Intro and summed up thoughts on PoE*
First off, I should say that I was on the whole disappointed by Pillars of Eternity, whenever I've considered its 26 March 2015 release build as the complete game, which I am now convinced it was not meant to be. Anyone who engages in the useless activity of following my sentiments for PoE as expressed on the Codex will see that I was very optimistic about PoE until a week or so after it was released. My excitement turned to disappointment when I saw in how many respects the experience was incoherent and the mechanics unfinished or unbalanced.
After these feelings passed, my reading is that the March 26th release was a miscarriage in terms of quality, although it apparently has sold very well**. It's unfortunately a common practice nowadays for a company to run out of budget and to release a beta disguised as a full game, with a slapped "1." in front of the beta build number. Therefore I personally consider version 2.0 as called by the developers to be what 1.0 should have looked like if the game was released in a release-ready state.
Refusing to accept the 26 March build as the final product makes me feel less negative towards the release.
* - it's applicable to mention right away that I am a PoE backer and have played the beta for around 70 hours.
** - See here, and here. The game has certainly been announced to have sold over 500 000 copies over Steam, and we can safely estimate about 1/5th of that number as copies sold over GOG.com.
The two-part expansion - "true to the roots" or "Paradox-style DLC"
Soon after release, lead developers made statements on what the PoE expansion will be like. As it turns out however, there were some minor discrepancies between announced plans and the end result.
As early as February 24th, with the interview probably conducted days earlier, Josh Sawyer promised that PoE would have a "traditional expansion" as opposed to "going down the DLC route":
Very soon however, new facts emerged, and it turned out the "traditional expansion" will come out in two parts:
This news broke in the context of Paradox Interactive becoming PoE's publisher, and soon afterwards it became clear that "Pillars of Eternity will benefit from unique marketing".
Now, if you are familiar with Paradox' uniquely annoying practice of releasing DLCs at the pace of "one tea spoon per hour", because it's easier to milk players this way, you should have braced yourselves for the impact. Fortunately, Obsidian is not going full Paradox with The White March. The expansion will be coming in two parts only, is guaranteed to be the only PoE expansion, and from what I've seen in Part I, it does feature enough content to deserve being called an expansion in the first place.
The other sweetener to the bitter pill of the expansion's being split might be if you have preordered it. And if not, you can always rest with the thought that an expansion split in two will probably end up being bigger as a sum of the two parts than if it were released at once. To me it still seems the most plausible reason to release the expansion in this way must have been to maximize profits by releasing an expansion while the game is still famous and selling well, and by hooking players of "Part I", so that most of them buy "Part II". The beneficial effect of splitting the PR event in two is also to be considered -- when news of Part II's release breaks, this will in turn generate sales for Part I from new audience which may not have heard at all about the expansion.
All these practical advantages are indisputable, yet I am still mildly annoyed by the evidence of Paradox' influence in the execution, such as the little icons on the bottom right of PoE's main screen, designating that you have (or have not yet) bought The White March. I think if you are a developer sincerely reaching out to a mature audience, you don't go for cheap gamification tricks like "collect all DLC icons on the bottom of the main screen". Instead, you show dignity, and design an alternate main menu background for your expansion, like game developers actually used to do in the past by the way.
The takeaway from this minirant of mine is that whenever you see Obsidian talking about "resurrecting the IE games' feels" (Josh Sawyer's favorite phrase, and a conveniently ambiguous one to boot), what is probably meant is resurrecting their own "feels" of what was good and what was not good in those games. What you get is the honor to finance their experiments purely on confidence that their "take", and interpretation on the subject will be to your liking.
The expansion is a similar story. Even though it all turns out to be in the players' favor - being composed of two parts, the expansion "is probably gonna wind up being bigger than [Tales of the Sword Coast], but I don't think anyone's gonna complain too much about it"**, the MO remains similar - name-drop an IE title to attract interest, but when it comes to game design - suddenly announce that you know better than whoever designed the same IE classics you've been name-dropping just until now.
Hence, we saw Obsidian talking about doing "a traditional expansion", appealing to "the old times"/"games in the old times"*, and looking for the confidence of those who associate "old" with "tried and true" and "good". But just like with the original game, this appeal for confidence does not bind Obsidian to deliver what you thought they promised. As far as they are concerned, you just misunderstood - it's a traditional expansion, dummy, it's just a two-part traditional expansion! Exactly the same as pledging to deliver an IE experience and coming up with MMO combat mechanics.
Anyway, I sincerely wish that when the time comes to market PoE 2, we will only hear it being announced as "the successor to PoE", without any allusions to these outdated, degenerative gameplay classics that players yet love so much, and which actually saved Obsidian from going under, as the PoE Making-of documentary claims. If name-dropping of games which PoE has supposedly surpassed continues, this will mean that Obsidian still has more confidence in the outdated and degenerate gameplay brands of 15 years ago, than in their own brand, modern and balanced as it is. I believe that when you show hubris, you better back it up with your own work's quality, otherwise you'll end up as laughing stock.
* - Appealing to the good old times and the games back then is also implying sincerity, which you used to feel existed between developers and players, because you were younger and the industry was much smaller and less experienced at milking you.
** - I understand Josh's irony in part as a hint that comparisons with the IE games become less relevant over time, since PoE's release. I can't know if he shares that view of course, but I imagine he would at least like to think so.
First impressions from The White March
I fired up The White March looking for what will differentiate it from, and preferably make it stand out against, the base game. The base game, mind you, I'm no longer concerned with the IE games, and comparisons to any IE games' expansions would be too far-fetched to be of use for anyone looking for info on whether to buy the White March or not.
Partly due to the "2.0", really 1.0 patch, and partly due to the expansion content itself, this time my overall impressions are positive.
On June 22 I said "All criticism of PoE aside, if the overall quality of the area and encounter design in the expansion is that of PoE's starting dungeon (the area they said they did last, so they were at their most experienced), I'll be very pleased. Just hoping that the combat will pose some challenge to a full party." On account of the combat difficulty, I found the expansion very satisfactory. I can't make claims on how "fun" combat is in the expansion, but at least for me, it's no longer the same boring battle over and over, so there is improvement.
I started the expansion on Hard difficulty and Expert mode, with a level 9 party composed of a rogue PC, Eder, Pallegina, Durance, Grieving Mother and Aloth. When prompted, I accepted the raised difficulty. I found it a nice surprise that Eder no longer felt invincible during combat, and that enemies would go for my weaker characters. Although I haven't felt a need to change the party's equipped items, or respec my character to reflect changes to the attribute system or AI, my impression is that combat difficulty has received a much needed boost. I was practically glad when my party got wiped out in the last battle in Stalwart Village - I had made it a house rule that I won't rest spam through the saving of the village.
Once the fighting in the village was done, and I had a better chance to look the area over, I immediately felt it's even better looking than the already pretty areas of the base game. Watching the PAX Prime Pillars Panel confirmed it that as a result of the experience the team has amassed in building the base game, they are able to produce even better areas. I wish it were possible that refinements in the game's combat mechanics could come with the same speed, but unfortunately that seems to be a subject where the project leads have too different ideas than me of what's fun and what isn't.
Some ramblings on the subject of PoE's systems
The White March enforces the same principle which the base game established, and that is the developers' aim to make the game possible to be played and completed in as many conceivable ways as the players can come up with. That's a very tough goal to achieve, in and of itself, and I admire Obsidian's ambition. Some of the good effects of this philosophy are, for example, that they've went through the trouble of providing a special "scaled-up difficulty" only for the expansion areas, or that the expansion itself is accessible in the middle of the game, or that players can choose whether or not to use party members' AI scripts, or if needed, they can reassign the attribute points of their character, to take better advantage of the changes to base attributes effects made in version "2.0". I generally view "respec" options with disgust, but when a game designer reworks their RPG's base attributes 6 months after release, I agree some means for players to fix their characters should be provided. Although I disagree with this base principle that the game's rules should be able to accommodate the character builds, as opposed to character builds aiming to get the most out of the ruleset, I admire the amount of work and effort Obsidian invest while aiming to follow that principle. I suppose that's the way they understand being attentive to players.
Ironically, due to the same "as many play styles should be viable as humanly possible" philosophy, fine-tuning your character's base attributes is probably one of the lower priority concerns for an average PoE player. The strive to make every character development choice viable in the end leaves me with the feeling that it matters next to nothing what attributes you set, as long as you've chosen a character class. And if by some accident, someone discovers a character build so bad that they can't progress in the game, and complains about it, the developers will most probably try to "fix" it.
This, along with the childish combat difficulty, offered under "Normal" difficulty, was my main criticism of the game at release, and unlike combat difficulty, this one is much harder to mitigate. Here unfortunately, the PoE team has little means to bring positive change in The White March expansion. After all, an expansion isn't meant to be a game systems' overhaul. All the more that from what I can see, Obsidian don't view the current state of the ruleset as a problem.
As a result, the amount of effort required from the player to make sense of what a given character development decision will actually result in, is still considerable, and at least for me, it's too much work. The base-100, percentage-, and seconds/tenths of a second calculations make it too damn difficult to tell how much of an effect a given ability will have. I'm not advocating "streamlining", just something manageable for an average person's abilities at mental calculations. Try imagining a "+2% chance" for something to happen on hit, or a "+2.5s duration" of some effect, which pass at the same time when 4 more timers are ticking just for your currently selected character. It's impossible to assess so much information at once. I feel PoE's rules system is still overly complex, needlessly so, for what it achieves. D&D 5ed manages to be a deep ruleset without resorting to such tortures. Why should this be impossible for PoE?
There's another problem that follows after hubris and setting high expectations - little mercy will be shown to your work from people who more or less worshipped the same "idols" you claimed were fake, and your game would show "the true way of the RPG". Anything that's less than stellar in your work tends to get attacked, and in PoE's case, the combat mechanics are an easy target, even after the patches and partial retractions from principles like "no hard counters".
I believe that, beyond a certain point, PoE itself becomes a hostage of its own design principle "nothing should be significant", "no character/skill/item/ability/talent should stick out", and the constant designer strive towards what is incorrectly dubbed "balance" inevitably prevents the game from allowing a player the moments of awe, felt when faced with the effects of great power, whether his own character's, an item's, or an enemy's.
To go even further, I think it prevents the game from realizing its full potential. Because the principle of "nothing should be significant" goes against the very defining trait of the Epic, and PoE is supposed to be an epic - it's a tale about heroes (and gods). Somehow, PoE is aimed simultaneously to be an "epic story" in the steps of the Infinity Engine epic stories, and is a game governed by rules which prevent anything and anyone from truly sticking out. This is mainly why playing PoE may leave you with the association for diet soda, e-cigarettes, or inflatable dolls.
The constant strive for accessibility, which is so evident in PoE's ruleset/mechanics, left me with the feeling, rightly or not, that Obsidian had collected money from hardcore IE fans and then made a game directed at casual players and game journos, who generally have no idea what is it they are playing, and would play and rate anything, as they are told.
In fact the game is directed at everyone, but this doesn't make it feel much better than if it was directed solely at casuals and journos.
Accentuate the positive
Now some more optimistic news that came with the latest patch. First, the so-called "2.0" version of PoE contains one major change to base attributes and that is the changing of the Perception bonus from boosting Deflection to boosting Accuracy. While I believe this to be a needed step in the right direction, in light of all I've said in the past few paragraphs, I think it's too little to make a difference for me. During my playthrough of the expansion, which I did with a character I built with version 1.0 of the game (in reality a build number around 0.800 as far as I remember), I never used the "respec" option, and this didn't pose the least problem for my party, a fact which I guess should pass as a celebration of the game's accessibilty. Regardless, this change affects gameplay more than is immediately evident, as we'll see below.
Talking about attempts to make the combat actually fun (after the success that was the base game in making combat boring), here is a prophetic quote from long before the expansion was out:
In the base PoE, something that followed from the "nothing should stick out" rule was that at some point the game designers had decided that that the ruleset should not feature any "hard counters", i.e. effects that completely counter each other/cancel each other out. I can't reproduce the designers' reasoning here, because I never understood it and never remembered it. However, and this is the second good news, along with the base attributes change, introducing hard counters for some enemies in The White March is another deviation from the "nothing should be significant" rule. And this is a deviation I was very happy to see, although I was less happy to watch my party getting slaughtered by ice and storm blights. Anyway, I welcome this migration from monotonous battles filled with calculations which are nearly impossible to follow, towards an environment where I have to adapt my weapons and tactics at least a little to enemies' properties and behavior.
And the third piece of good news, which comes as a side effect of the change to the Perception bonus - your party's tanks are now more vulnerable. What this translates to, especially in combination with an updated AI which tends to disengage and pursue targets in your back lines, is that you actually need to manage your party's movement... somewhat. The amount of party micro needed is still far from the BG/IWD levels, but I'm happy with what little has been achieved. This comes in addition to the nerfing of the fighter "Wary Defender" talent.
Writing, setting, NPCs
Even though I don't feel happy with a central part of the game's design, I can't ignore those that hit the mark. One such aspect of the White March expansion is that the main quest hub, and to a lesser extent - the wilderness areas, has seen much more effort towards making it seem alive, compared to any area in the base game. This is something I don't think anyone can honestly argue against. Ironically, the backwater fishing village felt more 'lived in' than Defiance Bay, the biggest city in the Dyrwood, according to the lore resources. Stalwart village had people that converse with each other, play games at the tavern, give out bits of information that make sense within the environment, have histories, professions, opinions, fears. Overall, the amount of work put into fleshing out the village solely through its inhabitants made a very good impression on me. Maybe this was the result of criticism expressed by players, or maybe this time around the PoE team was lucky to be working on a project with a properly defined scope, so they could put the right amount of attention to such details, or at least that's how I felt about it. Compared to the base game, I think this aspect is noticeably improved.
Talking about the expansion's story on a large scale, I can say I am content with what I saw. The player and his party act as heroes for hire, and as is usually the case, it turns out that there is more to their errand than was initially expected. That's a traditional, and for me, a good enough excuse for exploring wilderness areas and dungeons, and killing monsters. Whether the motivation behind a hero setting on an adventure seems plausible to you is down to personal preference, and my preference is for plots which have not been artificially complicated, and are more in line with traditional tropes as seen in folklore. In this respect, I'm quite ok with the low key premises of the party being sent on a mission to investigate Durgan's Battery. If anything, I was a bit worried of the grand plans for Stalwart that its mayor Renengild seemed to have been conceiving. I was practically hoping we could "keep this small-scale", although the prospect of affecting regional geopolitics gave me additional motivation to pursue the main quest. I could get even bolder and hope that increasing revenue for Stalwart would somehow affect my own fief around the fortress of Od Nua, but I guess hoping for so much reactivity would be unwise, in a game where the whole stronghold was hacked together with just enough work so that the game doesn't crash when you try to enter its area.
Returning to the writing's quality, not everything about it is lollipops and roses. The trademark writing stumbles of the original game were still present. For example - a fisherman with absurd lines such as "[I do] just about everything. I track the day's catches and see that our nets and hooks are in working order". This must have been written by someone who hasn't paused for a second to think how a fisherman would describe his work, let alone take the time to actually learn something on the subject before he writes the line. Wasn't it Sawyer himself in his blog who was urging people who do writing and game design to research the subjects which they write on? I know he has done that, and it's a really good piece of advice!
I was going to be more mildly critical of the NPCs after I encountered Zahua, but after listening to the Devil of Caroc, I decided to just fire a full broadside.
I disliked the idea about having a crazed monk companion from the first moment I engaged him in conversation. Here is my reasoning. First off, you already have a crazy priest in the party - you can't keep repeating the same gag over and over, you have to move on to the next gag, if you can come up with one. Second, and more important, I think the crazy monk is already a pretty banal and overused trope, even within the narrow field of cRPGs. Why such lack of imagination? How does a crazed monk archetype, which by definition has a comedic relief side to himself, with the player supposedly amused by his weirdness, tie in with a setting, plot and writing style that pretend to be realistic and "naturalistic"?
This contradiction between the character and the environment is evident even in the very first encounter you have with that NPC. Why on earth have him pop out of a barrel of fish, like a stripper out of a cardboard cake, and go through the unbearably stupid explanation for why he was there? If the goal of this scene was to present him to the player, a much more realistic way to do so would have been to show him meditating in the cold, half naked as we see him to be. This would have been so much more in tune with the expansion's setting and tone, which is one that I sincerely like.
His dialogue script doesn't miss the opportunity to raise brows with its clumsy writing. Scars are not "faded like lost memories", to give one example of cheesy writing. Whoever wrote this uninspired comparison should be ashamed of themselves, as should whoever permitted it to go into the game.
While Zahua may have some redeeming qualities, I think there is nothing to save The Devil of Caroc, and I'm very curious if there will be any voices in her defence. The Devil of Caroc is best described by her own statement - "If it's sane and logical reasoning you're wanting, you're going to be disappointed". Intentionally or not, I'd wager not, that sentence is even grammatically wrong. But that's the least of the Devil's problems. Somehow the writers' ineptitude and lack of inspiration demonstrated in this NPC manage to surpass everything seen in PoE so far. The Devil of Caroc is a combination of:
1. Implausible backstory
2. Annoyingly anachronistic language. The term "hicks" for example is completely out of place in a fantasy character's lexicon as is any regionalism. It would be equally stupid, especially in a setting that takes itself seriously, to have characters use American regional talk as it would be to have them use Australian regional talk.
3. Cringeworthy descriptions of the Devil expressing emotions through "the glitter in the stones which serve as its eyes" or through "the construct's essence".
4. Abysmally bad voice acting, which should put to shame anyone who has ever preformed as a voice actor.
5. Finally, just like with "The Crazed Monk", "The Frankenstein Monster That Broke Free And Now Experiences Internal Moral Conflicts" is as banal and overused a trope, as you can possibly get. Most readers will remember Shale from Dragon Age: Origins and its lousy pigeon puns(tm). I shudder in anticipation of the equivalent "construct humor" which will most probably flow from the Devil.
I'm not sure if having a construct as an NPC isn't some clever trick on the writers' part, so as to avoid the need to develop it as a character or describe its emotions and body language. Either that was the goal, or it has just been a hack job, which was hastily voiced by some volunteer from Obsidian. Either way, as a character the Devil of Caroc is completely worthless.
These problems aside, I was happy to hear more voiced lines (save for the Devil), although the allusions to the "Old West" in the tone and accents are a bit too strong for my preference. For a bit of high-brow nerd fun: According to the lore, in Dyrwood 'sc' is read like 'sh' (remember Calisca), yet there is a character in Stalwart Village who pronounces "Francesca" the way you would expect in normal English. I wonder how will this oh-so-major deviation from the lore be justified? But then again, the same voice actress mispronounces the word "row" not long after that. Kidding aside, it disappoints me when a game developer deviates from their own game lore. It makes me feel like I'm the only one who is actually keeping track, and looking for intristic logic to their world.
Encounter and area design
One aspect where I was expecting improvements in the expansion was the quality of area design and more variance to the encounters, even if the Infinity Engine games weren't exactly known for their varied encounters to begin with. From what I saw in the White March, my expectations were fortunately proven true, more so regarding area, and particularly dungeon design. Encounters themselves seemed more "hand-made" and less often looked copy-pasted compared to those in the base game, but I think the combat mechanics'/ruleset's deficiencies still prevent the player from experiencing more truly memorable combat engagements.
This isn't to say there weren't memorable engagements, probably owing to the difficulty options configuration I played under - 9th/10th level party, Hard difficulty, and scaled up by the expansion. I've been tracking this carefully as I played, and I can say there were enough (although not each and all) combat encounters where the following factors were present, which gave them character:
1. There was context to the creatures' group as it was composed - for example, a group of ogres gathered around the dead bodies of Lagufaeth.
2. There was conversation, either between the enemies, or between my party and the enemies.
3. The encounter was placed on terrain which offered some kind of tactical opportunities for both sides - a narrow pass, obstacles on the terrain which provided choke points or kept a character's back safe, a staircase with multiple turns which disallowed the party from deploying in an optimal combat order, etc.
In general, I could tell these were things that had been tested in advance, and encounters weren't just arbitrarily placed on flat ground. I welcome this effort on the developers' part. For me it feels really nice to see someone has put himself in the player's shoes while placing the enemies, and put the extra work to make them part of the world, as opposed to just fodder.
Another positive is that scripted interactions have been expanded upon, and are now present in every area. I can't tell if they've become more complex, because I haven't replayed them multiple times, and I use the 'Expert' option which among other things hides the prerequisites for specific options. However, I can say they've become more branched. I think most of them relied on strength and athletics though, which means I used Eder in the majority of situations, but that's not necessarily a drawback of the interactions themselves.
A minor suggestion - I would have liked it better if some of the interactions not involving the "Scripted Interactions" checks - like finding and picking up the new pet - actually used the scripted interactions' interface. It just seemed "right" to be so. A notable example I can think of is finding an egg in Longwatch Falls.
The areas themselves look somehow even more beautiful than I was already used to in the base game. It deserves noting that minute effects have been added, such as the party leaving footsteps in the snow and party members' breath coming out as steam.
I think the encounter design and difficulty (although I realize that difficulty is much more subjective) deserve a few words of commendation. I've had my party wiped out multiple times by the same encounter, which hasn't happened to me in the base game, save for just a few fights, and I consider this to be good progress in the right direction. In the base game it felt as if the designers were too shy to make encounters hard.
What's even better, the increased average difficulty of encounters, coupled with the addition of at least some sort of AI(!), required me to actually use party-level tactics in order to overcome the large part of encounters in the game. For the first time since I've began playing PoE, I had to economize spells, health, resting supplies, choose which spell to cast in order to disable some enemies for longer, while my tank and damage-dealers hack away at those who still were functioning. I think the changes that came with the game version branded "2.0" will actually make the game challenging for players above the 'casual' watermark, and this is the biggest news brought by The White March.
Regarding the "improved AI", announced in the patchnotes for the so-called "2.0" version - "improved" is a bit of a misnomer in my opinion. That's because you can only improve something which has previously existed. What used to pass as "AI" in the builds prior to "2.0" is described neatly by Sensuki, who has put lots of work into testing the game and in hacking its ruleset source code:
Enemies' behavior in PoE builds prior to The White March and the patch that accompanied it amounted to attacking 1) the party member that attacked them, or 2) the nearest party member they found, and once locked in engagement, they stayed locked until killed or until the party member was knocked out/killed. I can't testify as to how enemies' targeting logic has been changed in the newest patch, though I guess someone will eventually check this and report, but what's apparent is that enemies now use their abilities (with ranged enemies preferring ranged abilities/weapons), and enemies will occasionally break engagement to attack a different party member than the one they are engaged by (although I can't tell what's the enemies' reasoning for doing that).
Combined with the nerfing of disengagement attacks, which came soon after the original PoE release (possibly even with the day 1 patch), it appears that the farther the combat mechanics have veered from Josh Sawyer's initial theories on what is fun and balanced combat, and the closer they get to the old IE formula, the better for everyone. The general rule about PoE has been that the more refined combat gameplay becomes, the more it resembles the IE games. In that case, I wonder, what was the point in all of this forced "innovation", just to rediscover in the end that a wheel is generally more functional if it has a round shape?
In defence of my claim above, one aspect of the improved encounters in The White March is that just like in the IE games, enemies now form distinct front- and back-line with the front line occupied by melee versions of the enemies (Crag Ogres, Lagufaeth, Redfin Lagufaeth), and the back line occupied by their ranged versions (Crag Ogre Cannoneer, Lagufaeth Sidewinder, etc).
All the praise for AI improvements aside, it was a little disappointing to find that enemy-pulling tactics were still possible to pull off in encounters where enemies were positioned sufficiently spread out, and that pathfinding bugs are often encountered both when it comes to enemies and to party members. Characters will still "take the long way around" each other rather than bump into each other whenever neither is engaged in combat. In addition to that, in many cases where it seems that two characters should be able to stand next to each other and block a narrow pass, it turns out that there is room for only one.
Another peculiarity about encounters in the expansion, evident at least on the difficulty level I played on, has been what I think are attempts to circumvent the negative aspects of the engagement system, attempts which in themselves seem ironic by now. The methods used to this end are amount to either providing encounters with few (2-3 enemies), which would easily get wiped out but would give the player an idea about the enemies' abilities, or using encounters with a huge number of enemies (8-10), so that the tank's engagement limit would be filled and some enemies would inevitably attack back-line party-members.
This seems to be the way in which developers have chosen to overcome the tendency towards "tank-and-spank" anti-tactics brought about mainly by their own patent engagement mechanic, and leading to the monotonous gameplay that many players were complaining of. It was mainly the engagement mechanic which brought about the IE mod's being created even before the base game had shipped.
Talking about the IE mod, I think the next game patch will be a good moment for Obsidian to ask for permission to simply incorporate the IE mod into the base game. If such permission is granted, which I'm pretty sure will be the case, it would make for a much more convenient experience for many players, as testified by the mod's number of downloads.
Bottom line on encounter design - if you are a good player, you'll now find battles worth your time, so giving the expansion a try is encouraged. I think it would be too lavish to hope for fully scripted set piece battles, as these didn't exist even in BGII until special mods came up, but on the other hand, it's realistic to expect Obsidian to further improve the AI settings in future patches.
As for the areas - the developers have kicked into full gear, and the areas are both bigger - on par with the IE games, and just as beautiful, or more so than, in the base game, with multiple entry points and hence multiple paths through dungeons, and varied combat environments which in the odd lucky case necessitate some tactical thought on the player's part. I'd even go far enough to claim that in most TWM dungeons the dungeon design is superior to what's usually seen throughout the IE games.
I should also make a small mention of the music which I think is superb in The White March. Although I liked the music in the base game as well, I really felt that the seeming simplicity and the beauty of the northern landscape have been translated into music with impressive accuracy for the expansion. In my opinion Justin Bell is a very talented composer and Obsidian are lucky to have him working on the PoE games. Hopefully, he'll be retained for PoE 2.
Conclusion
Those are my thoughts on the PoE expansion, and on the game's current state, which seems to be the more or less "final" version, beyond which only relatively small improvements will be made with subsequent patches (though I may yet be wrong about that). I was mostly prompted to write it by the fact that version "2.0" looked like a version worthy of the title "the game as intended by the developers", and by the fact that I rather liked the White March expansion overall. I think it's evident that Obsidian are capable of producing a great quality cRPG which even improves on the classics, if given the right amount of time for the project scope. In this case, 5 months gave us about 20-25 hours of gameplay, probably more than that for the less experienced players out there.
I've aimed to be as impartial as possible, and point out explicitly the parts where I state personal opinions. I've also tried to give attention to all aspects of the game, so if I've missed something, whether bad or good, I've missed it despite my efforts, not intentionally.
Obsidian have stated that there will be no more expansions for PoE beyond The White March Pt. 2. Given that, I guess the season is open for wishlists for PoE 2. I'm far from ready with a full list, but off the top of my head, my bravest hope is that for the sequel Obsidian will completely rework their current ruleset with the end goal to provide clear and concise information to the player about what their characters' abilities will do. This will require ditching the current level of granularity to ability effects which involves percentages and tenths of a second. I believe those are simply impossible to process by an untrained human brain, especially for 6 characters in the heat of battle, and I hope they take more lessons from the IE games with their delay timers to character actions.
In conclusion, I still think PoE was itself born without a soul, but its expansion proves that this can be remedied, if one knows how and is allowed to work.
First off, I should say that I was on the whole disappointed by Pillars of Eternity, whenever I've considered its 26 March 2015 release build as the complete game, which I am now convinced it was not meant to be. Anyone who engages in the useless activity of following my sentiments for PoE as expressed on the Codex will see that I was very optimistic about PoE until a week or so after it was released. My excitement turned to disappointment when I saw in how many respects the experience was incoherent and the mechanics unfinished or unbalanced.
After these feelings passed, my reading is that the March 26th release was a miscarriage in terms of quality, although it apparently has sold very well**. It's unfortunately a common practice nowadays for a company to run out of budget and to release a beta disguised as a full game, with a slapped "1." in front of the beta build number. Therefore I personally consider version 2.0 as called by the developers to be what 1.0 should have looked like if the game was released in a release-ready state.
Refusing to accept the 26 March build as the final product makes me feel less negative towards the release.
* - it's applicable to mention right away that I am a PoE backer and have played the beta for around 70 hours.
** - See here, and here. The game has certainly been announced to have sold over 500 000 copies over Steam, and we can safely estimate about 1/5th of that number as copies sold over GOG.com.
The two-part expansion - "true to the roots" or "Paradox-style DLC"
Soon after release, lead developers made statements on what the PoE expansion will be like. As it turns out however, there were some minor discrepancies between announced plans and the end result.
As early as February 24th, with the interview probably conducted days earlier, Josh Sawyer promised that PoE would have a "traditional expansion" as opposed to "going down the DLC route":
Very soon however, new facts emerged, and it turned out the "traditional expansion" will come out in two parts:
This news broke in the context of Paradox Interactive becoming PoE's publisher, and soon afterwards it became clear that "Pillars of Eternity will benefit from unique marketing".
Now, if you are familiar with Paradox' uniquely annoying practice of releasing DLCs at the pace of "one tea spoon per hour", because it's easier to milk players this way, you should have braced yourselves for the impact. Fortunately, Obsidian is not going full Paradox with The White March. The expansion will be coming in two parts only, is guaranteed to be the only PoE expansion, and from what I've seen in Part I, it does feature enough content to deserve being called an expansion in the first place.
The other sweetener to the bitter pill of the expansion's being split might be if you have preordered it. And if not, you can always rest with the thought that an expansion split in two will probably end up being bigger as a sum of the two parts than if it were released at once. To me it still seems the most plausible reason to release the expansion in this way must have been to maximize profits by releasing an expansion while the game is still famous and selling well, and by hooking players of "Part I", so that most of them buy "Part II". The beneficial effect of splitting the PR event in two is also to be considered -- when news of Part II's release breaks, this will in turn generate sales for Part I from new audience which may not have heard at all about the expansion.
All these practical advantages are indisputable, yet I am still mildly annoyed by the evidence of Paradox' influence in the execution, such as the little icons on the bottom right of PoE's main screen, designating that you have (or have not yet) bought The White March. I think if you are a developer sincerely reaching out to a mature audience, you don't go for cheap gamification tricks like "collect all DLC icons on the bottom of the main screen". Instead, you show dignity, and design an alternate main menu background for your expansion, like game developers actually used to do in the past by the way.
The takeaway from this minirant of mine is that whenever you see Obsidian talking about "resurrecting the IE games' feels" (Josh Sawyer's favorite phrase, and a conveniently ambiguous one to boot), what is probably meant is resurrecting their own "feels" of what was good and what was not good in those games. What you get is the honor to finance their experiments purely on confidence that their "take", and interpretation on the subject will be to your liking.
The expansion is a similar story. Even though it all turns out to be in the players' favor - being composed of two parts, the expansion "is probably gonna wind up being bigger than [Tales of the Sword Coast], but I don't think anyone's gonna complain too much about it"**, the MO remains similar - name-drop an IE title to attract interest, but when it comes to game design - suddenly announce that you know better than whoever designed the same IE classics you've been name-dropping just until now.
Hence, we saw Obsidian talking about doing "a traditional expansion", appealing to "the old times"/"games in the old times"*, and looking for the confidence of those who associate "old" with "tried and true" and "good". But just like with the original game, this appeal for confidence does not bind Obsidian to deliver what you thought they promised. As far as they are concerned, you just misunderstood - it's a traditional expansion, dummy, it's just a two-part traditional expansion! Exactly the same as pledging to deliver an IE experience and coming up with MMO combat mechanics.
Anyway, I sincerely wish that when the time comes to market PoE 2, we will only hear it being announced as "the successor to PoE", without any allusions to these outdated, degenerative gameplay classics that players yet love so much, and which actually saved Obsidian from going under, as the PoE Making-of documentary claims. If name-dropping of games which PoE has supposedly surpassed continues, this will mean that Obsidian still has more confidence in the outdated and degenerate gameplay brands of 15 years ago, than in their own brand, modern and balanced as it is. I believe that when you show hubris, you better back it up with your own work's quality, otherwise you'll end up as laughing stock.
* - Appealing to the good old times and the games back then is also implying sincerity, which you used to feel existed between developers and players, because you were younger and the industry was much smaller and less experienced at milking you.
** - I understand Josh's irony in part as a hint that comparisons with the IE games become less relevant over time, since PoE's release. I can't know if he shares that view of course, but I imagine he would at least like to think so.
First impressions from The White March
I fired up The White March looking for what will differentiate it from, and preferably make it stand out against, the base game. The base game, mind you, I'm no longer concerned with the IE games, and comparisons to any IE games' expansions would be too far-fetched to be of use for anyone looking for info on whether to buy the White March or not.
Partly due to the "2.0", really 1.0 patch, and partly due to the expansion content itself, this time my overall impressions are positive.
On June 22 I said "All criticism of PoE aside, if the overall quality of the area and encounter design in the expansion is that of PoE's starting dungeon (the area they said they did last, so they were at their most experienced), I'll be very pleased. Just hoping that the combat will pose some challenge to a full party." On account of the combat difficulty, I found the expansion very satisfactory. I can't make claims on how "fun" combat is in the expansion, but at least for me, it's no longer the same boring battle over and over, so there is improvement.
I started the expansion on Hard difficulty and Expert mode, with a level 9 party composed of a rogue PC, Eder, Pallegina, Durance, Grieving Mother and Aloth. When prompted, I accepted the raised difficulty. I found it a nice surprise that Eder no longer felt invincible during combat, and that enemies would go for my weaker characters. Although I haven't felt a need to change the party's equipped items, or respec my character to reflect changes to the attribute system or AI, my impression is that combat difficulty has received a much needed boost. I was practically glad when my party got wiped out in the last battle in Stalwart Village - I had made it a house rule that I won't rest spam through the saving of the village.
Once the fighting in the village was done, and I had a better chance to look the area over, I immediately felt it's even better looking than the already pretty areas of the base game. Watching the PAX Prime Pillars Panel confirmed it that as a result of the experience the team has amassed in building the base game, they are able to produce even better areas. I wish it were possible that refinements in the game's combat mechanics could come with the same speed, but unfortunately that seems to be a subject where the project leads have too different ideas than me of what's fun and what isn't.
Some ramblings on the subject of PoE's systems
The White March enforces the same principle which the base game established, and that is the developers' aim to make the game possible to be played and completed in as many conceivable ways as the players can come up with. That's a very tough goal to achieve, in and of itself, and I admire Obsidian's ambition. Some of the good effects of this philosophy are, for example, that they've went through the trouble of providing a special "scaled-up difficulty" only for the expansion areas, or that the expansion itself is accessible in the middle of the game, or that players can choose whether or not to use party members' AI scripts, or if needed, they can reassign the attribute points of their character, to take better advantage of the changes to base attributes effects made in version "2.0". I generally view "respec" options with disgust, but when a game designer reworks their RPG's base attributes 6 months after release, I agree some means for players to fix their characters should be provided. Although I disagree with this base principle that the game's rules should be able to accommodate the character builds, as opposed to character builds aiming to get the most out of the ruleset, I admire the amount of work and effort Obsidian invest while aiming to follow that principle. I suppose that's the way they understand being attentive to players.
Ironically, due to the same "as many play styles should be viable as humanly possible" philosophy, fine-tuning your character's base attributes is probably one of the lower priority concerns for an average PoE player. The strive to make every character development choice viable in the end leaves me with the feeling that it matters next to nothing what attributes you set, as long as you've chosen a character class. And if by some accident, someone discovers a character build so bad that they can't progress in the game, and complains about it, the developers will most probably try to "fix" it.
This, along with the childish combat difficulty, offered under "Normal" difficulty, was my main criticism of the game at release, and unlike combat difficulty, this one is much harder to mitigate. Here unfortunately, the PoE team has little means to bring positive change in The White March expansion. After all, an expansion isn't meant to be a game systems' overhaul. All the more that from what I can see, Obsidian don't view the current state of the ruleset as a problem.
As a result, the amount of effort required from the player to make sense of what a given character development decision will actually result in, is still considerable, and at least for me, it's too much work. The base-100, percentage-, and seconds/tenths of a second calculations make it too damn difficult to tell how much of an effect a given ability will have. I'm not advocating "streamlining", just something manageable for an average person's abilities at mental calculations. Try imagining a "+2% chance" for something to happen on hit, or a "+2.5s duration" of some effect, which pass at the same time when 4 more timers are ticking just for your currently selected character. It's impossible to assess so much information at once. I feel PoE's rules system is still overly complex, needlessly so, for what it achieves. D&D 5ed manages to be a deep ruleset without resorting to such tortures. Why should this be impossible for PoE?
There's another problem that follows after hubris and setting high expectations - little mercy will be shown to your work from people who more or less worshipped the same "idols" you claimed were fake, and your game would show "the true way of the RPG". Anything that's less than stellar in your work tends to get attacked, and in PoE's case, the combat mechanics are an easy target, even after the patches and partial retractions from principles like "no hard counters".
I believe that, beyond a certain point, PoE itself becomes a hostage of its own design principle "nothing should be significant", "no character/skill/item/ability/talent should stick out", and the constant designer strive towards what is incorrectly dubbed "balance" inevitably prevents the game from allowing a player the moments of awe, felt when faced with the effects of great power, whether his own character's, an item's, or an enemy's.
To go even further, I think it prevents the game from realizing its full potential. Because the principle of "nothing should be significant" goes against the very defining trait of the Epic, and PoE is supposed to be an epic - it's a tale about heroes (and gods). Somehow, PoE is aimed simultaneously to be an "epic story" in the steps of the Infinity Engine epic stories, and is a game governed by rules which prevent anything and anyone from truly sticking out. This is mainly why playing PoE may leave you with the association for diet soda, e-cigarettes, or inflatable dolls.
The constant strive for accessibility, which is so evident in PoE's ruleset/mechanics, left me with the feeling, rightly or not, that Obsidian had collected money from hardcore IE fans and then made a game directed at casual players and game journos, who generally have no idea what is it they are playing, and would play and rate anything, as they are told.
In fact the game is directed at everyone, but this doesn't make it feel much better than if it was directed solely at casuals and journos.
Accentuate the positive
Now some more optimistic news that came with the latest patch. First, the so-called "2.0" version of PoE contains one major change to base attributes and that is the changing of the Perception bonus from boosting Deflection to boosting Accuracy. While I believe this to be a needed step in the right direction, in light of all I've said in the past few paragraphs, I think it's too little to make a difference for me. During my playthrough of the expansion, which I did with a character I built with version 1.0 of the game (in reality a build number around 0.800 as far as I remember), I never used the "respec" option, and this didn't pose the least problem for my party, a fact which I guess should pass as a celebration of the game's accessibilty. Regardless, this change affects gameplay more than is immediately evident, as we'll see below.
Talking about attempts to make the combat actually fun (after the success that was the base game in making combat boring), here is a prophetic quote from long before the expansion was out:
In the base PoE, something that followed from the "nothing should stick out" rule was that at some point the game designers had decided that that the ruleset should not feature any "hard counters", i.e. effects that completely counter each other/cancel each other out. I can't reproduce the designers' reasoning here, because I never understood it and never remembered it. However, and this is the second good news, along with the base attributes change, introducing hard counters for some enemies in The White March is another deviation from the "nothing should be significant" rule. And this is a deviation I was very happy to see, although I was less happy to watch my party getting slaughtered by ice and storm blights. Anyway, I welcome this migration from monotonous battles filled with calculations which are nearly impossible to follow, towards an environment where I have to adapt my weapons and tactics at least a little to enemies' properties and behavior.
And the third piece of good news, which comes as a side effect of the change to the Perception bonus - your party's tanks are now more vulnerable. What this translates to, especially in combination with an updated AI which tends to disengage and pursue targets in your back lines, is that you actually need to manage your party's movement... somewhat. The amount of party micro needed is still far from the BG/IWD levels, but I'm happy with what little has been achieved. This comes in addition to the nerfing of the fighter "Wary Defender" talent.
Writing, setting, NPCs
Even though I don't feel happy with a central part of the game's design, I can't ignore those that hit the mark. One such aspect of the White March expansion is that the main quest hub, and to a lesser extent - the wilderness areas, has seen much more effort towards making it seem alive, compared to any area in the base game. This is something I don't think anyone can honestly argue against. Ironically, the backwater fishing village felt more 'lived in' than Defiance Bay, the biggest city in the Dyrwood, according to the lore resources. Stalwart village had people that converse with each other, play games at the tavern, give out bits of information that make sense within the environment, have histories, professions, opinions, fears. Overall, the amount of work put into fleshing out the village solely through its inhabitants made a very good impression on me. Maybe this was the result of criticism expressed by players, or maybe this time around the PoE team was lucky to be working on a project with a properly defined scope, so they could put the right amount of attention to such details, or at least that's how I felt about it. Compared to the base game, I think this aspect is noticeably improved.
Talking about the expansion's story on a large scale, I can say I am content with what I saw. The player and his party act as heroes for hire, and as is usually the case, it turns out that there is more to their errand than was initially expected. That's a traditional, and for me, a good enough excuse for exploring wilderness areas and dungeons, and killing monsters. Whether the motivation behind a hero setting on an adventure seems plausible to you is down to personal preference, and my preference is for plots which have not been artificially complicated, and are more in line with traditional tropes as seen in folklore. In this respect, I'm quite ok with the low key premises of the party being sent on a mission to investigate Durgan's Battery. If anything, I was a bit worried of the grand plans for Stalwart that its mayor Renengild seemed to have been conceiving. I was practically hoping we could "keep this small-scale", although the prospect of affecting regional geopolitics gave me additional motivation to pursue the main quest. I could get even bolder and hope that increasing revenue for Stalwart would somehow affect my own fief around the fortress of Od Nua, but I guess hoping for so much reactivity would be unwise, in a game where the whole stronghold was hacked together with just enough work so that the game doesn't crash when you try to enter its area.
Returning to the writing's quality, not everything about it is lollipops and roses. The trademark writing stumbles of the original game were still present. For example - a fisherman with absurd lines such as "[I do] just about everything. I track the day's catches and see that our nets and hooks are in working order". This must have been written by someone who hasn't paused for a second to think how a fisherman would describe his work, let alone take the time to actually learn something on the subject before he writes the line. Wasn't it Sawyer himself in his blog who was urging people who do writing and game design to research the subjects which they write on? I know he has done that, and it's a really good piece of advice!
I was going to be more mildly critical of the NPCs after I encountered Zahua, but after listening to the Devil of Caroc, I decided to just fire a full broadside.
I disliked the idea about having a crazed monk companion from the first moment I engaged him in conversation. Here is my reasoning. First off, you already have a crazy priest in the party - you can't keep repeating the same gag over and over, you have to move on to the next gag, if you can come up with one. Second, and more important, I think the crazy monk is already a pretty banal and overused trope, even within the narrow field of cRPGs. Why such lack of imagination? How does a crazed monk archetype, which by definition has a comedic relief side to himself, with the player supposedly amused by his weirdness, tie in with a setting, plot and writing style that pretend to be realistic and "naturalistic"?
This contradiction between the character and the environment is evident even in the very first encounter you have with that NPC. Why on earth have him pop out of a barrel of fish, like a stripper out of a cardboard cake, and go through the unbearably stupid explanation for why he was there? If the goal of this scene was to present him to the player, a much more realistic way to do so would have been to show him meditating in the cold, half naked as we see him to be. This would have been so much more in tune with the expansion's setting and tone, which is one that I sincerely like.
His dialogue script doesn't miss the opportunity to raise brows with its clumsy writing. Scars are not "faded like lost memories", to give one example of cheesy writing. Whoever wrote this uninspired comparison should be ashamed of themselves, as should whoever permitted it to go into the game.
While Zahua may have some redeeming qualities, I think there is nothing to save The Devil of Caroc, and I'm very curious if there will be any voices in her defence. The Devil of Caroc is best described by her own statement - "If it's sane and logical reasoning you're wanting, you're going to be disappointed". Intentionally or not, I'd wager not, that sentence is even grammatically wrong. But that's the least of the Devil's problems. Somehow the writers' ineptitude and lack of inspiration demonstrated in this NPC manage to surpass everything seen in PoE so far. The Devil of Caroc is a combination of:
1. Implausible backstory
2. Annoyingly anachronistic language. The term "hicks" for example is completely out of place in a fantasy character's lexicon as is any regionalism. It would be equally stupid, especially in a setting that takes itself seriously, to have characters use American regional talk as it would be to have them use Australian regional talk.
3. Cringeworthy descriptions of the Devil expressing emotions through "the glitter in the stones which serve as its eyes" or through "the construct's essence".
4. Abysmally bad voice acting, which should put to shame anyone who has ever preformed as a voice actor.
5. Finally, just like with "The Crazed Monk", "The Frankenstein Monster That Broke Free And Now Experiences Internal Moral Conflicts" is as banal and overused a trope, as you can possibly get. Most readers will remember Shale from Dragon Age: Origins and its lousy pigeon puns(tm). I shudder in anticipation of the equivalent "construct humor" which will most probably flow from the Devil.
I'm not sure if having a construct as an NPC isn't some clever trick on the writers' part, so as to avoid the need to develop it as a character or describe its emotions and body language. Either that was the goal, or it has just been a hack job, which was hastily voiced by some volunteer from Obsidian. Either way, as a character the Devil of Caroc is completely worthless.
These problems aside, I was happy to hear more voiced lines (save for the Devil), although the allusions to the "Old West" in the tone and accents are a bit too strong for my preference. For a bit of high-brow nerd fun: According to the lore, in Dyrwood 'sc' is read like 'sh' (remember Calisca), yet there is a character in Stalwart Village who pronounces "Francesca" the way you would expect in normal English. I wonder how will this oh-so-major deviation from the lore be justified? But then again, the same voice actress mispronounces the word "row" not long after that. Kidding aside, it disappoints me when a game developer deviates from their own game lore. It makes me feel like I'm the only one who is actually keeping track, and looking for intristic logic to their world.
Encounter and area design
One aspect where I was expecting improvements in the expansion was the quality of area design and more variance to the encounters, even if the Infinity Engine games weren't exactly known for their varied encounters to begin with. From what I saw in the White March, my expectations were fortunately proven true, more so regarding area, and particularly dungeon design. Encounters themselves seemed more "hand-made" and less often looked copy-pasted compared to those in the base game, but I think the combat mechanics'/ruleset's deficiencies still prevent the player from experiencing more truly memorable combat engagements.
This isn't to say there weren't memorable engagements, probably owing to the difficulty options configuration I played under - 9th/10th level party, Hard difficulty, and scaled up by the expansion. I've been tracking this carefully as I played, and I can say there were enough (although not each and all) combat encounters where the following factors were present, which gave them character:
1. There was context to the creatures' group as it was composed - for example, a group of ogres gathered around the dead bodies of Lagufaeth.
2. There was conversation, either between the enemies, or between my party and the enemies.
3. The encounter was placed on terrain which offered some kind of tactical opportunities for both sides - a narrow pass, obstacles on the terrain which provided choke points or kept a character's back safe, a staircase with multiple turns which disallowed the party from deploying in an optimal combat order, etc.
In general, I could tell these were things that had been tested in advance, and encounters weren't just arbitrarily placed on flat ground. I welcome this effort on the developers' part. For me it feels really nice to see someone has put himself in the player's shoes while placing the enemies, and put the extra work to make them part of the world, as opposed to just fodder.
Another positive is that scripted interactions have been expanded upon, and are now present in every area. I can't tell if they've become more complex, because I haven't replayed them multiple times, and I use the 'Expert' option which among other things hides the prerequisites for specific options. However, I can say they've become more branched. I think most of them relied on strength and athletics though, which means I used Eder in the majority of situations, but that's not necessarily a drawback of the interactions themselves.
A minor suggestion - I would have liked it better if some of the interactions not involving the "Scripted Interactions" checks - like finding and picking up the new pet - actually used the scripted interactions' interface. It just seemed "right" to be so. A notable example I can think of is finding an egg in Longwatch Falls.
The areas themselves look somehow even more beautiful than I was already used to in the base game. It deserves noting that minute effects have been added, such as the party leaving footsteps in the snow and party members' breath coming out as steam.
I think the encounter design and difficulty (although I realize that difficulty is much more subjective) deserve a few words of commendation. I've had my party wiped out multiple times by the same encounter, which hasn't happened to me in the base game, save for just a few fights, and I consider this to be good progress in the right direction. In the base game it felt as if the designers were too shy to make encounters hard.
What's even better, the increased average difficulty of encounters, coupled with the addition of at least some sort of AI(!), required me to actually use party-level tactics in order to overcome the large part of encounters in the game. For the first time since I've began playing PoE, I had to economize spells, health, resting supplies, choose which spell to cast in order to disable some enemies for longer, while my tank and damage-dealers hack away at those who still were functioning. I think the changes that came with the game version branded "2.0" will actually make the game challenging for players above the 'casual' watermark, and this is the biggest news brought by The White March.
Regarding the "improved AI", announced in the patchnotes for the so-called "2.0" version - "improved" is a bit of a misnomer in my opinion. That's because you can only improve something which has previously existed. What used to pass as "AI" in the builds prior to "2.0" is described neatly by Sensuki, who has put lots of work into testing the game and in hacking its ruleset source code:
Enemies' behavior in PoE builds prior to The White March and the patch that accompanied it amounted to attacking 1) the party member that attacked them, or 2) the nearest party member they found, and once locked in engagement, they stayed locked until killed or until the party member was knocked out/killed. I can't testify as to how enemies' targeting logic has been changed in the newest patch, though I guess someone will eventually check this and report, but what's apparent is that enemies now use their abilities (with ranged enemies preferring ranged abilities/weapons), and enemies will occasionally break engagement to attack a different party member than the one they are engaged by (although I can't tell what's the enemies' reasoning for doing that).
Combined with the nerfing of disengagement attacks, which came soon after the original PoE release (possibly even with the day 1 patch), it appears that the farther the combat mechanics have veered from Josh Sawyer's initial theories on what is fun and balanced combat, and the closer they get to the old IE formula, the better for everyone. The general rule about PoE has been that the more refined combat gameplay becomes, the more it resembles the IE games. In that case, I wonder, what was the point in all of this forced "innovation", just to rediscover in the end that a wheel is generally more functional if it has a round shape?
In defence of my claim above, one aspect of the improved encounters in The White March is that just like in the IE games, enemies now form distinct front- and back-line with the front line occupied by melee versions of the enemies (Crag Ogres, Lagufaeth, Redfin Lagufaeth), and the back line occupied by their ranged versions (Crag Ogre Cannoneer, Lagufaeth Sidewinder, etc).
All the praise for AI improvements aside, it was a little disappointing to find that enemy-pulling tactics were still possible to pull off in encounters where enemies were positioned sufficiently spread out, and that pathfinding bugs are often encountered both when it comes to enemies and to party members. Characters will still "take the long way around" each other rather than bump into each other whenever neither is engaged in combat. In addition to that, in many cases where it seems that two characters should be able to stand next to each other and block a narrow pass, it turns out that there is room for only one.
Another peculiarity about encounters in the expansion, evident at least on the difficulty level I played on, has been what I think are attempts to circumvent the negative aspects of the engagement system, attempts which in themselves seem ironic by now. The methods used to this end are amount to either providing encounters with few (2-3 enemies), which would easily get wiped out but would give the player an idea about the enemies' abilities, or using encounters with a huge number of enemies (8-10), so that the tank's engagement limit would be filled and some enemies would inevitably attack back-line party-members.
This seems to be the way in which developers have chosen to overcome the tendency towards "tank-and-spank" anti-tactics brought about mainly by their own patent engagement mechanic, and leading to the monotonous gameplay that many players were complaining of. It was mainly the engagement mechanic which brought about the IE mod's being created even before the base game had shipped.
Talking about the IE mod, I think the next game patch will be a good moment for Obsidian to ask for permission to simply incorporate the IE mod into the base game. If such permission is granted, which I'm pretty sure will be the case, it would make for a much more convenient experience for many players, as testified by the mod's number of downloads.
Bottom line on encounter design - if you are a good player, you'll now find battles worth your time, so giving the expansion a try is encouraged. I think it would be too lavish to hope for fully scripted set piece battles, as these didn't exist even in BGII until special mods came up, but on the other hand, it's realistic to expect Obsidian to further improve the AI settings in future patches.
As for the areas - the developers have kicked into full gear, and the areas are both bigger - on par with the IE games, and just as beautiful, or more so than, in the base game, with multiple entry points and hence multiple paths through dungeons, and varied combat environments which in the odd lucky case necessitate some tactical thought on the player's part. I'd even go far enough to claim that in most TWM dungeons the dungeon design is superior to what's usually seen throughout the IE games.
I should also make a small mention of the music which I think is superb in The White March. Although I liked the music in the base game as well, I really felt that the seeming simplicity and the beauty of the northern landscape have been translated into music with impressive accuracy for the expansion. In my opinion Justin Bell is a very talented composer and Obsidian are lucky to have him working on the PoE games. Hopefully, he'll be retained for PoE 2.
Conclusion
Those are my thoughts on the PoE expansion, and on the game's current state, which seems to be the more or less "final" version, beyond which only relatively small improvements will be made with subsequent patches (though I may yet be wrong about that). I was mostly prompted to write it by the fact that version "2.0" looked like a version worthy of the title "the game as intended by the developers", and by the fact that I rather liked the White March expansion overall. I think it's evident that Obsidian are capable of producing a great quality cRPG which even improves on the classics, if given the right amount of time for the project scope. In this case, 5 months gave us about 20-25 hours of gameplay, probably more than that for the less experienced players out there.
I've aimed to be as impartial as possible, and point out explicitly the parts where I state personal opinions. I've also tried to give attention to all aspects of the game, so if I've missed something, whether bad or good, I've missed it despite my efforts, not intentionally.
Obsidian have stated that there will be no more expansions for PoE beyond The White March Pt. 2. Given that, I guess the season is open for wishlists for PoE 2. I'm far from ready with a full list, but off the top of my head, my bravest hope is that for the sequel Obsidian will completely rework their current ruleset with the end goal to provide clear and concise information to the player about what their characters' abilities will do. This will require ditching the current level of granularity to ability effects which involves percentages and tenths of a second. I believe those are simply impossible to process by an untrained human brain, especially for 6 characters in the heat of battle, and I hope they take more lessons from the IE games with their delay timers to character actions.
In conclusion, I still think PoE was itself born without a soul, but its expansion proves that this can be remedied, if one knows how and is allowed to work.
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