Pillars of Eternity - Review #4 @ RPGCodex

The Codex can't get enough of Pillars of Eternity. This time old Watcher Prime Junta has reviewed the game:

The big-picture similarities between Pillars and the IE games are obvious, and many featured already in the Kickstarter pitch. Top-down isometric camera. Six-member party. Real-time-with-pause combat. Class- and attribute-based character system. Swords and sorcery. Elves and dwarves. Dragons and dungeons. Looks that take you straight back to Icewind Dale or Baldur’s Gate 2. Pillars also has the feel of selecting and commanding units down well. Selecting a unit or a group, moving, rotating a formation, or picking a target has the same crispness and feel of immediate feedback as in the originals. The user interface has a number of small but subtle improvements, such as better support for quick keys and the ability to shift-queue commands. Switching between Baldur's Gate 2 and Pillars is almost seamless. The characters respond instantly, and there's the same pleasurable and "connected" feeling of direct control. This is where the game succeeds best, and it accounts for a lot of the praise it has received. […]

The Infinity Engine games made great use of one of D&D’s best features: magic. By the time BioWare began making its games, the ruleset had been played for over 20 years, and it was massive, flexible and polished. It offered plenty of tools, from opening locked doors to protecting yourself against the petrifying gaze of a basilisk, to sequencers releasing a number of spells at once, or preparing contingency spells that automatically fire off others in specific situations.
It is not without its flaws, however. It is extremely limited at low levels, and tends towards instant-win or instant-lose effects in the mid levels. It has a quite a lot of spells which are as good as useless, and only really hits its stride at late mid to high levels, when you have a significant amount of spellcasting oomph available, both in range and quantity. That’s when the famous ‘mage duels’ start.
The growth curve of Pillars magic is the opposite. It is highly useful and has a lot of variety straight out of the gate. Where Baldur’s Gate mages would rack up a few dozen misses with a sling on an average day, Pillars’ level 1 casters are already full participants in encounters. By the time IE game magic would start to really hit its stride, towards the end of Pillars, underlying weaknesses start to emerge, and it never develops the depth and emergent complexity of a Baldur's Gate 2. There are four main causes for this: the core resolution mechanic, status effect impact and duration, the inability of the AI to exploit the synergies in the system, and limited counters. […]

Even with its flaws, Pillars of Eternity is a remarkable game. It was made in a short time with limited resources, yet it is as big, sprawling, complex, and detailed as the games it references. The world is deep, fully-realised, and more believable than Forgotten Realms or most other swords-and-sorcery settings. The gameplay is rich and varied, with massive scope for experimentation and creativity, and if you crank it up to Path of the Damned, challenging enough to keep you on your toes for most of the ride. The writing is up to Obsidian's usually high standard. And there's a lot of it: masses of quests, monsters, maps, dialogues, items, abilities, and much more.

Baldur's Gate would likely have been forgotten had it not been for Baldur's Gate 2 and Planescape: Torment. If Obsidian can build on Pillars' success, improve on the areas that need improvement while maintaining its strengths, Path of the Damned can point the way to Path of the Incline. Pillars is a first, somewhat faltering step to reviving a near-stagnant genre. A few years ago, the very idea of a Baldur’s Gate 2-scope, top-down, isometric, party-based cRPG from a major studio seemed like a pipe dream. Whether this new flowering can survive between the siren song of a mass market and the grumbling of the grognards — let alone come close to making both groups happy — hangs on the followup. For some of us, Pillars delivered. Others are still waiting. The space it and the other big-ticket Kickstarters has helped clear benefits us all.

More information.

Starting with limited options in roleplaying games and some classes are better than others in a party RPG over the course of a game is a plus and not a minus in older D&D and IE games IMHO.
But maybe I am just a despicable Grognard

Prime Junta is a codexer? That means the POE beta forums was just the Codex outside of me wasn't it?

That explain quite a few things actually…

Prime Junta is Prime Junta - he has his very own taste and opinion. Several years ago here on the Watch, later at the Obsidian boards and now on the Codex.

The Codex hivemind is dashed to shivers over PoE - four very different reviews for one game already.

Don't take my post has something against Prime Junta. It's more that I had the impression back than, and this somewhat confirm it, that the POE beta forums was just The Codex #2.

The next review will be from a drunk bald eagle complaining that the game lacked carrion but the luxury boxed edition was good for making a patio to his nest…

Is it me or Codex is becoming NMA2, only obsessed with another game?

I'm hoping that PoE 2 will be to PoE what BG2 was to BG: even bigger in scope and with many welcome improvements.

Seeing PJ over there and so many codex trollers here, just starts to make me think if the Codex and Watch are playing role reversal?

Name names so that we can tar and feather them!

Well, now these guys have really gone insane. They've actually started writing "positive" things in their reviews. This time, next year they'll probably be called mmorpgcodex.

Baldur's Gate would likely have been forgotten had it not been for Baldur's Gate 2 and Planescape: Torment.

I can't say I agree with him there at all.

Baldur's Gate forgotten if it stood alone?

On the contrary. I think it would be remembered even more fondly.

I had a blast with PoE even though a little underwhelmed by endgame story and content closer to the ending. Looking forward to the White March, should be sweet.

Originally Posted by domein
I had a blast with PoE even though a little underwhelmed by endgame story and content closer to the ending. Looking forward to the White March, should be sweet.

Well, yeah. PoE was front loaded so it started very well, kept it up for a while and then went downhill…

PoE has created so much drama on Codex, probably more than any other game.
And funny thing is that they are not even that big of fans of IE games except for PST.
They are more of Fallout fans.

It has created enough drama they can export their surpluses.
And apparently, the demand for codex drama is not going down on this site.

I agree with the comments about the stronghold. I looked very much forward to that feature, but I now find it unnecessary. However, I still can't seem to stop upgrading it.

Fair review, I guess. Still waiting for the eventual enhanced edition before going back - and probably for some mod that turns the unintuitive ability system into something I feel comfortable with.
Anyone know: can I (continue to) roleplay as a sceptic char that choses to ignore that pretentious "souls" concept or is this going to be an unavoidable plot thing? I found that just as grating as the ability system… Strange I can accept magic of all sorts in my fantasy but spirituality remains completely alien and out of place to me.

I don't see why not, but by the end you'd be irrational considering the mounting evidence.