Pillars of Eternity

[Steely Glint]

This a good game. One of the best RPGs I've played actually, and certainly the bet one I've played for a long time

Good Things:

- Motherfucking Gambesons
- Goddamn Brigandine
- Coifs
- Non-retarded weapon design. Yeah, I'm looking at you, Skyrim. And Dragon Age.
- Good writing, and story
- Many, many sidequests
- Endlessly complex and rewarding combat mechanics
- Endlessly complex and rewarding RPG and levelling mechanics
- Every state useful for every class.
- Gambesons.

Bad Things:

- Helmets don't do anything and are purely cosmetic.
- They game gives you side quests and the narrative suggests you should pretty much go and do them right away, but you party is actually very much underleveled for the quests.
- People in towns stand around doing the same thing 24/7. I turned up in Defiance Bay (major city), and there was a guy leading a protest rally at 4 in the morning. In Arcanum, for example, characters in settlements have little routines where they go and stand around doing their thing during daylight hours and then bugger off home at night. This gives you a reason to stick to a somewhat normal sleeping pattern because some interactions/shops simply aren't available during the night. In Pillars of Eternity, like the infinity engine games or yore, day/night seems purely cosmetic.
- Stronghold mechanics are kinda meh

So yeah. Highly recommended, if you have a lot of time on your hands. Or not much time on your hands and are happy to play through something in short bursts over a period of months.

[Wraith]

I haven't played it yet as much as I want to, but I have at least gotten through act I and I can say that the game is fantastic. It was worth the wait. It was buggy when I last had the time to play it, but they've released a patch since then that at least fixes the worst bug I encountered - the guaranteed crash after zoning when you've finished a certain quest.

[Steely Glint]

I'm near the end now. There's a lot of little niggles with this game but absolutely no major design flaws at all that I've encountered, which is nice.

I don't really have a whole lot of time for the way the questing flows. I really like they way it just expects you to work out where to go based on in game text, not just follow quest markers but at certain points it just leaves you to guess what you're supposed to be doing. At one point in a companion quest, you're asked to go to a place called Cliaban Riag... which is where, exactly? I mean, that's what you'd ask right? If someone said they want to go to Cliaban Riag? But the game doesn't give you the option to ask. You end up going there as part of the main quest anyway. Another companions joins your part with the express purpose of going to a certain place which it turns out you can't access for totally arbitrary reasons until Act III. So she's really just hanging around with you for no reason until then. It feels very disjointed.

I don't think tying abilities and other mechanics to resting is a good idea in a CRPG. You should rest when it's night-time, not when you need your health and spells back.

Um, travelling. There are these things called horses. And carts. People used them in the olden times. Also if a place takes more than 12 hours to get to, they stopped and slept. A bit too much homage to the old infinity engine titles there I feel.

These are all very much nitpicks, though.

I think this might be one of the most important PC titles for a while, too, especially if it does well amongst non-backers. Shows there's a market for isometric RPGs with complex rulesets, and that no you don't actually have to ape MMORPG mechanics in single player RPGs. Again, looking at you Dragon Age.