Pillars of Eternity

PoE1 is kinda rough. The writing is pretty good - the setting is great, the tone is dark and consistent, the quests solid; the ending delivers both in terms of resolution and setup for the next game. Soooooo, now for the pain points. At its worst, Pillars 1 never veers off into being bad, but it sure does into being tedious and inscrutable. The balancing is just straight up a miserable mess - you'll go from trouncing mobs and bosses in one room, then the adjacent one you'll get pillared into eternity by what were fodder enemies just a moment prior. As you spend more time with the game, you learn how to cheese the AI, overwhelm them and make use of the consumables, stack buffs and so on - but it never feels rewarding like it would in Baldur's Gate, for example. There are quite a few well designed, tough but fair and quite cool, encounters in the game; unfortunately sharing space with the most absurd non-telegraphed difficulty spikes in the game. Oh and, they made the max party a whopping six. That's good and all, except for the fact that very often you'll be going down narrow halls and tight dungeon spaces where the AI pathing commits suicide and leaves you feeling left out of a potential pact for one as you watch your melee units spasm violently in place, trying to phase through the borders of the physical. Act 2 does the game's pacing no favours, and the fact it'll force you to go between lengthy loading screen, to lengthy loading screen again, gives me little surprise this is where people often drop the game. That, and the thematic and narrative payoff it eventually bears to the main plot, coming in at the very end of the game makes it kind of a slog. Godlike characters get minimal reactivity here (very little outside of the DLC in general), even though you do get one as a companion here too, and the Watcher element barely plays into any of the plots taking place here outside the fairly short one the critical path occupies in Defiance Bay. White March 1 & 2 are really good though, they address most of the problems the game has had so far - pacing, reactivity and quirks with the gameplay bones of, well, the game. Also do yourselves a favour and don't engage with the gold-plated NPCs and tombstone icons: they are backer-written NPCs/memorial texts, they serve NO purpose in the world, break the 4th wall routinely and are rather poorly written, perhaps unsurprisingly. You CANNOT interact with them beyond reading blurbs, or more often - walls of text. I fully get that Obsidian wanted to thank the backers for supporting them and making the game possible, but there surely had to have been a more subtle, gentler way to do so without cluttering the world with such weird (but admittedly well-marked and fairly easy to avoid) insertions. In a post-2018 world, this is basically the video game equivalent of 'required reading' for PoE2: Deadfire. Great setting, some pretty good writing and lore. But good grief, the gameplay is a mixed bag at best, in my opinion.

Now... now, after I’ve put over 230 hours into the game, they add a TB mode! You sons of...legends! Oh well, time for another playthrough :P

i thought turn based mode might make it good nope

they turned a lady into a throne and made me sit on her emotional highlight of the game

Great game made even better with turn based. Save early, save often, and bring your reading glasses!!

One of the best games of all time!

Played as Ranger, Found Stormcaller Bow early on did not change build entire game.. Lightning/Stun = Everything easy to kill got boring but the same did the game. Story is okay nothing worth-while would have loved to have more background pieces here & there. Gameplay is great about the only thing that kept me going, but in the end i was starting to fall asleep. My Playthrough was NOT without problems/bug/irritation.. 1. Constant bug after entering defiance bay for the first time (did not have it before). Hearing footsteps (like sound glitch / increased volume), bug and even reload don't work it comes back after less then 5 min gameplay. Loading to another part of the world don't help either. Over 16 Hours hearing this did not help on gameplay as i just wanted to be finished. (New Game did not fix it either). 2. Hardlock on Endless Path 13? Ghosts would not talk to me, so had to download mod to stop achievement from disabling while i enabled console to Teleport to other side.. So many years of patches and this is still there? Failure dev's. (Reloads did not help). 3a. Also tired of games locking me out of specific play styles, like the fact i wanted to sabotage "the dozens" & "merchant faction" by doing there first quest "wrong".. But in the end i just killed all. No roleplay. 3b. Found a woman in Heritage Hill "Icantha" holding 3 people prisoners, wanted to kill her or take her prisoner herself see how she likes it. But seems like she's part of quest.. so invinsible npc wins... RolePlay-Gameplay ruined.. (Seems she teaches me a dead language could i not just have taken it from her soul if i killed her?). 4. Epilogue makes 0 sense.. I had Aloth convinced Thaos was in the wrong's and put him in charge of L.Key but in the end i get "L.Key Turned on the ancient device in Heritage Hill again? like wtf.. And 2 others where incorrect.. and 1 i did not even meet that companion.. BS! 5. Also have a *NameError* from Berolt when i gave him money to purchase mercenaries to escort him to Thein.. (When escort completet name was displayed as *null*). 6. Hide Finished !!! Quests bottom is NEEDED! They fill out the Journal it's to much clutter.. 7. Disgusting to have a "kickstarter backer" achievement.. "ohh want 100% guess you'll have to pay us.. pff No Thanks. Because i saw this achievement i played on easy and did not go for anything really.. Too the people that find review "funny" you try and play 16 hours with glitched noices for 16+ hours & Hardlock bugs.. I'm just reviewing the game as i played.

Привет из 26-го, отличная игра

And now they added turn base mode... So I have to finish it again. *sigh*

Out of sheer boredom, I played Pillars of Eternity, something I bought from a Steam Sale some years back. It took me a while to gain a grasp of its gameplay, but to keep it short and simple, I'd rather not y'all play it. Pillars of Eternity is filled with convoluted lore, incomplete voices, questionable choices, and frustrating real-time/pause battle. No, the turn-based mode introduced early April 2026 did not help. You're expected to be a "do-it-all" type of character, making your companions useless conversation fodder. Healing in battle is not fun because what do you mean a 5th-level healing spell can only heal less than a quarter of a PC's endurance? It would be okay if you can upcast your spells, but no, the lack of strong healing coupled with healing spells' lackluster area of effect make combat a hassle when you're fighting against dragons and other party busters. Soulbound items add an additional frustration because you get most of them at the end of the game yet they require specific kills WITH the weapon and NOT having the weapon equipped, which is logical in practice but irritatingly stupid when it's a party-based game where two or three characters can decimate enemies in seconds if you let them and let your party die if you choose to turn off their AI. Then there's the plot and the character endings where if you invest in reasonable-sounding choices two of the characters become suicidal in their own way, with one becoming a thrill seeker and the other just a murderous sociopath. Each faction of Defiance Bay started nuanced and ended useless; the entire storyline of the game is just an exercise in futility. The only lesson I got from Pillars of Eternity is that beliefs are infallible when it comes to stupid people, and all of the characters are stupid to the point that it wasn't even worth empathizing with its villain despite his rather reasonable but incredibly flawed reasons because beliefs are infallible and everyone is stupid. I can't get back the 100 hours I played, but I'm hoping that you don't spend a single cent on this game. Just find the game elsewhere.