Pillars of Eternity - Review @ RPG Codex

RPGcodex's Decado has written a positive review of this game. A quote from the beginning:

Pillars of Eternity (PoE) is very much a calculation based on nostalgia, in many ways a manipulative shot to the pleasure center of the CRPG nerd's brain, but carefully curated to be approachable by a larger audience. I don't know how successful the latter has been, and unless Obsidian is willing to release sales numbers I don't know that we'll ever find out.

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A quote on the story and writing:

RPG veterans will likely find the main story a bit flavorless. I was disappointed here because while there are tinges of "Chosen One" nonsense in the beginning of the game that go in a slightly different direction than you might expect, it ends up being a rather banal climax. It is interesting that you are not the only Watcher, that being a Watcher is a phenomenon that exists in the world apart from you, but it is still a bit too "special" to shake off the trope entirely.......Except for some blandness in the main narrative, and the occasional over-reliance on adjectives and info dumps, this is solid writing and certainly better than what you get in most modern games.

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A quote from the conclusion:

[.....]overall we're talking about a pretty damned good game that, were there no attachment to the IE legacy, would still easily stand on its own. This is the irony of creating art based on nostalgia, at least as far as I can tell. It is easier to get started, but the stakes are higher. You can't just copy what came before, because that is lazy and cheap. But neither can you deviate from the core formula, because pretty soon you're talking about a "different" game.

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More information.

Just popping in here to say that I finished it! I finished Pillars around 10 PM Sunday night. Steam has me at 93 hours played. I had a great time! Towards the end I was just doing bounties to level up and take on Thaos; I was ready to be done (...Witcher 3). But I did it.

I haven't read the whole Codex review (that site gets blocked here at work) but the quotes above sound spot on. I enjoyed the writing, the depth of world history, peoples, and religions. I didn't like rtwp before this game, but I grew to like it mostly. I still prefer tb, but at least now I won't dismiss a game for having rtwp (e.g. Staglands).

Pillars would have been extremely cool as a single character game with maybe two computer controlled henchmen. Of course that wouldn't have worked with the engagement mechanic.

387,246 ± 16,496, this is a pretty reliable estimate of how many people own it. A significant number of owners are from Kickstarter. Compare with Blackguards: 334,004 ± 15,322. So not bad, but not even close to the huge success it was predicted.

I'm sure Steam does account for the bulk of copies sold, but the game is still #4 at GOG after two months -- and the $90 Royal edition is still #6.

mbpopolano24 said:

387,246 ± 16,496, this is a pretty reliable estimate of how many people own it. A significant number of owners are from Kickstarter. Compare with Blackguards: 334,004 ± 15,322. So not bad, but not even close to the huge success it was predicted.

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That doesn't include GoG sales though and I'd be curious how many were sold through there.

There are also physical copies of the game being sold. I'd also like to mention that the game has yet to be on sale. I picked up Blackguards at 33% of the original price some 8 months after release.

The game sold well, there's no doubting that. There are plenty of people who enjoyed it, there's no doubting that. The primary issue with the 'controversy' as far as I can tell, from the position of an observer still deciding whether to play the game, is this bit:

were there no attachment to the IE legacy, would still easily stand on its own. This is the irony of creating art based on nostalgia, at least as far as I can tell. It is easier to get started, but the stakes are higher. You can't just copy what came before, because that is lazy and cheap. But neither can you deviate from the core formula, because pretty soon you're talking about a "different" game.

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From an extremely cynical viewpoint, the game looks to be nothing more than a cash-cow that fed unfairly on the nostalgia market, a slap in the face to people who funded an IE successor and nothing more and were given just another random game which did nothing more than look graphically like an IE game but played nothing like one.

From an extremely fanzine viewpoint, the game is just a game and there's no reason to get so het-up about trifles. It provided the necessary amount of nostalgia while developing a new and interesting IP/franchise with an awful lot of potential that played well and delivers something currently lacking in the market for which we're all eternally grateful.

As an objective observer it's very difficult for me to gauge whether I would enjoy the game. PoE seems to be a very polarising game, but not in a love/hate sense, but rather in a like/dislike sense and in a boring/entertaining sense. Of all the reviews I've seen so far I think I 'believed' Corwin's the most. Not because it's a Watch thing, but because his review seemed to be the one most unsure about the game's quality, which kind of fitted my perspective of what I'm guessing the game would be like.

I think I'm going to be waiting for a significant price-drop, personally, so that I can play the game without any sense of bias as to whether I thought the game was 'worth it', which is likely a big factor in the current debate. If it then turns out that I become a fan then I can always contribute to future projects more vigourously, but, in the mean time, I'm not confident enough to help promote the product at full price, there's just too many things that aren't sounding too good from a range of perspectives.