This game is Impressively Unimpressive

[SocioPsycho]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2fJHAUb5Bg

This is a summary of my review video, which I encourage you to watch
if you are looking for a more in-depth review.

Pillars of Eternity is a nostalgia filled game in the same vein as Baldurs Gate, a top down RPG adventure. To start out, the options menu and control menu both have a lot of options to make the interface and game experience personalized, which is a great thing to see. Graphically the game looks good, and has it's own atmosphere, which is nice. The game suffers from quite a few little bugs graphically, whether it be minor things like a dead enemies powers still triggering, or more annoying ones like debuffs that are supposed to last through a battle lasting even after I left the zone and rested in an inn. A detail list of more bug issues is in the video review.

The game also suffers from an excess of loading screens. From entering a house to going to another room in the house, and to another floor of the house, this coupled with the fact that the longer I played the game, the longer the loading screens were. This really breaks the immersion, and is disheartening the more you play.

The character creation is very well done, with lots of customizable options, and a great number of characters and styles to choose from, sadly no dual class system through. You also have the option to create and customize your entire party as you progress through the game, allowing you easily to play with six fully custom made characters.

The interface for the most part is sleek, with some customizable options, which is nice. It offers an option of a stash, where you can put all of your gear. I really enjoy this option, because it makes the selling of items really simple. As a loot ♥♥♥♥♥, this is one of the best systems for gear and items that I have ever come across. The quest log is fairly well organized, and the game offers a Journal feature that literally provides a written account of your adventures, as though you were in a grand novel.

Visually, the level design is well done, but upon closer examination of the map, you see that the world is not that large, and the pathway to get through the world is fairly linear and limited in where you can travel to. Within towns and cities, the exploration is limited as well, as you can only explore homes and buildings that directly relate to the story line. This takes away from a sense of adventure never allowing you to wander yourself into loot or trouble.

The crafting system is simplistic, and while it's not a feature I enjoy, it is necessary if you play on a harder level.It also offers an enchantment feature, where you can craft and enchant items and better your weapons. You are limited in what you can chose, which some might find disappointing. It's more like a starter kit rather than an in depth crafting system.

The story doesn't really connect with the atmosphere and graphics of the world. The story is written more like a book than a game. Each encounter comes with story text, that is elaborate and over detailed. Over and over again as you come across an event, person, or story driven device, you have to read about useless details such as the dew that glistened on the leaves in the early morning dawn. While this may be enjoyable at first, it becomes more of a tedious reading experience than a bonus to get through the game. Twelve pages to talk about one event. If you want more detail and in depth environment, the atmosphere should reflect this visually, not pages of reading. In spite of the extra details in the dialogues, the characters and villains in the game feel weak and extra. There is no weight behind your actions. If I slaughter an entire village, there is no consequences such as being ambushed by those seeking vengeance. It still feels like you are fighting against mundane mobs instead of affecting change in the world around you. The characters lack personality or depth. They are hypocritical in their beliefs; their actions do not support their words. Unlike Baldurs
Gate, where you had the option to go through dialogue with the option of leaving to battle something else and coming back if you got tired, here you have to read all the dialogue, complete the task that is required, then come back for more dialogue before you can continue in your adventure.

The combat comes down to experience more of which is by completing quests than by killing enemies. You only acquire experience by killing a certain number of a particular enemies, at which point you stop gaining experience at all after you kill X amount of them. The problems is that you come across many, oh so many of each opponents. It is annoying to have to continue to fight the same enemies, but not gain any experience, as humanoids of any kind never give any experience is just down right annoying as it wastes your time. The loot isn't all that amazing, and you stop gaining experience, so what is the point of killing these beasts? The amount of experience you gain is also scaled by the number of people you have in your party, which is poorly designed. If you want to distribute the experience gained but not have a in depth gain vs party member, it should be equally split between the members, they discourage playing with anything less than six party members as you get less Xp not more. You have an 'Awakened' soul, but your Awakened status adds little to no extra abilities to your character. You do not feel special in this game, sure having a fear style ability may be nice as a melee DPS but as a healer or ranged worthless. It does not customize to your class.

Each character has two health bars; health and endurance. This becomes more annoying than useful, as your character will naturally develop a higher level of health than endurance, but in battle it is your endurance that is drained 30x faster than your health. Once your endurance is depleted, your character is knocked out and useless, even if they still have a high level of health. There are magic spells, armor, weapons, buffs, and some natural race abilities that heal endurance levels through out combat. Yet they are still drastically lower than your health level, to the point where your health levels become unimportant. Having a tank character becomes essential, as the rest of your party can be easily one shot if an enemy gets to them. Beasts that are summoned with high defensive health numbers become almost pointless. As their low endurance numbers guarantees that they will be knocked out easily, for a creature with 400 health will be out due to their 70 endurance. Instead of balancing the damage taken versus the health you have, or adding tactical depth where people must have supplies to survive a dungeon, all you have to do is sleep and all your health points are restored. You have a camp kit and sleep whenever, and where ever needed, without the danger of ambush. There is no risk to your characters, or a need to prepare for a battle, as the threat of death is next to none, failure sure, death no. The combat becomes repetitive and disappointing. It limits your choices so far as gaining experience and getting low quality loot that I lose the desire to fight.

Each magical class had their own set of spells, (mages focus more on control and aoe damage, druid's debuffs the enemy and buffs the tank, priests are good for protecting the entire party, and ciphers focus on mental spells to confuse or control). Despite this, their class spells still felt too balanced with each other, with no impactual roles where having a particular class would give an advantage to a certain situation.

Traps can be bought or collected, but only one trap can be put down at a time. If you use a trap on a higher, stronger enemy, they do next to no damage. One trap against a boss is useless.

A brief summary leads us to this; performance wise there are many bugs and issues, these may be resolved over time through. The character creation is excellent and has depth. The interface overall is sleek with plenty of customizable options, just a few minor flaws in it. The level design, while graphically beautiful, was a disappointment with a lack of open world, and a misleading story with too much reading that only took away from the atmosphere, and left you with wondering more what is going on rather than knowing where to go next. Instead of making the character feel epic or powerful, you felt as if you were being led by the hand, with your choices making no impact. The combat reward is poorly done, where progression feels more tedious as gaining experience only from quests, does not reward your time at all.

This game is accepted and admired because of the severe lack of other games in this genre. It has many faults, and could have been so much better than it is. The more I played this game, the less I enjoyed it. At the end of the day, it did not respect my time, and felt like a chore. Everything feels drawn out to extend gameplay time, instead of for enjoyment and experience of the world. I cannot recommend this game.

This is a summary of my review video, which I encourage you to watch
if you are looking for a more in-depth review.

Thanks for your viewership and support; for more videos click here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/SocioPyscho

[GUY]

supertrooper pls get a life

[Dorok]

Publicado originalmente por Nikolaus:

...Think of this game as an MMO in a sense. You have to level your characters before you can take on higher level creatures.

Facepalm, no PoE isn't a dull MMO and no PoE doesn't require grinding, it's just similar to BG1&2. You need do some optional stuff, quests or exploration otherwise it's more an achievement to just rush the main quest, probably possible anyway, at least at EAsy.

But for that type of RPG you need have a bit of curiosity and on your path you'll find multiple quests and if you don't have the curiosity to do them then wrong game. But there's no grinding like in MMO, and if PoE secondary quests are rarely great, it's still quite batter than usual MMO stuff. And unlike MMO no grinding as pure combats doesn't bring any xp, and there's no monsters respawn.

[Tikigod]

Saying that "Mass Effect/Dragon Age/Other 3D RPG game" did expression depiction better is kind of missing the point.

It's like saying those same games did story telling better than Zork because you can see all the sequences in 3D whilst in Zork they mostly just described environments using text with no visuals. So clearly Zork sucks at that kind of thing.

Unless the point trying to be made here is that Pillars of Eternity should have been a fully 3D 'over the shoulder & up close full animation dialogue ' RPG game and not a isometric RPG and that is the problem with the game?

If that isn't what's trying to be said, then really the fact that Obsidian actually recognised that there are people who will get something positive from having the additional narrative and descriptive details provided and included it in the only way they could provide it within the format of the game is a good thing.

The alternative is what you generally see most developers doing in games, opting out of the additional quality touches because it's not 'core appeal'. And where does that end?

Bioware dialogue wheels where your responce options are summed up in 3 words or less and have an accuracy rate of about 5% between what the 3 words stated and the scripted sequence you actually end up watching?

Not providing any dialogue text at all and instead just giving a general impression of what the option will mean as a general theme through the use of emoticons? (Smiley face option, frowny face option, devil face option, angel face option, head exploding option, heart option, phallus option)

Forgoing all dialogue and conversations in your game because not everyone is going to want to listen to conversations and will just skip through them anyway?

In my book it's better to provide additional detail and content and let the player decide how much of it they want to absorb and take on board, then it is to argue that anything some individuals will definitely enjoy and get something positive from shouldn't be included in a game as some other people may ignore it or not find it interesting.

Optional content you can take or leave as you please beats excluding a entire aspect from a game completely any day.

[supertrooper225]

Publicado originalmente por George Lincoln:

supertrooper pls get a life

Never.

[sheep from hell]

this is why i like total biscuit reviews, at least he tries to let personal preferences out and just look about the functionality of game mechanics and how well they are executed and technical stuff. doesnt work all the time but at least its not a "mimimi this game is not what i hoped" attitude the op had

[Metsakurat]

Publicado originalmente por CharliezFrag:

Different strokes for different people. I enjoy having my "over detailed" text in the game. I laugh at you if you say Dragon Age does it better. No, it does not. It does it differently, that's all.

Seeing a facial expression is not better ? You can laugh at it all you want but seeing a man being murdered with your own eyes and having someone describe it to you are two different things indeed.
And describe of a murder is never-ever gonna feel as horrible as witnessing the scene with your own eyes. It is better to see the expressions.
Seeing a facial expression + hearing the voice to match said expression is way more immersive than reading about it.
As i said: I don't mind reading dialogs. I grew up with Baldur's Gate. But when it comes to facial expressiosn...Man, they should have like 4-5 different portrait pics of each character and then change that pic to match his/her current emotion. It doesn't have to be live movement but just a still picture that changes like maybe once in a conversation...Depending on the mood swing of t he character. This is totally doable in such a game. Not asking too much or not going too far at all.
This is something to think about indeed.

The facial expression descriptions are...dull to say the least. Not needed in this game at all imo.

[SocioPsycho]

Publicado originalmente por sheep from hell:

this is why i like total biscuit reviews, at least he tries to let personal preferences out but at least its not a "mimimi this game is not what i hoped" attitude the op had

Did you even watch it? The writing is a summary of the video. If I don't cover concepts of the game enough for people to make up their own mind then I have failed.

[Metsakurat]

Publicado originalmente por sheep from hell:

doesnt work all the time but at least its not a "mimimi this game is not what i hoped" attitude the op had

TB has that attitude tho. He is quite arrogant. I sometimes stumbled upon his videos but decided to ignore them a year ago when he actually said in one of his videos that if anyone disagrees with him then they're basically morons.
Yeah, he acts like his opinions are facts. He doesn't like having an argument: He doesn't like to be proven wrong or talking back...or talking facts. He has his opinion and he isn't open for debats.
If there's a game feature he doesn't understand he goes out to make it clear that it's a bug or that the feature is just bad. Is that fair or "mimimi not what i hoped" ?

TB videos should be watched with an open mind. Don't take anyones word for truth on the internet. Not mine, not his. He's not accurate in everything altho he claims to be.

[sheep from hell]

Publicado originalmente por Metsakurat:

Publicado originalmente por CharliezFrag:

Different strokes for different people. I enjoy having my "over detailed" text in the game. I laugh at you if you say Dragon Age does it better. No, it does not. It does it differently, that's all.

Seeing a facial expression is not better ? You can laugh at it all you want but seeing a man being murdered with your own eyes and having someone describe it to you are two different things indeed.
And describe of a murder is never-ever gonna feel as horrible as witnessing the scene with your own eyes. It is better to see the expressions.
Seeing a facial expression + hearing the voice to match said expression is way more immersive than reading about it.
As i said: I don't mind reading dialogs. I grew up with Baldur's Gate. But when it comes to facial expressiosn...Man, they should have like 4-5 different portrait pics of each character and then change that pic to match his/her current emotion. It doesn't have to be live movement but just a still picture that changes like maybe once in a conversation...Depending on the mood swing of t he character. This is totally doable in such a game. Not asking too much or not going too far at all.
This is something to think about indeed.

The facial expression descriptions are...dull to say the least. Not needed in this game at all imo.

sadly most of the facial expressions nowadays are just ....weird because of technical limitations (at least when its not a cut scene).
the talk with the old woman hanging on the tree was much more chilling than everything dragon age had offered till now

[Tikigod]

Publicado originalmente por Metsakurat:

Publicado originalmente por CharliezFrag:

Different strokes for different people. I enjoy having my "over detailed" text in the game. I laugh at you if you say Dragon Age does it better. No, it does not. It does it differently, that's all.

Seeing a facial expression is not better ? You can laugh at it all you want but seeing a man being murdered with your own eyes and having someone describe it to you are two different things indeed.
And describe of a murder is never-ever gonna feel as horrible as witnessing the scene with your own eyes. It is better to see the expressions.
Seeing a facial expression + hearing the voice to match said expression is way more immersive than reading about it.
As i said: I don't mind reading dialogs. I grew up with Baldur's Gate. But when it comes to facial expressiosn...Man, they should have like 4-5 different portrait pics of each character and then change that pic to much his/her current emotion. It doesn't have to be live movement but just a still picture that changes like maybe once in a conversation...Depending on the mood swing of t he character. This is totally doable in such a game. Not asking too much or not going too far at all.
This is something to think about indeed.

The facial expression descriptions are...dull to say the least. Not needed in this game at all imo.

The problem is, the fully voiced, animated and depicted formats come with a limitation on the scope of the events that can and will be included in the game.

Not just for additional censorship reasons, where you can go into fine detail about a murder in text and that's fine. But showing 5% of that detail in a direct depiction is grounds for having the game barred from distribution in some countries. Therefore most events are generalised and depicted briefly with a "Fill in the gaps yourself with whatever details suit you" off screen sequence or even not acknowledging the details at all and just hoping the player makes the connections themselves and creates the possibility.

But also in the fact that production takes much longer for every event intended to be in the game, and so most of what could have happened in the game never gets added to the game and you end up with something with 10% of the content it could have otherwise have had, and what content it does have is kept as streamlined as possible for budget and time reasons.

It's a toss up between:

* Having the freedom to include massive amounts of more situations and content, describe it in much finer detail and touch on a wider range of subjects.

* Being significantly limited in what can be depicted in both theme and level of detail without resorting to off screen tricks and distractions. Having less content but having what is there more immersive and easier to communicate to a player only paying general attention.

[The Dude]

Publicado originalmente por moosc:

I myself got down to the 3rd level of the endless paths before giving the game up and I just don't see how you could talk and not fight your way through. It seems pointless that you don't get experience after a certain number of the same enemy has been killed.

The endless paths isn't meant to be a place you send your party to level up, it's meant to be a challenge of your party management skills in combat. The lack of XP from combat, quite frankly, is a massive improvement over Baldur's Gate which basically forced players into rest spamming for Wyvern and Ankheg encounters just to gain enough XP to survive the trash mobs and enough gold to buy weapons that wouldn't break.

[Metsakurat]

Publicado originalmente por Tikigod:

Saying that "Mass Effect/Dragon Age/Other 3D RPG game" did expression depiction better is kind of missing the point.

It's not missing a point. While Dragon Age is a different sub-genre of the RPG genre than PoE. The facial expressions still stand.
I can compare the gunplay in Battlefield with the gunplay in Bioshock altho they are in different sub-genres.

Altho i never said that Dragon Age did facial expression description better.
This is the thing: DA has facial movements - PoE has descriptions in text of facial movements
What i said is that seeing a facial impression is better. Sometimes simplier things are better. While i often approve of reading...This is the case where i'm saying that seeing a face is better than reading about it.
DA does NOT do facial description better than PoE because it doesn't describe it. It shows it to you.
Why can't faces be shown in this sub-genre ? It's totally doable.

[supertrooper225]

Publicado originalmente por sheep from hell:

Publicado originalmente por Metsakurat:

Seeing a facial expression is not better ? You can laugh at it all you want but seeing a man being murdered with your own eyes and having someone describe it to you are two different things indeed.
And describe of a murder is never-ever gonna feel as horrible as witnessing the scene with your own eyes. It is better to see the expressions.
Seeing a facial expression + hearing the voice to match said expression is way more immersive than reading about it.
As i said: I don't mind reading dialogs. I grew up with Baldur's Gate. But when it comes to facial expressiosn...Man, they should have like 4-5 different portrait pics of each character and then change that pic to match his/her current emotion. It doesn't have to be live movement but just a still picture that changes like maybe once in a conversation...Depending on the mood swing of t he character. This is totally doable in such a game. Not asking too much or not going too far at all.
This is something to think about indeed.

The facial expression descriptions are...dull to say the least. Not needed in this game at all imo.

sadly most of the facial expressions nowadays are just ....weird because of technical limitations (at least when its not a cut scene).
the talk with the old woman hanging on the tree was much more chilling than everything dragon age had offered till now

I can actually agree with that very much. Some games with heavy cinematics and 3d Graphics get it right...but even some of the best looking games don't do facial expressions well. That conversation with the old woman was pretty creepy. I can't really say that about Dragon Age.

[sheep from hell]

Publicado originalmente por Metsakurat:

Publicado originalmente por sheep from hell:

doesnt work all the time but at least its not a "mimimi this game is not what i hoped" attitude the op had

TB has that attitude tho. He is quite arrogant. I sometimes stumbled upon his videos but decided to ignore them a year ago when he actually said in one of his videos that if anyone disagrees with him then they're basically morons.
Yeah, he acts like his opinions are facts. He doesn't like having an argument: He doesn't like to be proven wrong or talking back...or talking facts. He has his opinion and he isn't open for debats.
If there's a game feature he doesn't understand he goes out to make it clear that it's a bug or that the feature is just bad. Is that fair or "mimimi not what i hoped" ?

TB videos should be watched with an open mind. Don't take anyones word for truth on the internet. Not mine, not his. He's not accurate in everything altho he claims to be.

as i said, at least he tries. and yeah he is arrogant, but mostly he have better views on things and at least well thought views than most others. doesnt mean i have always the same opinion as he, but normally he can make always a point. and well nor tb is there to discuss with me or i to discuss with him, the only thing what i expect from him is information about pros and cons and exactly that he delievers.

[Metsakurat]

Publicado originalmente por sheep from hell:

Publicado originalmente por Metsakurat:

sadly most of the facial expressions nowadays are just ....weird because of technical limitations (at least when its not a cut scene).
the talk with the old woman hanging on the tree was much more chilling than everything dragon age had offered till now

I agree with that.
However it was more chilling because of what was happening. Not how they describe her face.
Witcher has ruined me. I'd say it's more chilling seeing eyes poked out in Witcher2. Seeing the agony in that face cannot be described in text.

Yes, again different sub-genres. Witcher and PoE are different games but i can still compare and talk about the facial expressions and how they seem to us.
Just like i can compare physics in a F1 and MotoGP game.

EDIT: The thing why you don't think Dragon Age did the old woman not as creepy is because she was not in Dragon Age.
But on a serious note: It was not her facial description that made the scene "chilling" to you guys. It was the whole situation in overall.