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.

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.

—————————————————————

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