You’ll regularly find yourself getting to fights with gangs that match your number, having to deal with the sometimes comical spectacle of a dozen little computer people beating the shit out of each other in doorways and broom cupboards. The real-time (with pause) swashbuckling can get frantic, particularly indoors. Its interface and combat system will feel instantly familiar to anyone who has played an Infinity Engine game. Of course, there’s plenty of real-time action too. They can be some of the tensest moments, as having removed most of your control, it is forcing you to throw the dice. The choices available to you are often determined by your character sheet, your inventory, or decisions you’ve made elsewhere. It’s a little jarring at first, coming in at points where you would expect to be able to have a bite of that egg burrito or whatever it is you have on hand to gorge on during the talky bits, but then you’ll be expected to make a decision. One of its most charming features is that, where other games would have cinematics, PoE has multiple-choice text adventure. Thus, PoE is almost completely dependent on its writing to paint its pictures, imbue its characters with life, and keep its players engaged. What it cannot show, it must tell, and it can’t show a great deal. It has a tiny set of components – scenery, combat, and prose. It makes no attempt to be cinematic, in stark contrast to that other grand reinvention of Baldur’s Gate, Dragon Age. Y’see, Pillars tells its many stories with a most humble box of tricks. You’ll be disappointed if you’re hoping for significant deviation from the standard Tolkien-esque bullshit, but Obsidian’s strength has always been in its writing, and PoE exemplifies that. It’s part video game, part choose-your-own-adventure novel, where the extensive lore not only provides background colour, but gives context to the minute-to-minute proceedings. But one thing is immediately apparent – there’s a lot of reading to do. By the time you actually pick your character class, you’ll have already made half-a-dozen agonising choices about your character’s mind, body and upbringing. Then, there’s a selection of homelands and backgrounds, again coming with lore-specific stats for each. Numbers fans are well catered for there are six races to choose from, all with at least two variants, offering alternate stat-boosts and skin colour. For those who take the “role-playing” part of RPG seriously, this is a rare treat in 2015. It immediately hits you with a character creation screen so brimming with possibilities that it’s perfectly possible to notch up two hours of playtime before ever setting foot in its world. It’s arguably the most pure cRPG of the last fifteen years. Or so I resolutely believed, until I got a few hours into PoE and started wondering if the genre has evolved to a point where it has lost something vital. Beloved as they are, the Infinity Engine titles of old – Baldur’s Gate etcetera – are very much products of their time. Its stated goal is to revisit a distant past where, before your KOTORs and your Dragon Ages, cRPGs were rickety, glacial affairs composed of 2D backdrops, awful sub-Babylon 5 CGI cutscenes, and rulesets lifted wholesale from tabletop games (which work fine on tabletops, but computer screens aren’t tabletops). It’s a product of the Kickstarter boom that happened a few years back, a fad which has seen more than a few reckonings since. On paper, Pillars of Eternity is fraught with danger.
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