If you guys feel it's a productive use of your time to dissect one of my posts from three years ago, carry right on bros. The attention is flattering.
So hey, I'll join the fun. Here's my dissection of three-year-ago-me's first impressions of the game.
I'm a storyfag. Or more like lorefag really. If a game gives me a world that's coherent, believable, and lived-in, I can forgive a lot. Pillars has that in abundance. It's far better in this respect than any IE game other than Torment. We have nations fighting wars for reasons which make sense, with power relations changing, alliances shifting, fortunes reversing, and reversing again. We have technological, scientific, and social progress. We have people with complex relations to their gods, whom the follow -- or hate, or resent, or wrestle with -- for human reasons. We have -- finally -- put to sleep the Scots dwarf, with subraces no longer forming only their own cultures. In fact we have a range of cultures that's far broader and more interesting than anything I remember seeing in any cRPG, and drawing from a much broader range of historical cultures than just about any other game I've played. Eora exists for its own reasons, not just as a sandbox for you to play in.
Yep I agree with this paragraph. Eora is gud worldbuilding. Good job 2015 Prime Junta.
The writing and story were really good as well. We had a compelling, memorable, and really well voiced antagonist, equally compelling allies like Lady Webb, and a general flow that kept a lot of freedom without losing momentum. Not flawless, mind: like most games with a blank-slate protagonist, the main story had some problems with character motivation and acknowledgment of character choices or background (what if I thought being a Watcher was the coolest thing evar?) and the companion writing was somewhat uneven, but I was only disappointed with one of them, and there only a little. The companions' motivations for hanging out with me made sense, for the most part and with relatively minor exceptions, and they had distinct and interesting personalities, even the not-so-likeable ones. We've come a long way here from "For Shar!" and "For the Balance!"
Okay here I've got to disagree a bit. Thaos was at best an okay antagonist, although the voice acting was pretty good, and Lady Webb was also at best okay. There were more interesting NPCs in the game too. The general flow was like that up to the weird chokepoint after Defiance Bay; from there on out it was pretty much on-rails. Shame 2015 Prime Junta for not pointing that out.
I still agree, broadly, about the companions.
I also dug the pacing. It picked up speed as it went. Twin Elms didn't have nearly as much stuff in it as Defiance Bay, but that felt right: by that point, I didn't want to get bogged down in faction politics or the like.
Nah, the pacing was, again, at best okay. There was never any sense of urgency to anything; it was more like drip-feeding stuff and Defiance Bay and Twin Elms both felt pretty thin, Ondra's Gift notwithstanding.
And... I loved the way the game was an obvious parable of the stuff that's going on in our world right now. Also the way nobody's appeared to pick up on it, despite its obviousness.
Yup, it was and is, and I still think it's odd that so few people are picking up on that dimesion.
Story aside, with Pillars, though, there really wasn't all that much to forgive. I loved the character mechanics. I loved the writing, quests, and companions. And I loved the combat.
Here I'll repudiate the bit about the writing. It was serviceable, but no better than that. The character mechanics were great, the quests were for the most part pretty good, and the companions for the most part very good -- as I said ITT, the best writing in the game was companion writing. I did and still do love the combat, although I'm not quite sure why I was so gushing about it in 2015 -- it had pretty major flaws in 1.0; while it was possible to find enjoyable ways of playing it (and I did), in 1.0 it was also easy to get pushed into rote, repetitive tactics which got the job done but weren't all that much fun. This was only really addressed with the AI rewrite in 2.0, and further improved in 3.0.
The character classes and their development are, by and large, really well thought-out and fun. The classes are genuinely differentiated: playing a fighter isn't like playing a ranger or paladin -- not quite -- and despite their superficial similarities, the wizard and druid are actually quite different when you look more closely.
There's also a quite a bit of wiggle room within the classes. In my playthrough, charname was actually built "against type" -- a fighter where I pumped Dex, had high Res and Per, above-average Mig, and dumped Con and Int, and then only picked offensive talents on levelup. The result was very different than tank-and-spanking: I built Edér and Pallegina much the same way, and ended up with a front line that was both durable and devastating, but had to deal with creatures getting past it due to the engagement limits.
Yep, the character mechanics are the best aspect of P:E in terms of systems, and I'm butthurt that Josh
d that for P2.
When I changed my party composition, I had to change my tactics as well. The only character who stayed with the party almost all through was Durance; I switched everyone else in or out as the spirit moved me (or as companion quests required), and consequently had to adjust the way I was doing things fairly frequently. That was a lot of fun.
Yep, still true. I suspect a lot of people just don't do this though; they build a party and stick with it to the end.
I also really dug most of the combat encounters, and combat itself. The difficulty was just about in the sweet spot for me; it felt challenging but not frustrating. Some of the boss battles were a little underwhelming though; the dragon fights were not like any of the dragon encounters in the IE games. Other than that, the fights were varied, fun, and interesting, and I had to work to keep my lines straight and stop the battlefield from turning into chaos and ruination. Success felt extremely rewarding: it wasn't so much about winning a fight -- most of them were easily winnable -- as winning it with minimal expenditure of resources. Pulling out all the stops when I was starting to run low on health or fatigue was hitting was fun too. But yeah, the game could've used some more hard boss battles -- as it is, I only had to reload a couple of times with the final battle, and with one optional late-game challenge which I took on one level "too early" (the counter to the main danger came one level later).
I was playing on Hard at this point. PotD would have been a fair bit tougher. I was also too easy on the encounter design here: while there are a number of well set-up encounters, there are way too many trash mobs and most of them are fairly unimaginative, just a bunch of mooks dropped onto the map. This was improved somewhat in 3.0 for the OC and greatly improved for WM.
And, of course, the damn thing is gorgeous, with fantastic sound and music really creating a feeling of time and space.
I could have been more critical of the music, which is fairly generic fantasy fare, a few nice tunes aside. It does look and sound good though.
(Also, guns. BOOOM! hahaha)
Yeah. I like guns in my fantasy, so sue me.
Okay, so much for the gushing. What could use improvement?
The stronghold. That felt tacked-on and superfluous. The should've put less stuff in it, but done more with it. Would it have killed Tim Cain to think of something more evocative than "Major Adventure" for Christ's sake?
Yup.
The crafting and enchantment system. It made items feel same-y, and was way too easy. "Add Corroding Lash. Click!" At the very least, I would have made Fine/Exceptional/Superb properties of the base item rather than something you can add later, and required you to go to a workshop to craft. I would also have had a skill or talent requirement for it, even if that's all it's used for.
Yup.
"Assembly-line" feel that shows through in some respects. The way the item effects are broken down into specifics, or the way many monsters are clearly put together from available parts. Understandable given the scope of the game and limited time and budget, but jarring nevertheless.
Yup. Although the itemisation was significantly improved in 2.0 and 3.0.
The spell FX and camera angle. They made things really hard to see in combat sometimes, and some of the FX slowed framerates to a crawl.
Yup.
The lack of depth in the spell system. No hard counters yadda yadda, but I would have liked some approximation of back-and-forth spell battles. The only counters I ended up using were Prayer against Fear and Suppress Affliction, and the only hostile effects that were nasty enough to require special attention were Petrified and Charmed. Why not fold in counters into the spells themselves?
Yup. This was greatly improved over the next several years though, and the spell system evolved into something pretty good.
Also it looks like Josh stole my idea for P2, what with the keyword counter system. Go me.
The fragility of enemy casters. They were only threatening en masse. If there's a single caster, it's like he has a huge bull's eye painted on his forehead and is really easy to murder.
Yup.
Boss battles. As mentioned above, they were usually underwhelming, with no special tactics or thought needed. Especially dragons which were just overgrown lizards really.
Yup. Much improved in WM though.
Level 8 of the Endless Paths. That was dull. I left the rest of the dungeon unexplored. Hit the level cap just before the endgame anyway, even with all my party switching.
Yup, it was a dull level. There were some better ones further down though.
That voice actress with an S that sounds like fingernails on chalkboard.
Yup, hate that voice.
(Version played: 1.05. Before that, I ran through the first part of the game several times with several different characters built different ways, as well as putting about 75 hours into the backer beta. Difficulty setting Hard, with auto-level companions Off but no other major difficulty changes.)
There you have it.
