Review: Pillars of Eternity

What's this contraption?  Mechanical-magic structures
play an important part in this game world.

While it wasn't the first RPG that I ever played, Baldur's Gate was my introduction to DnD.  It, and frankly all of the Infinity Engine games, were terrific.  They combined diverse character options, party-based gamemplay, a fun, strategic "realtime with pause" combat system, and an engrossing story.  That's a formula that was forgotten for a while as games transitioned to 3D.  And while there have been some phenomenal games that have come out using other paradigms, to be sure, the success of the Enhanced Edition games has demonstrated that the Baldur's Gate formula is still popular and desirable.

Seeing this opening, Obsidian kickstarted Pillars of Eternity, a Baldur's Gate-style isometric game designed for modern PC's.  The interface, graphics style, etc, were all built directly upon the principles of the Infinity Engine games, and the story was designed for a mature audience.  While they did not have a DnD license, the style of the mechanics are largely inspired by DnD.  And the result?  It's a really good game.

Lots of great times exploring large wilderness maps,
just like in Baldur's Gate.

The world the game is set in feels like someone's home-brew campaign world, in a good way.  It's full of mystery and therefore a few layers of history beyond the ones that the modern-day people of the gameworld still know.  Somewhat reminiscent to Baldur's Gate (although only in the loosest sense), the story begins as a personal mystery that ends up being intertwined with a local political crisis, and ultimately has ramifications for the gods themselves.  The pacing, in my experience, wasn't the best.  The first half of the tale plays out pretty slowly, but it picks up good speed in the second half of the game and has a terrific finish.  The story does a good job of stressing gray, rather than black and white: you are often faced with decisions without a clear best answer, and I enjoyed the opportunity actually roleplay a character rather than just stick to the designer's preconceived "good" or "bad" responses.

Some towns, like this one, are struggling just to survive

The graphics are fine.  They used the paradigm of what were effectively sprites (though 3D-rendered ones) moving about on a pre-painted background, a la Infinity Engine.  It worked then, and works now.  Some parts are genuinely pretty, though occasionally some of the painted backgrounds got busy enough that, along with the use of a black-out fog of war in unexplored areas, I had trouble interpreting what I was seeing.

The combat engine felt familiar, but was definitely its own animal.  Like DnD, there's an attack roll and a damage roll.  Unlike DnD, there are a number of things that can happen on a hit.  Miss the target's defense by even a decent amount and you can "graze" them, inflicting a small amount of damage.  Hit them easily and you crit.  Furthermore, again unlike DnD, damage resistance (i.e. soaking damage) plays a big role in this game.  By the end of the game, even decent 1-handed melee weapons inflicted only a pittance of damage; most damage output occurred via the slow, heavy-damage ranged weapons like arbalests and rifles, as well as spells.  This actually got pretty annoying, as some characters became almost useless when monsters had damage reduction against certain damage types.  Thankfully, I opted to play a cipher, which consistently manages superb damage throughout the game with both spells and his ranged weapon.

It's a drake, not a dragon.  But there are dragons.

While there are AI options for combat, I found that these rarely did what I want and was compelled to micro-manage all combat in the game.  It was tolerable, but sometimes felt like a grind because most fights worked the same way: open with my cipher's paralyze ability, make sure the tank aggros everyone else, and then start picking foes off one-by-one.  90% of the time, that's the solution throughout most of the game.  Combat difficulty did not progress smoothly. Early on, it was pretty challenging, though usually in a good way.  Later, it became a cake-walk, except for a handful of key foes that seemed designed to test one's mettle.  Those were so much more powerful than anything else I'd encountered that it was bewildering.

In any case, despite the nitpicks, this is a really fun game with a neat story.  It's a long game that can be very engrossing.  I enjoyed the strategy in the combat (despite the grindy nature of it at times), and really enjoyed the emphasis on quests that require the player to make hard, imperfect choices.  It felt like a game targeted at adults, which is exactly the target audience of a title like this.  I give it a solid and warm 4 out of 5.

Short Pillars of Eternity Combat Story

I still haven't figured out how to take screenshots, so unfortunately this is text only.  And minor, non-story spoilers follow...

My party was walking through the Black Meadows, a barren patch of land that appeared to have been desolated by a battle involving a small army of dragons.  As as creep out of the wasted meadow, we entered a small forested region and encountered some Forest Lurkers.  These remind me of the dnd "shambling mound" creature, and are highly resistant to piercing damage, have a lot of HP, pretty good defenses, and pack a mean punch.  I started fairly conservatively with my spell usage, having my cipher paralyze one of the two lurkers, while the wizard used his encounter powers, the rogue tried to sneak attack her way through their high piercing resistance, and my fighter tried to tank.

After a fairly long battle of attrition, I finally dispatched one, but my cipher was out of focus, and my priest was using all of his spells to heal the fighter who was taking a lot of damage from the creatures.  Suddenly, the last of my cipher's spells wore off, and the last lurker knocked Eder, my fighter, prone and started to really pummel him.  I realized that he was not just in danger of being knocked out, but because of all the endurance healing I'd used, he was actually getting very close to being permanently killed!

Fortunately, at exactly that moment, my cipher hit with his crossbow, regenerating just enough focus to cast a desperate spell.  I cast amplified thrust, and, with Eder being only one more hit away from death, the spell slammed the monster back away from my fighter, allowing my priest and rogue to run interference.  The party still might not have survived it--I had completely exhausted all of my spellcasters' spells by that point, and my ranged rogue was rendered useless by the piercing resistance--but I realized that I had a scroll on my wizard.  He rushed forward to cast it and managed to deal 60 points of damage with that final attack to kill the monster.

Whew!

Also: this game is really fun.

First thoughts on Pillars of Eternity Combat Mechanics

I'm only a few hours in, but I'm loving Pillars of Eternity.  The mood in the world is terrific, and the writing has been excellent.  So far, it has had something of  Planescape: Torment vibe with its dark, macabre themes, though the setting does not have the wackiness that Sigil did.

The combat engine is fun as well.  It definitely seems built upon something that resembles 4e combat to me.  There are at-will abilities, encounter powers (which are even named as such!), and daily spells.  The exception so far is the cipher, the class I chose to play, which uses a mana-like system with a resource pool called "Focus."  You gain focus by hitting with melee or ranged weapons, and then spend it with your spells.  It's a fun system.

Deflection and Damage Reduction

Armor has interesting differences as well.  Like in 4e DnD, there are four defenses: Deflection (i.e. AC), Fortitude, Reflex, and Will.  Interestingly, while these can be enhanced with magic items, they seem mostly determined by your characters' attributes and class.  Armor, typically, does not enhance Deflection.  Instead, it boosts Damage Reduction; donning heavy armor instead of cloth armor does not change your deflection, but instead adds substantial damage reduction to certain kinds of hits.  Damage reduction can really help, especially given the grazing mechanic: most "misses" actually are grazes in this system, which can leave a small amount of damage.  That graze damage will usually be completely negated with decent armor.

As far as I can tell, there isn't such a thing as armor proficiency.  Instead, the main incentive to not wear heavy armor seems to be a speed penalty.  After each action, be it shooting an arrow, swinging a sword, or casting a spell, there is a recovery period before you can act again.  The heavier your armor, the longer the recovery period.  This can be dramatic; the heaviest armor I've seen so far is still just medium armor, and it has a recovery penalty of 50%!  Therefore, if those numbers are true, suiting up is going to halve your damage output.

I think the main consequence of this is that one needs to have characters specialize in combat roles.  You'll definitely want to have a few characters in a party of 6 who can take on a "tank" role, wearing heavy armor and shields, and using heavy damage reduction to survive on the front lines.  Behind them, you can use ranged attackers wearing cloth or light armor that fling spells, arrows, or shoot guns, and it is those characters who will do most of the damage.  I personally enjoy this degree of specialization, and it stands in contrast to the 5e dnd approach where fighters can serve not only as tanks, but also as legitimate damage-dealers themselves.

It's less clear to me exactly what one should do for a "melee striker"-style character.  I think this is where you end up compromising with medium or light armor, and being careful when engaging to minimize your risk of engaging more than one enemy at once, ensure opponents already are engaged with the tank, etc.

Weapon Choices

The fact that Damage Reduction is such a big part of this game has implications for weapon selections.  In 2e DnD, assuming equivalent accuracy, a fast, low-damage weapon will give you equivalent "damage per second" output to a slow, high damage weapon.  3e and 4e didn't have weapon speeds, but you got similar effects from dual-wielding light weapons compared to swinging a big, two-handed sword.

But if DR is important and common, then you could run into issues where a fast, low-damage weapon can't provide much of any benefit because it can't clear a foe's damage reduction.  I ran into a similar problem while playing The Prophet, which features a lot of foes with damage reduction.  Therefore, you see a lot of folks on the internet boards advocating high damage weapons like firearms, which also have extremely long reload times.

Ultimately, it will come down to how much damage reduction an average foe has, and exactly how much longer the reload times are compared to how much extra damage output you get.  If I was really methodical, I'd get out my stopwatch and start measuring this.  ...  but I'm sure some young buck out there will do this before I get it done!

Endurance and Health

Rather than a single pool of hit points, PoE employs a system that involves a combination of two pools of health systems.  Endurance is a comparably small pool of health.  As you are hit, therefore, it quickly drops in combat.  If you reach zero, you fall unconscious.  Most healing spells and potions work to replenish endurance, as do some skills.  Fighters, for example, steadily regenerate endurance during combat.  Finally, when combat is over, characters almost immediately regenerate all of their endurance.  

In contrast, health is a much larger pool.  As you take endurance damage, you also steadily lose health.  It's unlikely that you'll run out of health in a single encounter.  However, after a long series of fights, you'll eventually start to run low.  This is dangerous, because dropping to 0 health will kill your character, permanently.  Furthermore, aside from a pair of talents (aka feats), I haven't seen a mechanism to heal health aside from resting.  Therefore, while endurance is usually one's concern during combat, health is what will ultimately end your adventuring day.  One can always rest to heal, but you can carry limited camping supplies, and resting may(?) come with risk of random encounters (maybe...I'm not sure of this).

What I like about the system is that, most of the time, character death isn't something that one has to worry about.  Most of the time, you'll bounce back up after a difficult fight, even if you get knocked unconscious.  But at the same time, you have to take damage seriously, because it will eventually catch up with a character, forcing a risky rest out in the wildnerness or within a dungeon.  There is still risk and there are still consequences.

As you can tell, I'm having a blast with this game, and am really enjoying learning the mechanics of this dnd-esque system.  Most of the changes have seemed like very positive improvements, or at least very enjoyable alternative mechanics.  Can't wait to get back in game soon!

Pillars of Eternity Released

Like a fair number of people of my generation, my first true DnD experience was playing Baldur's Gate.  I'd played rpg-light board games as a kid.  I'd played computer RPG's before, starting with Might and Magic 3 as my first "real" RPG.  I'd even played some pen and paper games in college.  But Baldur's Gate, released in 1998, was my first foray into true Dungeons and Dragons rules and worlds.  It was a fantastic game, and launched my love affair with other DnD products like BG2, Planescape: Torment, and, of course, the Neverwinter Nights games.  And, based on my play through Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition, the game still holds up quite well.

So when Obsidian launched their kickstarter proposing to build a modern game along the lines of Baldur's Gate, I do remember taking notice.  But then, for some reason, I decided to take a pass.  I'm still not completely comfortable supporting Kickstarter projects, mostly because of the sense of no guarantees.  I've certainly preordered my share of games before, but at least in those cases it is usually only a short time until a game is released.  With Kickstarter, you pay in your money long before a project will ever turn up in your mailbox, and there's always some chance that the project won't ever materialize.

I might need to start rethinking those kinds of concerns, because I almost overlooked this game.  It was really only through a few retweets on twitter that I noticed the game coming a few weeks back.  I've been catching up ever since.

Today, Obsidian officially released Pillars of Eternity, their modern homage to the Infinity Engine games.  It looks really impressive.  The world looks dark and full of flavor.  The interface looks crisp and clean.  The combat looks strategic and tight, with a lot of neat innovations (endurance vs. health, new ways of thinking about character attributes and how that affects builds, etc).  The early reviews have been very positive (92 on metacritic as I write this).

Right now, I'm at 2.87 GB of 6.33 GB downloaded from GOG.  I teach in the morning and my wifi in this part of the house is not stellar, so it's not going to finish tonight.  I have family coming to visit for the weekend that arrive tomorrow.

In short, I can't wait to play.  But I also probably won't be able to play for several more days.  So, I'm going to content myself to read the manual tonight, think more about my first character choice (cipher vs. druid vs. wizard...decisions decisions), and head off to bed.  ::sigh::