I’m actually a Kickstarter backer for this so the reason why I’m slow to play newly released games isn’t always because I’m a cheapskate who buys games only when they’re on sale. Of course, the good thing about this is that I only play them after they’d been more or less fully patched and Pillars of Eternity is a game that had more than its fair share of bugs when it first launched. It’s worth noting however that even now it still has more bugs than I’d expect though they are minor ones that don’t really affect gameplay such as error messages in the textbox and getting exploration XP over and over again at a specific location. The most annoying bug I had is how the dialog buttons disappear from the save game menu after you’ve been playing for a while.

The first big surprise I got when first starting it up are the mediocre production values. Despite it being a high profile game, this definitely isn’t an AAA-quality production. Graphics are middling, aesthetic customization of characters is extremely lacking, voice acting is bland, and I even occasionally get problems with sound effects getting abruptly cut off. One thing they didn’t skimp on is the volume of in-game text. Holy shit, there sure is an awful lot of fluff to read. Unfortunately like everything else, writing quality is only mediocre and combined with how verbose the prose tends to be, I pretty much stopped reading everything after a while.

One of the team’s boasts was their original fantasy world. Again, I think it’s only mediocre. There are some cool ideas in there and you can’t fault the scope of their ambition. But instead of feeling like anything coherent, it feels like what it really is: a mishmash of stuff from lots of different sources without anything really tying them together. Then it makes the mistake of throwing a lot of new names and terms and history to the player all at once instead of a gentle introduction so you end up not really caring about the setting. I can’t help but compare this to the world Bioware created beginning from the first Dragon Age game. Introduce a nation that feels vaguely like medieval England, then tell the player that the world gets invaded by demon-like being every once in a while, then talk about the order that specializes in fighting these things. Simple.

Partially for these reasons, I didn’t find the story very compelling either. It does have its moments. Obtaining the favor of the gods feels suitably epic. And I like how there are many ways to go about doing something, the best example being perhaps infiltrating Raedric’s castle. I even liked the little “choose your own adventure” style bits of text in which you can use your skills and items to solve problems. But on the whole, the writing is a letdown, made even worse by the impression one gets that the writers involved think that they are writing great literature. Even the personal story arcs of your companions seem rather truncated and simple.

Finally we get to the gameplay, which is basically as promised the second coming of Baldur’s Gate. Now, I have a lot of complaints about this too. Game balance seems all over the place: ciphers rock, rangers suck, crowd control spells and abilities are crazy awesome, so much so that the side that gets off a big one first typically wins the battle, and despite all of the balance changes, guns are still amazing. Plus how come you can fire ranged weapons at point blank range with an enemy swinging at you with no penalty? But the fact of the matter is that there are few enough games that offer combat in this mold with a full party of six characters that I’m willing to forgive a lot just  to recapture this experience

It helps a lot that between all of the different classes, talents, items, spells and special abilities, you get a ton of options in combat to play around with. Having six characters allows you have a lot more fun with all this that you just can’t get with only three characters as Dragon Age uses. You’d need a tank who so’s specialized that he or she basically won’t be doing any damage. Then there are off-tank, support, healing, damage and other roles to fill out. You need to decide who’s going to be in melee and who’s going to be in the back row. All of this stuff makes developing and equipping characters a lot more interesting than smaller parties who are forced to have everyone do a little of everything.

It helps even more perhaps that combat difficulty is tuned high enough that all of this matters. At hard difficulty, the game was challenging enough to force me to make full use of all of the tools available to me, plus I had to judiciously use consumables, strategically use my tank to hold chokepoints, and pay attention the enemy’s stats. Enemies appear in large enough groups that they swarm around and leak past your tank. Plus there are enemy equivalents of tanks, ranged damage, priests and mages too, so you really want to just tie down the tanks while burning down the glass cannons as quickly as possible. Then add complicating factors like enemies with AOE abilities or summon adds or who teleport straight to your back row. This adds up to great combat and lots of fun.

What this boils down to is that Pillars of Eternity is a game with combat that despite having many irritating flaws still manages to be excellent. Unfortunately, every other aspect including the much vaunted fortress development is merely good enough. This meant that all things considered I’d have very much preferred a clone of something simple and straightforward like an Icewind Dale game instead of a story-heavy Baldur’s Gate game. Also, I note with regret that even though I greatly enjoyed this nostalgic trip, I’m not sure how much of this gameplay I could take. To a certain extent, all this is been there, done that so I’m not even enthusiastic about the expansion.