I've tried and tried but I'm just not all that into Pillars of Eternity
This is my fourth attempt at playing the Pillars and it is not going too well. During my past three attempts, I quit before the second act. I originally blamed it on my cruddy PC which couldn't run the game lag-free, but now, with an upgraded gpu and all, I realize there is something else to the game that keeps putting me off.
Now, I want to begin by saying that Pillars of Eternity is one of the most meticulously crafted crpgs I've ever played. It is obvious that the folks at Obsidian put their heart and soul into making this game, and it shows. There's an incredible amount of detail and lore and customization. The UI's awesome and the gameplay is a great mix of old Infinity Engine goodness and new inventions. So I'm not saying this game isn't good. It's pretty great, actually.
Yet it isn't as great as it could be. In fact, it seems to lack that special something, that ephemeral, hard-to-define quality that characterizes the legendary, timeless classics such as the Baldur's Gate games.
Firstly, the whole premise to this game is strange. You play as some random guy/gal who goes through a kind of spiritual enlightenment by accident, enabling him/her to see and do things that are off-limits to regular mortals. Okay, interesting enough. However, what happens next is baffling. Instead of cherishing your newfound abilities, the game tries to convice you into believing that having been awakened is a bad thing, and you should do all in your power to reverse it. Granted, I'm not too far into this game, but it makes very little sense to me. Imagine if the plot to Spider Man was to help Peter Parker to find a way to get him rid of his spider powers and help him return to his old life as an awkward pizza delivery boy. I mean, why on earth would I want to do that?
Now, you could say that the plot is similar to that of Baldur's Gate, which is true, but in my opinion there are some important differences. In Baldur's Gate, you start out believing you're completely normal and your predicament is revealed to you over time. You are driven to learn more about your condition precisely because how little you know initially. In PoE, your predicament is revealed to you pretty much right away, and after you learn you're a Watcher, there doesn't really seem to be anything that special to it. Okay, you can talk to souls, so what? Did someone rob you of your home, kill your godfather and desperately want you and your half-sister dead? Nope. Does your fate seem linked to the turmoil that goes on all around you? Kind of, but not directly. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the plot of PoE doesn't feel very personal to me. All it really does is give you an excuse to take up a sword, kill hordes of wolves, thugs and spectres and conquer a keep at your leisure. Sure, it's a better story than your cookie cutter rpg (*cough* Icewind Dale *cough*) but it lacks the immersion of the greats such as BG, Planescape:Torment and Deus Ex.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the game looks and feels a bit bland, despite being full of lore and detail. The general color scheme is very subdued and the art style is almost painfully neutral. I'm aware Dyrwood is supposed to be quite a bleak place, but there is a difference between bleak that is fascinating and bleak that is just dull and lifeless. PS:T was set in a world that's as bleak as it gets, yet it was very much alive and full of fascinating detail. In contrast, Dyrwood looks and feels like an anemic version of Amn or the Sword Coast. Raedric's Hold is just a less interesting version of De'Arnise Keep, the Endless Paths feels like a lackluster print of Durlag's Tower and Defiance Bay conjures up images of a rheumatic Baldur's Gate. It's all very elaborately crafted, but there is very little that stands out or makes me go 'wow'.
The same goes for creatures and character models. None of the monsters I've seen look particularly interesting or threatening, and they all have these weird names that mimick the ones from the D&D universe. So instead of having kobolds, ettercaps, golems, ghouls, vampires and banshees, PoE has xaurips, skuldrs, animats, dargul, fampyrs and Cean Gŵla. Maybe it's just me, but Obsidian seems to have fallen into the trap of trying to reinvent the wheel here. Why didn't they just do a fresh take on the monsters we know and love instead of giving us a range of obscure critters with unpronouncable names? What's more, they don't really look all that interesting to me. Half the time I'd have no idea what I was up against if it wasn't for the floating names. The same goes for the character sprites. They don't have floating labels, so a lot of time I end up selecting the wrong character because they all look pretty much the same.
Thirdly and finally, the combat in this game just isn't all that fun. The engagement system is a bold new idea which I can get behind on paper, but what it does is make the already poor pathing all the more intolerable. No matter how I format my party, my fighters always seem to get stuck between lines of monsters and end up fidgeting around, taking repeated hits in disengagement. The monsters in contrast couldn't care less about being engaged and go around pursuing my squishies with impunity. Not being able to cast spells outside of combat is also theoretically good since it takes away the pressure to metagame, but I really wish they would've given more weight to spellcasters in this game. Coming from Baldur's Gate, it is quite unnerving to realize that your wizard is your least essential party member. In PoE, damage and deflection seems to be all the rage. I'm playing on Path of the Damned, and I've only used crowd control spells a handful of times. Disabling, dispelling and debuffing definitely take a back seat in this game, which consequently makes the combat much less like Baldur's Gate and more like Icewind Dale. The challenge, when it exists, comes from numbers rather than the AI of individual opponents.
Oh, and I'd happily avoid most of the battles if it wasn't for the fact that there is no invisibility and scouting is just a pale reflection of stealth in Baldur's Gate. Oh well.
tl;dr: I know this is coming a year and a half late, but I don't find PoE to be as awesome as some of the reviews make it out to be. Half the time, I wish I was playing Baldur's Gate instead.
Now, I want to begin by saying that Pillars of Eternity is one of the most meticulously crafted crpgs I've ever played. It is obvious that the folks at Obsidian put their heart and soul into making this game, and it shows. There's an incredible amount of detail and lore and customization. The UI's awesome and the gameplay is a great mix of old Infinity Engine goodness and new inventions. So I'm not saying this game isn't good. It's pretty great, actually.
Yet it isn't as great as it could be. In fact, it seems to lack that special something, that ephemeral, hard-to-define quality that characterizes the legendary, timeless classics such as the Baldur's Gate games.
Firstly, the whole premise to this game is strange. You play as some random guy/gal who goes through a kind of spiritual enlightenment by accident, enabling him/her to see and do things that are off-limits to regular mortals. Okay, interesting enough. However, what happens next is baffling. Instead of cherishing your newfound abilities, the game tries to convice you into believing that having been awakened is a bad thing, and you should do all in your power to reverse it. Granted, I'm not too far into this game, but it makes very little sense to me. Imagine if the plot to Spider Man was to help Peter Parker to find a way to get him rid of his spider powers and help him return to his old life as an awkward pizza delivery boy. I mean, why on earth would I want to do that?
Now, you could say that the plot is similar to that of Baldur's Gate, which is true, but in my opinion there are some important differences. In Baldur's Gate, you start out believing you're completely normal and your predicament is revealed to you over time. You are driven to learn more about your condition precisely because how little you know initially. In PoE, your predicament is revealed to you pretty much right away, and after you learn you're a Watcher, there doesn't really seem to be anything that special to it. Okay, you can talk to souls, so what? Did someone rob you of your home, kill your godfather and desperately want you and your half-sister dead? Nope. Does your fate seem linked to the turmoil that goes on all around you? Kind of, but not directly. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the plot of PoE doesn't feel very personal to me. All it really does is give you an excuse to take up a sword, kill hordes of wolves, thugs and spectres and conquer a keep at your leisure. Sure, it's a better story than your cookie cutter rpg (*cough* Icewind Dale *cough*) but it lacks the immersion of the greats such as BG, Planescape:Torment and Deus Ex.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the game looks and feels a bit bland, despite being full of lore and detail. The general color scheme is very subdued and the art style is almost painfully neutral. I'm aware Dyrwood is supposed to be quite a bleak place, but there is a difference between bleak that is fascinating and bleak that is just dull and lifeless. PS:T was set in a world that's as bleak as it gets, yet it was very much alive and full of fascinating detail. In contrast, Dyrwood looks and feels like an anemic version of Amn or the Sword Coast. Raedric's Hold is just a less interesting version of De'Arnise Keep, the Endless Paths feels like a lackluster print of Durlag's Tower and Defiance Bay conjures up images of a rheumatic Baldur's Gate. It's all very elaborately crafted, but there is very little that stands out or makes me go 'wow'.
The same goes for creatures and character models. None of the monsters I've seen look particularly interesting or threatening, and they all have these weird names that mimick the ones from the D&D universe. So instead of having kobolds, ettercaps, golems, ghouls, vampires and banshees, PoE has xaurips, skuldrs, animats, dargul, fampyrs and Cean Gŵla. Maybe it's just me, but Obsidian seems to have fallen into the trap of trying to reinvent the wheel here. Why didn't they just do a fresh take on the monsters we know and love instead of giving us a range of obscure critters with unpronouncable names? What's more, they don't really look all that interesting to me. Half the time I'd have no idea what I was up against if it wasn't for the floating names. The same goes for the character sprites. They don't have floating labels, so a lot of time I end up selecting the wrong character because they all look pretty much the same.
Thirdly and finally, the combat in this game just isn't all that fun. The engagement system is a bold new idea which I can get behind on paper, but what it does is make the already poor pathing all the more intolerable. No matter how I format my party, my fighters always seem to get stuck between lines of monsters and end up fidgeting around, taking repeated hits in disengagement. The monsters in contrast couldn't care less about being engaged and go around pursuing my squishies with impunity. Not being able to cast spells outside of combat is also theoretically good since it takes away the pressure to metagame, but I really wish they would've given more weight to spellcasters in this game. Coming from Baldur's Gate, it is quite unnerving to realize that your wizard is your least essential party member. In PoE, damage and deflection seems to be all the rage. I'm playing on Path of the Damned, and I've only used crowd control spells a handful of times. Disabling, dispelling and debuffing definitely take a back seat in this game, which consequently makes the combat much less like Baldur's Gate and more like Icewind Dale. The challenge, when it exists, comes from numbers rather than the AI of individual opponents.
Oh, and I'd happily avoid most of the battles if it wasn't for the fact that there is no invisibility and scouting is just a pale reflection of stealth in Baldur's Gate. Oh well.
tl;dr: I know this is coming a year and a half late, but I don't find PoE to be as awesome as some of the reviews make it out to be. Half the time, I wish I was playing Baldur's Gate instead.
Post edited by Ballad on
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Comments
That makes it harder to invest in the story, because the story isn't investing in you as an active participant.
It's well designed and beautifully written, but it's missing that one piece that is there to answer the question, "Why should I care?"
I've also said before that PoE seems to not be sure whether it wants to be a epic fantasy (Baldur's Gate) or literary fantasy (PS:T) and falls just short of being either.
You ask why?
It seams to me that if your game project resembles or is close to BG, BG2 or PS:T, someone will find either flaw or something related to that games which doesn't live up the expectations as one would wanted.
When approching to create BG succesor, one needs to take bold moves and inovations never seen before.
Reason for this lies in the nature of human brain. Brain can understand if something is made as carbon copy or creates some spark which hasn't been there before.
Brain spark is made when you have succeeded with novel ideas or twisted old ideas in unusual way.
I just recently gave up on trying to get into PoE as well, for largely the same reasons as the TS - bland visuals and artwork, forgettable characters, detached atmosphere, subplots/quests (particularly the entire stronghold subplot) that are awkwardly shoehorned into the game, some incongruous mechanics, and sudden and extreme difficulty curves.
For anyone who plays as or with a barbarian, there is also an excruciatingly frustrating bug in which the character will suddenly attack him- or herself. After my most recent barbarian creation suddenly decided to beat herself to death, I called it quits for good and uninstalled it from my laptop.
All in all, I'd say the game was a step down from Divinity: OS, another IE-styled throwback that had been released a year before.
In one of my playthroughs, I actually went to Spellhold as soon as I was able. Curiously enough, you can skip Chapter 2 altogether if you're playing a thief and go on a shoplifting spree in the promenade before leaving for the slums. I was quite disappointed to find out that rescuing Imoen early has no storyline benefits whatsoever, quite the contrary. Once you get back to Atkathla, ignoring the main plot for side quests makes even less sense from a roleplaying point of view. I mean, who in their right mind would go treasure hunting when Irenicus has their soul and is about to absorb the power of the Tree of Life? And if you do go treasure hunting, you'll be disappointed to find out that Imoen has absolutely no dialogue or interparty banter for that part of SoA (though this is beautifully remedied in the Imoen Romance mod. [Sue me, I am a fan.])
Personally, I don't think PoE's problem is so much the lack of urgency as the lack of personal importance. Like @Dee said above, the game fails to give you a reason to invest yourself in the story. This, by the way, is also true for the NPC companions. I'm about halfway through the game, yet I still don't understand where most of my companions are coming from and what their motives are. I mean, they're taking an awfully big risk helping some nutty foreigner in his half-hearted quest for his sanity. It all seems very disjointed to me and the more I delve into it, the more it kills my suspension of disbelief.
You should expect from PoE what you get out of a tribute rock band. Maybe they perform some of the old band's songs quite well, hit a few notes, and maybe they produce a few of their own songs that incorporate some of that old sound, but they are unlikely to surpass their forebears because the audience listening has too much extraneous emotional attachment to the original. In time, if things go well for Obsidian they may branch out, but only time will tell. For example, the variety of monsters in PoE relative to BG1 is objectively in PoE's favor - many more monsters doing many more unique things. The combat system is also more complex, as is the combat GUI (even in the area of having spells show you what their radius' are) in PoE. Hell if you play a fighter in IE games there's virtually nothing for you to do besides click on the thing and hope you don't die lol.
Another good example here is that Tim Cain proposed a rather robust and complex crafting system in a KS update and people *freaked out* about how much they hated complex crafting mechanics in games, so instead they created a crafting system that was much less robust and honestly felt kind of tacked on because modern RPGs are just expected to have crafting systems. So there are those sorts of concerns at play as well.
Although if you do have major problems with the combat system you should tell them - 1.0 PoE's combat and the more recent updates are fairly different.
The reason for this is that these games aren't intended for speed-throughs; they're intended for compelling stories. If the player is actually rushed through the game, that limits their enjoyment of the story.
However, the illusion of urgency--the urgency within the story, of "So-and-so did such-and-such and we have to do something now!"--is immensely important. It's the thing that makes the player take the first steps on their adventure, the thing that makes them care enough to keep playing instead of abandoning the story altogether.
In Baldur's Gate II, for instance? If you feel compelled to move swiftly and to make character choices based on the urgency of Imoen's plight, that's successful, even if there's no mechanical timer that tracks your progress. That's the sensation I was referring to. You got to a moment that made you feel like you needed to take action right away. If that moment had occurred early on, there would be fewer players talking about having trouble "getting into it".
There's a lot of gameplay flaws that can be forgiven if the story is compelling. If the story doesn't make the player care about what happens next, though, all that's left is the gameplay--and for a number of players, the gameplay in Pillars isn't enough to keep playing.
Literary fantasy is a different matter, since even critically acclaimed examples fail to be commercially successful. Presumably for the same reason as Jodi Picoult sells more novels than Kazuo Ishiguro.
I think they should be present in any BG spiritual succesor. You would want to set new higher bar.
I have enjoyed playing a great many good games that aren't Baldur's Gate. PoE was okay, but I wouldn't call it good.
PoE set out to be a Baldur's Gate clone, and on those terms it's perfectly reasonable to say "it's not as good as Baldur's Gate".
It's going to draw criticisms for not being exactly like Baldur's Gate, but a lot of what's being said in this thread isn't about how it's not exactly like Baldur's Gate; it's about failing where Baldur's Gate succeeded.
The question of urgency and personal investment is an important critique. For a lot of players, it's what keeps them from continuing the game past the first few areas.
No, Pillars doesn't need to make the player an adopted orphan who witnesses their foster father's murder, who's pursued for their heritage, who's the child of a dead god. That would be Baldur's Gate, and would likely draw a lot of unfair comparisons.
Where Pillars of Eternity fails, what I and a number of other people have argued, is that the starting premise for the game doesn't give the player motivation to keep going.
It starts really strong! You're with a caravan, you have time to explore, and then suddenly there's bandits! You defeat them, and suddenly there's a Biawic! You escape into a temple, fight your way out, and suddenly there's a scary ritual thing and your friends die!
But then what? The ritual people didn't see you, they're not looking for you, you don't know where they might have gone. You're left only with the premise the game gave you: you're heading to a nearby town for reasons that are your own.
This is a problem for a couple of reasons. First, it's not that your past is unknown; it's that it's undefined. Your character has reasons for being on the journey they're on, but you don't know what those reasons are (beyond a set of dialogue options early on), and because of that, the game can't give you any inspiration as to how to proceed.
Second, the game gives you just barely too little information about what's going on to give you any idea of how you should proceed. All you can do is move forward on the path that's given to you. You end up in a town, still not knowing what's going on or who your character is or why you should do anything specific.
The people who are posting here saying that they've tried to get into Pillars of Eternity and couldn't? It's not because they're expecting Baldur's Gate. It's because they're expecting some kind of motivation for their character, something in the story to drive them forward.
Icewind Dale had that. Planescape: Torment had that. And yes, Baldur's Gate (and Baldur's Gate II) had it too. But Pillars of Eternity doesn't have that. It has a whole lot going for it, but it falls short in the one area that is a sticking point for a lot of players.
It's okay if you can get past that; great even, because it means you get to really enjoy a game you were looking forward to.
(Incidentally, Baldur's Gate has a similar problem, at a couple of points in its story. Those are usually the points where we think "I wonder what it would be like if I made a Thief...")
You can make a great, compelling game where the driving force is exploration, where the world is interesting enough that the player wants to see what's over the horizon.
You can make a great, compelling game where the driving force is gameplay, where it's genuinely fun to press the buttons that make your character do awesome things.
You can make a great, compelling game where the driving force is mechanics, where the game is a puzzle that the player enjoys deciphering.
And you can make all of those things into RPGs, nothing says you can't. But for Pillars of Eternity, the driving force is story and character. And for a lot of players (maybe not a majority), the point where we get stuck is the point where both story and character seem to fall short.
It doesn't make Pillars a bad game, but it's certainly a problem. And if it keeps a significant number of people from completing the game, it's a big enough problem that it's worth not dismissing out of hand.
WotC allegedly don't like when other IPs use their monsters, so they have to take those generic monsters and then give them a different name.
but they don't give the creatures any in game lore. They are just ... there.
Baldur's gate added lore around the monsters of the series (most of them). You had yipping demons in the mines. A Ogre with a belt fetish. Creatures that took your appearance and pretended to be you. Hobgoblin bandits wanting your iron. A village of tiny blue men with a "pet" bear that was going to protect them. Gnolls that has another adventurer's companion captured.
They were part of the story, not just farmable XP.
Like I said, there's a lot to love about Pillars of Eternity. (I'm also in love with the storybook cutscenes--it's a fantastic way to both break up the action and escape the lackluster cinematography of an isometric camera.)
A lot of the "gameplay" problems in Pillars of Eternity are also problems in Baldur's Gate; it's the story that allows us to forgive those problems.