fire port or starboard cannons. Your ship equipment and crew skill at various tasks affects things like ship speed, turn initiative and cannon accuracy, there are choices to be made in ship outfitting over whether you want cannons that can stand off and engage at long range or more quick-firing variants that are designed for short-range brawling etc. etc., you can fire different types of shot to wreck enemy sails or target their crew… it’s clear that a lot of thought has gone into designing this system, for all that it’s handled entirely via text. It might even be a good system, if I ever chose to engage with it.

Unfortunately that well thought-through system is rather undone by some simple cost-benefit analysis on the macro level. If you choose to fight a ship battle, you will take damage from the enemy ship, even if you’re in a giant galleon and you’re taking on a piddling two-cannon voyager. Most of the damage will go to your hull and there’s also a chance that your crew will be injured and have to spend time recovering. Damage and crew injuries take multiple days to make good, during which time taking on another naval action is riskier, not to mention the fact that you have to rotate any injured crew out of their duty posts to rest. In short, fighting ship-to-ship has a real cost in terms of time lost, and it is far easier (not to mention quicker) just to sail straight at the other ship at full speed, take a single raking broadside that will nevertheless inflict less damage than slugging it out ship-to-ship, and then initiating a boarding action. Boarding actions transition the fight to the decks of both ships and have both crews fight each other to the death using the regular Pillars combat engine — your ship type and equipment have no impact on your ability to win a boarding action, and as long as you’ve built your party halfway sensibly and aren’t taking on a crew that’s several levels higher than you you’ll win all your boarding actions quite handily. Importantly there’s no fallout from this that lasts past the conclusion of the boarding action — unlike the ship battles, any downed crew members get straight back up once it’s done with no lasting consequences.

This renders the ship battles somewhat pointless — you can do them if you want, but the outcome is inferior in every way to simply boarding the enemy ship — and I would be far more annoyed about this if it wasn’t for the fact that the boarding actions are by far the most fun fights in all of Deadfire. Not challenging perhaps, but definitely fun; you’re facing an enemy crew numbering anywhere up to twenty, but any benched companions who aren’t currently on the party roster will pitch in on your side along with a subset of your own crew. Boarding actions therefore end up being massive rucks involving thirty or forty combatants, with people leaping from one ship to another while spells go off everywhere accompanied by an appropriately swashbuckling soundtrack. Some might call them a confusing mess, but I thought they were absolutely glorious.

The last word before I wrap up should probably be about the factions: simply put, the factional rivalry in Deadfire reminded me very pleasantly of Fallout: New Vegas. There are four major factions present in the Deadfire archipelago: the Vailians, who are basically colonial Spain despite being a nation of Italian stereotypes; the Royal Deadfire Company, who are a state-sponsored concern of the Rauritai with a lot of cannons and guns; the native Huana, who are trying to resist the colonisation efforts of the previous two groups; and the pirate Principi faction, who exist to cause a lot of pain for everyone else but who are afflicted with their own internal ructions. All of them want to exploit Deadfire for their own ends and, as usual for RPGs, treat the player character as a sort of combination handyman/exterminator for cleaning up their rivals. Throughout the game they give you side quests to further their interests and work against those of other groups, and these quests inject a huge quantity of flavour into a game that’s otherwise a little light on story meat, fully-voiced dialogue or no. In fact I’d say probably 50% of your time in Deadfire is spent working for the factions, with another 45% exploring and the remaining 5% actually chasing that damn statue across the Deadfire. It’s important that they be well-written and characterful, so it’s a good thing that they are… mostly, anyway; I was a little puzzled that blowing up Vailian ships didn’t piss the Vailians off any (this goes for all factions), and in fact it appears to be impossible to annoy them to the point where they’ll turn hostile, since this is reserved for a rather artificial pick-one-fight-the-others plot mission towards the end of the game.

(As weird as these little structural tics with the factions and story are are there’s at least nothing as lopsided as Caed Nua or the second city in Pillars, both of which were included because they were promised as part of the Kickstarter rather than because anyone thought they were a particularly good idea and which ended up being a waste of development resources. Obsidian are learning here too; I think the most ambitious thing they promised in the Deadfire crowdfunding campaign was to include backer NPCs, who are at least relatively inconsequential and easy to ignore.)

Deadfire’s a dramatic improvement on the relatively humdrum Pillars. Obsidian have kept what worked — it’s the same engine, but prettier; the same combat mechanics, but streamlined; the same reputation system, but overhauled; the same totally broken economy where you store a thousand sets of bloodied armour and weapons in your bottomless stash to fence to merchants later… actually, maybe they should have fixed that — and haven’t been afraid to throw things out and make sweeping changes to try and address the worst of what went wrong in the first game. Yes, these changes aren’t entirely original; we’ve got the obvious inspirations of Pirates! and Black Flag, and I also suspect Original Sin 2 of having had a non-trivial influence on the more freeform philosophy behind Deadfire’s design. Despite that, it still takes talent (and not a small amount of courage) to weld together so many of these new elements that haven’t been tried before in this kind of RPG, and to have them work as well as they do. It’s also unsurprising that some of them (ship combat) have been flawed on the first try, but I’m willing to forgive that because it was the first try; I’m far more annoyed by the story that, despite being well-told this time around, is still frustratingly insubstantial, when a storming narrative is what Obsidian is supposed to be good at. Still, Deadfire at its worst is a far more confident game than Pillars or Tyranny  were at their best, and restores some of my confidence that Obsidian can crank out a good RPG when they want to.

The post Thoughts: Pillars Of Eternity 2 – Deadfire appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

I feel like Tyranny suffers from a slight marketing problem. Let’s take a quick look at the blurb on the Steam store:

In Tyranny, the grand war between good and evil is over – and the forces of evil, led by Kyros the Overlord, have won. The Overlord’s merciless armies dominate the face of the world, and its denizens must find their new roles within the war-torn realm… even as discord begins to rumble among the ranks of Kyros’ most powerful Archons.

Sounds interesting, right? Tyranny is actively sold as an RPG where you are — or at least, are working for — the bad guy. Having played all the way through Tyranny now, though, I’d say that maybe one third of that summary is accurate; discord is indeed rumbling among the ranks of Kyros’ Archons, to the point where the first act feels more like you’re wrangling a bunch of preschoolers squabbling over who gets to play with the pony next than it does dealing with the immensely powerful leaders of Kyros’ armies. As far as the rest of it goes I have some bad news for Kyros, as the dictionary definition of “dominate” is “to have a commanding position over”, and since Kyros’ forces are afraid to venture outside of their camps in nearly all of the territories that you visit during the course of the game I would say that he’s¹ dominating the world in the same way that the USA dominated Vietnam back in the ‘70s. It’s that first sentence I really take issue with, though. There is plenty of scope for an RPG in which you’re on the side of evil for once — genuine evil, not the mwa-ha-ha-ing stereotypes found in Bioware titles. Psychopath playthrough of Alpha Protocol aside, I’ve not seen the genre come up with anything significantly new here since I told Zaalbar to kill Mission back in Knights Of The Old Republic and I was looking forward to an exploration of what being evil would mean and how it would change things both for your character and for the wider game world.

Unfortunately, Tyranny is not that game.

I should probably be clear about one thing before we go any further: Tyranny is a good game. What it is not is a good game about evil, and while I’d usually feel like that was a personal expectation and wouldn’t hold it against Tyranny all that much, in this instance I don’t feel like it was an unreasonable one based on the marketing. To be fair, doing the Tyranny concept as stated would be tricky without coming off as Brandon Sanderson fanfiction (although I would have been okay with that as long as I got to play a Steel Inquisitor), but even so it’s far more conventional than I thought it would be. And disappointingly so, especially considering Tyranny is built on top of the Pillars Of Eternity game engine and so already recycles an awful lot of content.

Tyranny casts you as a Bhaalspawn Spectre Watcher Fatebinder travelling to the war-torn Tiers. The armies of Kyros’ conquest in the Tiers are split into two factions: the Scarlet Chorus, led by the Voices of Nerat (Chaotic Evil), who are a survival-of-the-fittest collection of gangs that overwhelms enemy forces through sheer weight of numbers, and the Disfavored, a small but elite band of fighters led by Graven Ashe (Lawful Neutral). As the two factions have been set up to be polar opposites they kind of hate each other and spend more time sabotaging the other’s efforts than they do fighting the poorly-defined enemy. This is where you come in: Kyros has sent you to knock some heads together and ensure the conquest goes as planned, and he’s backed things up with an Edict. Much of Tyranny’s plot and backstory revolves around the Edicts, which are super-powerful magic spells capable of destroying entire regions, but this one just says that everyone in the valley is going to die unless they capture the last remaining enemy stronghold within eight days². Excellently this is reflected in a little timer next to the menu bar at the top of the screen; since “everyone” happens to include you (as you were in the valley at the time you read the Edict) you also have a vested interest in getting this situation resolved as quickly as possible.

Having the Edict hanging over your head makes this extended tutorial segment a little more interesting, since the tutorial itself is basically there to emphasise Tyranny’s reputation system and I think it spends a little too much time over-egging the pudding. Said reputation system bears more than a passing resemblance to the attitude ratings from Alpha Protocol: every single faction and major character has both a Loyalty and a Wrath rating, and doing things that they like or dislike will raise the respective rating. Importantly this is not a single sliding scale; while it is possible to do things that will lose somebody’s Loyalty, an action that increases Wrath doesn’t usually decrease Loyalty at the same time and so you’re freed for the most part from worrying about powergaming the reputation system to maximise one or the other for the good ending. It’s perfectly possible to max both for certain factions – I know I did — and while there are passive ability unlocks that are linked to Loyalty/Wrath ratings you mostly care about them because they change the responses you get in conversations. As with Alpha Protocol having a high Wrath rating isn’t necessarily a bad thing and also opens up new responses from NPCs, which makes this pretty much a perfect system for roleplaying: optimising your reputation for mechanical benefit isn’t really a consideration, and so you’re free to act how you will and people will respond naturally to you based on what you’ve been doing to them.

The actions you take in the tutorial have a heavy effect on your reputation with all factions involved; it’s essentially a way for you to configure your starting reputation for the game proper, which starts as soon as you resolve the Edict and get control of an ancient Spire that gives you magic powers because you’re the Chosen One³ and… oh, just imagine the same cliched horseshit that’s been the foundation of every single RPG of this type since Baldur’s Gate 2 and you’ll have the story as it pertains to your character in particular. Far more interesting is the wider world of Tyranny, which you get to explore in the course of cleaning up the fallout from the tutorial — I really liked that there was no clean solution to the Chorus vs. Disfavored problem and that no matter what you did you were going to end up pissing somebody off. I do also feel like the tutorial itself could have implemented this a little more organically rather than presenting you with a “NOW CHOOSE” crisis point, but I guess they wanted to give you one last chance to walk back anything stupid that you might have done while getting to grips with the factions and the reputation system. Anyway, you flit about the world putting the boot into dissident groups and rebel factions and in the process learn much more about Tyranny’s world and its backstory, and I must say this was a significant improvement on the comparatively dry and tasteless world of Pillars Of Eternity. As usual for an Obsidian game the writing is very high-quality, but there’s also a large sprinkling of flavour provided by all the locations that you visit having a very tangible history; there’s one or two Generic Cities that are basically just there so that you have somewhere to sell the vast piles of weapons and armour that you’ve looted from the bodies of your foes (this hasn’t changed from Pillars), but for the most part it’s fascinating to see how Kyros’ conquest has changed things, and how you can change them back.

Kyros’ empire being a nuanced, layered place full of people who are for the most part just trying to get through the day is one of Tyranny’s big strengths, but in light of that marketing I also feel it’s a bit of a weakness too. Kyros himself is a mysterious, powerful figure who wields magics that nobody else really understands, but beneath him stands a rather mundane and human structure. Your role as a Fatebinder is one of a roving judge, but while you might be expecting to roleplay Judge Dredd the cases you’re presented with are more reminiscent of Judge Judy: petty squabbles over goods and jobs and merchant trading rights. Yes, you can usually end these cases by having somebody executed but it seems like something of an overreaction given the circumstances. Tellingly, the responses you’re able to pick in these conversations usually follow the standard RPG blueprint: you’ve got the Good option, the Self-Serving option, the Evil option, and the I’m Going To Kill You option⁴. At no point in the game are you presented with any particularly difficult moral choices; there’s no case where you’re forced to choose between the lesser of two evils in the name of trying to do some kind of good, which is the sort of thing that I was expecting from Tyranny.  The supposed evil empire is, at the end of the day, no more evil than the Roman Empire was; I’m not arguing that the Roman Empire wasn’t a pretty shitty place for anyone who wasn’t on top of the pile, but I don’t think you could call it inherently evil, like there was some black beating heart at the centre of it. It was just people being people, and Kyros’ empire is too. While Tyranny’s portrayal of the empire as a very human environment makes it a great place to set an RPG its world and the way you interact with it is far closer to something like Pillars than the premise implies.

And this is a bigger problem for Tyranny than it sounds, because it’s painfully obvious that Tyranny was a game made on a shoestring budget and that’s resulted in a lot of natural carryovers from Pillars in and of itself. The companion and inventory systems are identical. Combat has many of the same basic concepts as that found in Pillars, although the bewildering array of spells and abilities has been helpfully streamlined to make it a system that’s now parsable by a human who hasn’t spent dozens of hours playing it; I’ve seen people say it’s been dumbed down but I found Tyranny’s combat to be far more enjoyable than what I experienced when I revisited Pillars to play White March. Speaking of White March, Tyranny imports the Artifact Weapons found in the expansion pack. There is a lot of carryover, and while I’m not complaining all that much since everything they’ve imported was at least proven to work the first time around, it does ensure that the two games bear more than a superficial resemblance to one another. The budget limitations also mean there are some parts of the game that feel distinctly underfed, in particular the Missive interface (think fantasy e-mail) which is used for all of one significant conversation, and the ending, which is very similar to Mankind Divided in that Tyranny gets about two thirds of the way through the story and then just… stops. It’s a far more coherent two-thirds than Mankind Divided managed and does at least halt at a natural break point that leaves room for an expansion pack to round out the story, but it still feels ridiculously anticlimactic to have a third act that takes about half an hour and then finishes with you pushing a button.

(Oh, and Tyranny also shares Pillars’ ridiculous loading times. It should not take twenty seconds plus to load a tiny room with two people in it. There’s a city with about fifteen of these building interiors and I gave up exploring them after the sixth or seventh one because I couldn’t face sitting through another loading screen.)

Still, Tyranny does have one last significant card to play: it’s taken heavy inspiration from Alpha Protocol for its reputation system, and that logic carries through to the game’s replayability. It does choice and consequence right, scattering little decision points throughout the game that all add up to produce a story that feels truly organic – because it is. It’s genuinely changed in response to your actions. Aligning yourself with one faction or another in the tutorial (or even spurning them both) will significantly change how the rest of the game plays out from that point onward. I would up carving my way through more than one settlement that was obviously supposed to have NPCs and questlines in it because my choices earlier on in the story had flagged me as an enemy to those people. I think there’s at least four different ways to play through it, and while I find the idea of a second playthrough less immediately compelling than I did in Alpha Protocol⁵ I might eventually go back to it to see how the “Screw everyone, I’m the best” path plays out. That’s more than I can say for Pillars.

In a way, Tyranny is everything I’ve come to expect from an Obsidian RPG. It has good writing, an engaging world and a story that evolves as you play it — just so long as you’re willing to put up with all of the flaws and cut content. I’ve made many positive comparisons to Alpha Protocol throughout this review and that’s pretty damn high praise, but Tyranny’s development issues are more glaringly obvious than those in Alpha Protocol⁶. More than anything else, though, I feel like it would have benefited from not being sold as a game where you play the Bad Guy, when it’s actually an entirely conventional RPG. It’s a good one, don’t get me wrong, but I couldn’t get over that expectation the whole time I was playing it, and when you combine that with the odd decision to release it during Hell Month (which has already done for at least one GOTY candidate) it’s ensured that I think less of it than I probably should do.

The post Thoughts: Tyranny appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

The first part of the White March expansion to Pillars of Eternity was released almost a year ago. I bought it, downloaded it and tried it, and bounced straight off almost immediately – partly this was down to a… questionable design decision that I’ll talk about in due course, but mostly it’s down to the game world. PoE’s fantasy universe succeeds in being more complicated and more nuanced than the entry-level D&D world of Baldur’s Gate, but that comes at the cost of accessibility and it turns out Pillars of Eternity is a damn hard game to get back into after six months, especially since the expansion does an absolutely terrible job of onboarding you into its content. I tried again in February on the release of part two of White March and got a little further, playing for an hour or so before I unaccountably lost interest; it turns out that you need to both be in the correct mood and have a sizeable run-up before you can really pick up White March with a seasoned adventuring party.

This is partly because Obsidian have made the weird decision not to target White March at a party which has played and completed the base Pillars of Eternity campaign, but instead to slot the majority of its content in about midway through the game — the new White March area itself is designed for player characters who are around level 7-8, when the reality is that the majority of people who are playing this thing will be tackling it with a party that’s at the pre-expansion level cap of 12. I’m not complaining that the expansion enemies were underlevelled compared to me, especially since it does provide you with an option to upscale them to provide an appropriate challenge for your level. However the fact that I was supposed to be hitting this area about fifteen hours before I actually did meant that I had to actively rewind my brain a little bit to think about the stuff that was actually important back then; it took me several hours to remember who the Leaden Key goons I was supposedly chasing into the March were, or what the hell a pargrunen was supposed to be, or why the various gods involved were important to the plot. It’s a dense world, and while D&D defining most of the genre tropes makes it a very easy world to fall back into the opposite is true of the world of Pillars; there’s practically no on-ramping to recognise that you might be a returning player, and that makes this process about twice as hard than it really needs to be.

Still, I’m sure that if you were to start a new game of Pillars from scratch you’d have enough time to get up to speed, and the new content would actually fit in quite nicely from a pacing perspective, if not a narrative one. White March takes the standard DLC approach of having you go back to your stronghold where you receive the equivalent of a letter saying that there’s a couple of new areas on the map and that you should totally go visit them¹, and while there’s a couple of quests baked into older areas of the game the vast bulk of the expansion is split off into two new standalone questlines. Probably four-fifths of the content is reserved for the White March questline, which takes place in a snowy winter wonderland that’s just as impeccably presented as the environments in the original game; this is the story of the reclamation of an ancient dwarven forge called Durgan’s Battery and the ensuing fallout, and it’s all pretty high quality throughout. There’s a new hub area, Stalwart, with all of its attendant sidequests and bounties, 4-5 different overworld maps in the White March itself, and several dungeons to crawl through including the Battery. There’s three new party members to be found in the White March — a Barbarian, a Monk and a Rogue, rounding out the missing character classes from PoE’s existing party roster — and my only complaint about these is that while their characterisation is decently handled compared to the existing NPCs, their personal sidequests are extremely brief; there’s certainly nothing that even comes close to the extended conversations you have with Durance in the main game.

The White March expansion was released in two parts, and this has caused the White March narrative to similarly be split into two parts. Reclaiming Durgan’s Battery is Part One, and while it’s well-written throughout it’s also pretty standard RPG fare; there’s any number of motivations for your wanting to do it but when you boil it down to its most fundamental idea you are, basically, reclaiming Moria from Lord Of The Rings — albeit a rather low-budget version, as while the Pillars background art is very pretty it can’t do anything to really match the visuals from the film.  There’s even a whole bit around trying to get the front door to open that’s arguably more interesting than the Battery itself, which is a stock dungeon adventure where you hit angry ghosts in the face. Eventually you run out of ghosts and get to the bottom and restart the forge, at which point you have to leave White March and come back to trigger the second part of the expansion; this is supposed to be because some time has passed in between, but I found it a little bit jarring nonetheless. Part Two takes a lot of its cues from Mask Of The Betrayer, being all about gods and the forgetting thereof – there’s one part that’s a straight-up ripoff of one of the most iconic scenes from MotB — but while it doesn’t win any points for originality some of that narrative shine does end up rubbing off on White March and the second half consequently ends up feeling a lot more accomplished. Most importantly it feels like its own story, a story that’s naturally part of the world it is set in and which is well worth telling, and which is a definite set up from the relatively humdrum Part One. I have some reservations about how well it fits in with the main storyline since the stakes seem so much higher than thwarting Thaos, but I think that’s more a failing of the main campaign’s plot than it is White March.

So the White March setting is an okay-to-good level of quality, ensuring that the bulk of the expansion’s content is relatively worthwhile if you liked Pillars. Outside of the White March, though, it’s a very different story. You see, while I may have complained about this expansion not being targeted at endgame players that’s not quite true of all of White March’s content.  Obsidian have included a couple of areas that are actually targeted at players beyond the original level cap of 12 – i.e. you have to have done the White March questline first in order to get enough levels to take it on. If you go there before you’re ready you’re going to get absolutely destroyed, because it’s an extremely combat-focused quest designed for people who really grok Pillars’ complex combat system and you can’t survive there without the edge those couple of extra levels give you. Unfortunately:

• Pillars does absolutely nothing to surface this little titbit of information.
• The first area of this questline, Cragholdt, is built into the main PoE campaign map just above your stronghold of Cad Nua rather than being hived off in its own area like the White March, all but ensuring the majority of players are going to visit it first.

This takes White March’s atrocious onboarding to a whole new level. Not only do you have to make an effort to get back into the world and the lore, but it’s extremely likely that you first experience of the expansion is going to be getting your ass handed to you by enemies who pull the teleporting-into-your-backline horseshit I so despised in the main campaign. Cragholdt really needed some sort of warning on it saying “These guys are tougher than the Adra Dragon, AVOID UNTIL READY”; as it is it’s a large part of why I bounced off the expansion the first time around since I assumed the entire expansion would be as poorly-balanced as Cragholdt appears to be to a returning player.

(Also, apropos of nothing: the enemies you fight here are a mercenary company who are inexplicably more powerful than archwizards and dragons. It really smacks of the opening of Throne of Bhaal, where your character was literally approaching godlike levels of power and so they had to hand the basic human mooks +3 enchanted weapons in order to even pose a baseline level of threat to you.)

Cragholdt left such a bad taste in my mouth, in fact, that I avoided the area altogether even after getting enough levels to be able to take it on; I like the Pillars combat system but I’m absolutely not interested in something that throws broken enemies at me just to get me to optimise my party configuration, and the fact that it’s so story-light just makes it easier to ignore completely. The rest of the expansion is, as I said earlier, okay bordering on good in places, but I think that as far as I’m concerned that’s actually a disappointing outcome for a Pillars expansion. I said in my original review that, while generally weak story-wise, the base game did do the hard work of setting up the world and systems to be developed and explored properly by an expansion such as White March. However I don’t feel like White March achieves this. It’s a workmanlike addition to the game rather than a proper expansion on the ideas and concepts of the Pillars world, and its best beat is imported wholesale from an expansion to a completely different game that’s almost a decade old at this point. White March certainly delivers more of the same content as the base game but it doesn’t really improve on it, and so I think it’s kind of a failure; it’s an expansion pack that forgets to actually expand the game in any significant way, and a definite sub-par performance from a developer that had previously specialised in taking already-existing worlds and making them amazing².

Anyway, after two decidedly underwhelming experiences I think I’m done with the Pillars world now, and it looks like Obsidian are too — at least for the time being. Roll on Tyranny I guess.

The post Thoughts: Pillars Of Eternity – White March appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Pillars of Eternity is a game that’s trying to be too many things to too many people.

To Obsidian, it’s a chance to prove themselves; after years of putting out bugged/incomplete titles because of publisher interference, they can finally show what they can do when developing a game with their own funding on their own schedule. To the gaming world at large it has some sizeable shoes to fill as a spiritual successor to the old Infinity Engine games, a Baldur’s Gate 3 in all but name.  And to the people who backed it on Kickstarter, and who have been waiting the best part of three years for the game to be finished, there were a lot of promises made. Strongholds! Cities! A 15-level mega-dungeon! All things that would require a lot of time and effort in order to do properly, and since Pillars of Eternity is also the most successful game Kickstarter that’s actually going to be released it’s fair to say that Obsidian must have been feeling the weight of expectation a little bit.

Given that, is it really any wonder that they’ve ended up playing it safe?

Pillars of Eternity is a good game that doesn’t take the risks it needed to in order to be outstanding. It chooses the road-more-travelled at almost every turn in terms of its structure and themes, with only a little bit of Obsidian’s trademark choice-and-consequence to liven things up. Now, a “good” Obsidian RPG is automatically going to be better than 90% of other RPGs released this year since they’ve been at this a while and they know what they’re doing, so perhaps this was the right thing to do. Pillars has a lot it needs to accomplish; in addition to ticking all of the above boxes it had to establish, from scratch, a brand new world with its own rules and foibles, and so playing it safe might have been the wiser option.

My problem here — and Obsidian’s problem, in my opinion — is that they’ve previously excelled at taking somebody else’s established intellectual property and driving it into new and interesting territory. Knights of the Old Republic 2, Neverwinter Nights 2, Fallout: New Vegas — this sort of restructuring is basically their entire resume for the past decade, Alpha Protocol excepted.  Now that they’re playing with their own IP and their own universe they seem to be a lot more reluctant to go off-piste. Pillars of Eternity could just as easily have been a Baldur’s Gate game had it been released ten years ago, and while that’s precisely what a lot of people who backed it will have been looking for it’s also not entirely a good thing.

Nowhere is this more obvious than the game’s main plot. Set in the virgin swords-and-sorcery world of Eora,  Pillars has you playing the part of a Bhaalspawn Spectre Grey Warden Watcher, which is something that caused an eye-roll of epic proportions once I realised I was going to spend yet another game being referred to as a capitalised noun that gave me magic powers. Pillars’ big conceit is that the reincarnation of souls into new bodies after they die is both proven and commonplace, and thanks to being caught in a magical storm during the game’s tutorial sequence you’ve gained the ability to see other people’s past lives — and your own. Said magic storm was kicked off by the game’s main villain, Thaos, and so you spend the rest of the game hunting him down so that you can get some sort of explanation, or at least deliver a strongly-worded note telling him not to do it again.

If this sounds familiar it’s because it’s the plot to Baldur’s Gate 2 with some of the words changed – except Pillars’ take on it is far weaker. The player’s motivations for hunting Thaos are never explained convincingly; one of your past lives is connected with him in some way, but there’s nothing else particularly driving the Watcher to travel halfway across the planet in search of the man. Unlike BG 2’s baddie wizard Jon Irenicus, Thaos hasn’t taken anything from you, he has no cure for your condition, and he’s not voiced by David Warner, making it spectacularly hard to care his nefarious plots. The Watcher thing itself is treated in a very fuzzy way; the game says it’s basically a terminal illness where you slowly lose control and become unable to tell the difference between your past lives and your current one, but it only ever says it. It never surfaces this descent into madness to you in any tangible way; you experience many visions of the past but they’re always relevant to the plot or sidequest you’re currently on, which made me wonder why I’d be so anxious to get rid of something so useful. BG 2 at least had the player character experience some pretty hardcore nightmares that gave them some impetus to find Irenicus and fix their problem. Pillars on the other hand seems to think it’s enough to assume you’ll be happy spending thirty hours finding Thaos just because that’s what the main quest tells you to do.

There’s no getting around the fact that Pillars’ main plotline is a pale shadow of what you’d expect from a game of its heritage, and that’s its a largely self-inflicted wound caused  by the conservative need to stick to the general story structure of the Baldur’s Gate series. The story does get interesting towards the end, but that’s due to reasons and revelations that have absolutely sod all to do with the first twenty hours of the game — and even then I couldn’t help but think that Mask of the Betrayer explored many of the same themes in a far more effective way. Some of the individual story events are fun enough, but because it’s so unusually clumsy in tying those events together into a coherent narrative there’s no single moment in Pillars that even comes close to the punch-to-the-gut conversation with Myrkul in MotB. Perhaps that’s a high bar for the game to clear, but it’s one Obsidian themselves set back in 2007 and one that I was hoping they’d at least equal with a game set in their own universe. As it is Pillars not only falls short, it also only narrowly avoids sprawling in the dirt thanks to Obsidian’s innate talent for choice and consequence.

These elements are less emphasised than they were in something like Alpha Protocol, but they are present and they’re very welcome – in fact I think they might be improved by being less obvious, as that makes for a more organic-seeming game where the player likely to respond naturally to the situation at hand instead of trying to game it. Instead of having you make obviously-signposted binary decisions (as you would in a Bioware game) Pillars chooses to deal with the choices you make through reputation and disposition scores. Reputation is exactly what you’d think; you have a reputation score with each major faction/town in the game, and certain plot events and quests will appear or be closed off to you based on how your previous actions have affected your standings with these groups. Then you’ve got Disposition, which is more to do with the manner in which your character has interacted with the world in general. If you’re true to your word you’ll pick up levels in the Honest disposition. If you threaten people a lot you’ll acquire an Aggressive disposition. The stronger your disposition is, the more likely you’ll be able to rely on it in conversation in the future, trading on your Honest reputation to get people to trust you or using the evidence of your Aggressive nature as a warning to others. The conversation options opened up by your dispositions won’t necessarily lead to better outcomes, but they at least give you more choices and encourage you to stick to a coherent character rather than — again — trying to game the system.

This ability to subtly mould events according to your character’s nature is very welcome in a game with such a thin main plotline, as it at least provides the sense that your involvement is having some effect on the outcome, even if it’s an illusory one. Better news is that the various companions you pick up on your travels are written with the confidence and sophistication that you’d expect from a developer of Obsidian’s calibre – Durance in particular is the first RPG cleric-type I’ve encountered who has made me buy into his spells being powered by his religious zeal rather than just being a particularly heavily-armoured mage whose speciality is healing people — and the vast majority of the side-quests are similarly excellent, with very few of them falling into the Fedex trap. Since that main plotline is so anaemic the side quests are what you spend probably 70-80% of your time on in Pillars, and so despite its weaknesses it still ends up being a pretty strong game in terms of content. It tapers off a little towards the end, as I think the second city was added more to tick some Kickstarter boxes than it was because the designers had anything particularly interesting in mind for the player to do there, but fortunately this is where the main plot starts to take up some of the slack and things remain on a somewhat even keel all the way up to the end boss.

One area where the conscious decision to ape Baldur’s Gate has helped rather than harmed Pillars is its appearance. I don’t know how it’ll look to someone who didn’t play the BG saga at the time and whose nostalgia glands won’t be firing at full throttle, but Pillars of Eternity is a really pretty game. The characters are 3D models and they look a bit basic when viewed side on in the level up screen; however when you switch to the isometric viewpoint the Infinity Engine is known for they look very nice indeed when paired with the painted/rendered backdrops; fifteen years of progress in how these things are drawn has done wonders for their appearance and detail, and about the only complaint I can make is that the maps themselves seem a fair bit smaller than the ones from the Baldur’s Gate series. Maybe that’s just because I spent most of the game with things zoomed out as far as they would go, though. While the UI is a carbon copy of BG’s in some places — everything from the movement and inventory icons to the faux-90s renders of environments in the loading screens to the layout of the innkeeper screen is designed to evoke fond memories of those games — there’s also a few incredibly welcome interface improvements, chief of which is the Fast Mode button that doubles the speed of the game and makes trudging from one map edge to another far less painful. I’m not so sure about the player stash, which is essentially a bottomless Bag of Holding you can access at any time and which allows you to loot literally everything you come across; it doesn’t matter that a merchant only pays 5 gold pieces for a Xaurip spear when you’re selling him two hundred of the things, and pretty soon money becomes totally meaningless. RPG economies usually break towards the endgame if the player is doing all of the content, but I wasn’t expecting Pillars to take the mechanical equivalent of a claw hammer to its own economy with such enthusiasm.

Still, it’d be selling the game short to say it doesn’t make some significant improvements over the Infinity Engine games. The combat system is outstanding, taking more than a few pointers from classic Microprose RPG Darklands. It’s built around the concept of fatigue and damage reduction; unlike D&D, wearing heavier armour won’t do anything to stop you from getting hit, but it will apply a flat reduction to the amount of damage you take. If the armour you’re wearing is thick enough you’ll only take a point or two of HP damage per attack, meaning your fighter in plate armour has suddenly become very difficult to kill in a melee and can tank multiple opponents for a long, long time. They won’t do all that much damage, mind — heavier armour does slow the wearer down so that they can’t attack as often, but this is why you have a backline of mages, rangers and other classes armed with missile weapons. Muskets and pistols are available in the Pillars universe and these weapons have armour piercing properties that make them very good against tougher enemies (who have damage reduction just like you do), meaning your backline often becomes a gunline when you’re fighting a boss.

The other thing Pillars lifts from Darklands is the separation of fatigue from regular hitpoint damage. In practice most characters have enough HP that they’ll never run out during a single fight, but what they have to watch out for is fatigue damage. Most attacks do fatigue damage to a character’s Endurance pool along with regular damage to their HP pool — getting hit in the face by multiple assailants is going to knacker you out even if you’re inside otherwise impregnable plate armour — and a character’s Endurance limit is much smaller than their HP pool.  Letting your Endurance reach zero means that character will be knocked out and won’t get back up again until after the fight is done, so it’s just as dangerous as running out of HP. Fighters get big Endurance pools and skills that boost their recovery of Endurance points during a fight, which is another reason to stick them on the frontline and let them handle the skull-bashing while the rest of the party retires to a safe distance.

Fortunately Endurance damage completely regenerates once you exit combat, so it’s not something you have to worry about long-term; however any HP damage that’s bled through your armour cannot be healed except by resting up. This used to be something you did practically after every fight in Baldur’s Gate as there was very little downside to it, but Pillars puts the kibosh on that by making every rest stop consume one set of camping supplies — and you can only carry four of those at any one time. The decision of whether or not to rest therefore becomes a matter of how far you want to push your luck. Your party might be half-knackered, or you might have fired off all your good spells in the last fight, but you have to balance that against your dwindling count of camping supplies; can you get through one or two more combats without having to rest up? This is something of an artificial choice as enemies don’t respawn and you can always exit whatever dungeon you’re in to go and buy some more camping supplies from an ever-obliging innkeeper, but that’s enough of a faff that you still don’t want to rest unless you absolutely have to.

I like the things Pillars does with combat. Every class has something unique they bring to the table, and nobody is gear-locked by an absurd “can’t use spells unless I’m in my pyjamas” requirement. This gives Pillars a flexibility in how you put together your party that’s rather missing from modern RPGs; I’ve seen the Chanter NPC you pick up three hours in built with at least three different gear configurations, all of which are perfectly valid for what he does. It also makes the choice of sword and shield versus big two-handed weapon versus missile weapon a much more interesting one, as there are scenarios in which you might want to switch between all three on the fly depending on where you’re positioned and what opponent you’re fighting. It does have the problem that once you’re max level on Normal difficulty you can roll over just about any opposition that isn’t the end boss of Od Nua without breaking a sweat, but I think this is one of those rare RPGs where I’d actually be interested in playing it through on a harder difficulty level for the extra challenge, as the combat system is good enough to justify it.

And now, because I want to fit it in somewhere and we’re getting close to the end of the review, it’s time for the Kickstarter rant: because this is a Kickstarter game, there’s rather a lot of “features” that are in the game because they were promised as one of the Kickstarter stretch goals/backer rewards, not because they were in any way a good idea. Top of the list here is the player stronghold, added when the Kickstarter reached $3 million but never removed once Obsidian realised that they didn’t have the time or resources to make it work. When you first get it you’re bombarded with a list of about twenty-odd improvements such as new fortifications or renovating the buildings inside the stronghold’s bailey that take both money and in-game time to construct. Finishing them all takes most of the length of the game, but the problem is that none of these improvements actually do anything interesting. Most of them increase your stronghold’s Prestige and Security ratings, each of which amounts to a generic number since it’s never adequately explained what they do, and they never seem to have any effect in game. Bandits will still steal your taxes and attack your keep even with max security. Prestige boosts said tax rate, except by the point you get the stronghold you’re already the Eoran equivalent of Nicholas Cage from Lord of War thanks to the industrial quantities of only slightly bloodstained second-hand weapons and armour you’ve been flogging to innkeepers across the continent, and so you don’t need an extra seven hundred gold every hour. Occasionally a quest will come up in the stronghold which you can assign one of your inactive NPC companions to — a nice idea that I thought Dragon Age Inquisition should have taken advantage of — but once again the rewards from these quests are so pathetic and inconsequential you wonder why Obsidian even bothered including them in the first place. It’s a running theme in this review, but Obsidian executed the same concept much more effectively in one of their previous games (in this case Neverwinter Nights 2¹), so why is this version of it such a pale imitation of their past success?

(Other things on that list: the 15-level mega-dungeon, which you can tell Obsidian were regretting committing to once you get down to level 9 or 10 and the level maps have shrunk to something roughly the size of a broom closet containing a few angry mushrooms and nothing else, and the backer characters and gravestones, which only confirms my thesis that letting your most rabid and obsessive fans author even a tiny amount of content in your game is a terrible fucking idea any way you look at it. )

Finally, this is an Obsidian game. That’s a name that’s become synonymous with deep, well-written RPGs, but sadly also with bugs. Previously a lot of people excused them on the basis that they kept getting screwed over by publishers, couldn’t work to their own schedule and had to rush games out the door in an unfinished state. This is exactly the situation that the Kickstarter funding was supposed to avoid, which is why I’m more than a little surprised to find that Pillars of Eternity is still riddled with bugs. In my thirty hours I’ve experienced the following:

• Characters repeatedly getting stuck in the prone position after a fight, necessitating a reload.
• A scripted trigger un-firing and resetting an area to its initial peaceful state after a bunch of monsters had been let loose in the level. After killing the monsters while the various bystanders looked on in disinterest, I was immediately attacked on the next level by the guards after (I assume) the game deemed my actions to be hostile somehow.
• The Swarm of Insects spell having an indefinite duration. Since this is a damage over time debuff spell it makes any fight involving enemies that use it practically impossible unless you cheese it.
• Bounty targets not spawning in the very small area where the quest said they could be found.
• A repeatable, unavoidable hard crash to desktop in Raedric’s Hold that wasn’t solved by reloading. I was just lucky I had a save from just before I went there that I could go back to; otherwise this would have been a game-ending bug.
• Bloating save/load times that got longer and longer the further I got into the game. Loading screens were taking thirty seconds plus towards the end – since you have to endure a loading screen every time you enter a building or change floors this quickly became extremely obnoxious².

Yes, Pillars of Eternity is a big, complex RPG, and the worst of these bugs have since been squashed in the game’s first patch, but while it wasn’t Total War levels of broken Pillars’ release state is still enough to make me think that maybe the publishers weren’t entirely to blame for Obsidian’s previous failures in this regard.

So Pillars of Eternity isn’t quite the unqualified success that everyone was hoping for. There is one area in which it does excel: it may be a decade too late, but this is as close to Baldur’s Gate 3 as we’re ever going to get. If you were expecting more than that you’re probably going to go away disappointed, however, since I don’t think it matches the quality of Obsidian’s previous output. The work that’s gone into establishing the world, the engine and the combat mechanics is by no means wasted, but nearly everything else in Pillars has been done before in a far more effective manner in a previous Obsidian title. Perhaps it’s a little unfair to ask that much of the game, though; it does its job competently, if a little unimaginatively, and expecting more of it just because it’s Obsidian making it seems a little churlish in hindsight. If nothing else, Pillars of Eternity does successfully set the stage for a sequel or expansion that’ll do the really interesting things with the universe that Pillars shies away from. And that will be a project more suited to Obsidian’s strengths, I think.

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The post Thoughts: Pillars Of Eternity appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Now this is a surprise. I don’t think anybody was expecting Dungeon Siege III to be anything other than a by-the-numbers cash-in, a hack n’ slash action game churned out with little thought or care purely because Square Enix had the licence going spare and Obsidian needed some money. I certainly wasn’t expecting it to turn out to be one of the better games I’ve ended up playing this year.

In retrospect this probably wasn’t giving Obsidian enough credit. Baroque RPG games (by today’s standards, anyway) are their speciality, and while I’m not saying Dungeon Siege III is the next Planescape: Torment or anything it still has a story that’s really far too good for the action RPG it’s ended up bolted to. It’s been a while since I played the original Dungeon Siege, but I seem to recall the plot there being something along the lines of KRUG ARE ATTACKING KILL THE KRUG – a simple, uncomplicated excuse for hitting things, and ultimately one of the reasons why Dungeon Siege isn’t that fondly remembered these days. DS3 by contrast seems rather shallow and superficial – “The bad lady killed the order of good knights protecting the country! Rebuild the order and restore peace and justice to the land!” – but as I made my way deeper into the game it revealed plenty of hidden depth – not quite to the same degree as KOTOR 2 or Alpha Protocol, but certainly more than can be found in the average Bioware RPG. There’s plenty of decisions to be made as the story unfolds, some of which appear to have game-changing consequences and all of which get a little callback during the Fallout-esque end narration.

This is going above and beyond the call of duty as far as Dungeon Siege is concerned. A complex story wasn’t necessary but Obsidian did it anyway, and it makes the game far better than it really has any right to be. Yes, there are some concessions that have been made to the format – it’d be very, very hard to miss even one side-quest, for example, and any hard decisions I had to make were literally signposted in conversation (presumably for the hard-of-thinking console players the game is primarily aimed at), but it’s more than enough to raise it up above the horde of Diablo-alikes I’ve attempted and abandoned over the years, not least because I finished Dungeon Siege III on the strength of its story. The denouement is something of an anti-climax – a common problem with most RPGs these days – but the end cutscene more than makes up for it.

So that’s the major surprise attached to Dungeon Siege III. What about the actual game? As it turns out, Obsidian surprised me again by making a game that was:

• Fun to play.
• Very good looking (from the isometric perspective, anyway).
• Bug-free.

There’s a few rather odd choices like having every single conversation take place with the camera squarely aimed at the back of the player character’s head the whole time, and when zoomed in to the level necessary to have conversations the graphics definitely start to show their rough edges. Still, by Obsidian standards this is nothing short of a triumph, not least because they got the crucial combat element almost exactly right.

I played through the adventure as Reinhart, a teleporting git-wizard who started the game uppercutting everyone so hard they flew off the screen. The difficulty quickly ramped up so that this was no longer possible – especially since Reinhart has a nasty tendency to crumple under two or three hits from even a normal baddie – but this simply forced me to get acquainted with my dodge button. His combat abilities and talents are well thought out so that there are several synergies which boost each other and the boss fights are structured so that each one isn’t beatable with just one ability or tactic. I died a dozen times on one boss before I realised that blocking her blue homing deathbeams was much better than dodging them and having them hit me in the back. Another boss amassed a similar heap of Reinhart corpses with his merciless barrage of shotgun-snot until it occurred to me to toss a mirror image at him first so that he’d have something else to shoot at. It’s a very nice piece of design, and one which I wish more games would emulate.

Unfortunately – this being Obsidian – there are still a few gaping holes here and there. The primary one is that Dungeon Siege III is designed and marketed as a co-op game, yet it goes out of its way to make co-op as frustrating and unfriendly to the player as it possibly can. There’s two major problems with it.

1)      All the characters in a game are stored locally, with the host. This means that I can’t take the Lucas from my game and go and play with Kenti. I have to use his Lucas in his game. When I quit, that Lucas will stay on Kenti’s computer. I can’t take the character or any items out of Kenti’s game, and if Kenti decides never to play again I’m screwed. This means that the only one with a stake in the game is the host player; anyone who joins is basically just playing for shits and giggles.

2)      So let’s say we’ve got two players willing to put up with that in-built limitation, and that they’ve agreed to only play that particular game together so that both characters progress at the same rate.  This is where the second problem rears its ugly head: the camera is permanently nailed to the host player’s perspective. It’ll move a little with the client player, but they’re only allowed so far away from the host before they get tugged back on their invisible leash. This pisses both players off because the client can’t hit anything outside of this magic radius while the host can’t aim properly due to the client constantly moving around to try and hurt things that are off-camera.

Both of these problems are down to the game being designed for this mythical beast called “couch co-op”. Dungeon Siege III is great if you happen to want to sit down with your buddy in front of a 360 and pick up a controller for a few minutes of multiplayer mayhem, but this comes at the expense of the vast majority of players who primarily go for online co-op. Ironically this all means that co-op’s latest poster child is far more fun to play in single-player than it ever will be with a friend. I don’t quite know what Obsidian were thinking here.

Still, I’m not going to let that cloud my view of things when the single-player stands alone remarkably well. There are other more salient flaws: the shop and inventory interfaces manage the astonishing feat of actually being worse than the ones in Mass Effect; most loot will only change the colour of a character’s outfit when equipped and not the outfit itself; combat occasionally gets too noisy to see what the fuck is going on; there’s no tooltips explaining what all the special equipment effects are and they’ve all got non-intuitive names (so +Critical Damage is now “Doom” and Stun is now “Warding”, or alternatively “Stagger”), etc. etc. Crucially, though, none of these flaws were serious enough to significantly hamper my enjoyment of the game, and I enjoyed it a lot. For that alone Obsidian deserve high praise.

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