Lots of games endeavour to create an atmosphere reminiscent of pen-and-paper role-playing games, but few manage the feat as handily as Obsidian Entertainment’s Pillars of Eternity.
The Irvine, California-based developer – best known as a capable team to whom other studios turn to churn out entertaining sequels within established RPG franchises (some examples: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II, Neverwinter Nights 2, Fallout: New Vegas, and Wasteland 2) – took to Kickstarter in 2012 to drum up support for an old-school isometric RPG sprung from the minds of its own designers and ended up with the highest funded game project the crowd funding site had seen up until that point. More than 77,000 people pledged in excess of $4 million.
The result, Pillars of Eternity, is pretty much everything that its public backers could have hoped for: an intricate, epic, hardcore, original RPG that recalls a youth spent with friends around kitchen tables rolling dice and scribbling notes, all happily lost in their imaginations.
Paradox Interactive
That’s not to say Pillars of Eternity relies solely on your imagination. Far from it.
It plays out on dozens of small but highly detailed and beautifully rendered maps depicting countryside, castles, dungeons, ruins, and towns. There’s even a sprawling multi-map city that took me about seven hours to fully explore.
The story picks up with your fully customizable character – you decide everything from appearance, race, gender, and name to class, back story, and and how to allocate attribute points – beset at night by mysterious attackers near the end of a long journey. Injured and exhausted, he (or she) manages to stumble to a nearby town and straight into an enormous tree, the branches of which are weighed down by more than a dozen hanging bodies – people deemed guilty in one way or another for a blight in which children are being born without souls.
It’s atmospheric, to say the least.
But while the lovely visuals do a fine job of showing us what the world looks like, it’s the beautiful writing – baroque and at times almost poetic – that really draws us in. Thousands of lines of descriptive text slowly develop a sense of place, as well as a feel for its people, politics and magic.
At the centre of the tale is the concept of souls; what they are, how they can be attached to and ripped from bodies and objects, and the ways in which they may persist beyond death. Your hero is one of a rare few “watchers” who can see into people’s souls, revealing their innermost secrets in the form of short – and frequently disturbing – stories about murder and heroism, deceit and love, all written in the game’s florid language.
The finely written text is also intermingled with spoken dialogue. Passages inserted between lines describe the speaker’s expression and body language. It’s an interesting experiment that only works about half the time (dialogue doesn’t pause for you to read these descriptive bits, so you won’t always take time to read them), but it is effective when it does.
Textual elements persist even into adventuring and exploration. When encountering certain locked doors or barriers such as vines, cliffs, or puzzle-like stone reliefs, for example, the game shifts to a weathered scroll of a screen in which the situation is described and you are provided options. After you choose one – say, to test a vine for strength before climbing – you’ll be provided feedback and additional options.
In these moments it almost feels as though Obsidian has human dungeon masters sitting behind computers waiting to direct you as needed. I only wish there were more of them.
Paradox Interactive
The Baldur’s Gate-style combat took a little longer to grow on me than the story. I eventually became comfortable, but I had to do a lot of tinkering in the (thankfully robust) options menu, adjust everything from speed settings to key and mouse inputs.
Eternity‘s raised three-quarter perspective will probably make you want to play it like a Diablo game, but that’s ill-advised. Things happen too quickly and you have too many options – parties consist of up to six characters (plus pets), each with a broad selection of abilities and/or spells from which to choose – to allow battles to play out in real time, even when slowed down.
That means you need to pause. A lot. You can – and should – set battles to pause at regular intervals in the options menu. Four seconds seemed about right for me. Whenever the action stopped I’d assess how things were shaping up, how quickly enemies and allies were taking damage, select an attack, ability, or spell for each character, then set things in motion again.
It takes a while to get used to this odd rhythm. Plus, many of the abilities possessed by heroes are insufficiently explained, leaving you to experiment and figure out what they do for yourself. I also found I frequently had to micromanage characters – especially in close-quarters fights where they had a tendency to block each other, rendering melee fighters at the rear useless or ranged attackers obstructed from enemies by walls.
But it can be a lot of fun when everything clicks. Once you have your team in the right position, have figured out how to properly buff allies, and begin letting lose your more powerful spells and abilities even powerful enemies can be taken down in satisfying fashion. (Ranged area-of-effect magic attacks are particularly delicious.)
Perhaps the most compelling part of combat is a clever system that differentiates the notions of endurance and health.
Your party members can and will lose health in combat. If you don’t heal them with magic, they’ll collapse. But they won’t die. That’s left to a second vitality bar labeled endurance. If that bar empties your heroes will perish. Permanently. Even important characters with stories in progress can die.
Health recovers after battles, but endurance does not. It can only be replenished by using limited supplies to set up a campfire for the group or retreating to an inn where you can rent a room and rest.
The concept of endurance makes for an interesting twist on adventuring, and can even make things kind of nerve-wracking while working through lengthier dungeons. You’ll want to save your game frequently.
But don’t worry too much about companions kicking the bucket; you can always hire more adventurers at your current level and customize them in exactly the same way you did your primary hero.
Paradox Interactive
There’s plenty of room for improvement, should Pillars of Eternity ever see a sequel.
An awkward inventory system combines with a surfeit of uninteresting and duplicate weapons and pieces of armour to make loot management a bit of a pain.
Plus, while the customizable stronghold – a keep that you discover, take ownership of, and slowly restore and improve to grow your power and prestige – is a nice touch, it is, in the end, a bit purposeless. It’s home to a great dungeon, but I kept expecting to be able to do more with the fortress itself.
And there are lots of little technical smudges that could use some polish, such as quests occasionally failing to properly resolve; distant non-player characters who begin talking before they even share the same screen space with your heroes; and cursor-based window scrolling that feels at least two times too slow.
But fans of old-fashioned RPGs – both the video game and tabletop variety – oughtn’t let these niggling issues stand in your way. Pillars of Eternity proves that the men and women at Obsidian know how to make a good traditional RPG based on their own intellectual property.
And now they’ve proven they don’t even need an investor to do it.
Paradox Interactive
