Kickstarted several years ago with the support of tens of thousands, and after a very successful launch and two major expansions later, Pillars of Eternity (PoE) finds its way to the PS4 and Xbox One this week packing the complete original game and both White March expansions. It’s a massive, hardcore CRPG offering that is a mixture of both amazing and intimidating.
You know you’re playing a serious RPG when your character creation menu includes a pause option; kidding, but all (bad) jokes aside, character creation is the perfect opening intro to PoE and in gauging how serious of an RPG player you are. The depth of the character creation is impressive, and to a degree, overwhelming. You have all of your standard cosmetic features available, and a half dozen different races with as many sub-races within that as well. You also build character traits by reading short passages about different cities or areas your character came from, and their skills and other character-building aspects. For hardcore RPG fans, you can really sink your teeth into it, but for the more uninitiated, it might be a bit staggering. I fall into the latter camp, but after a good twenty or thirty minutes, I was moving onto the difficulty setting.
Choosing your difficulty is not as simple as ‘easy, medium, and hard.’ I think there are about eight different difficulty settings you can choose from, that range from Story Mode which makes the battles very easy so you can enjoy the award winning story, on up to permadeath settings that are as unforgiving as they sound. I liked that the game encouraged players not familiar with the genre to go with Easy, which is what I chose. Afterall, no matter how great the story, characters, graphics, if you’re getting your ass handed to you after every battle, that’s going to get tiring quick.
PoE gives you a lot to manage, and while doing that on PC is one thing, on a console it can be a nightmare if not handled well. Fortunately, Paradox has done a very good job bringing the plethora of commands and inventory and spells and all of that stuff to the console in a workable way through radial menus. More important than that are your options to pause the game whenever you do things like access said menu to allow you time to think, peruse, and issue the command that best suits the combat situation. I don’t think I have ever played a game, a console game for sure, that had as much going on in the heat of battle as PoE, but Paradox has made it functional at least and smooth at best. For this genre noob, it proved challenging, but more so because of my inexperience than something Paradox could have done much better with.
I recently tried to tackle Tides of Numenera and was very much reminded of it while playing PoE. These games are deep; they’re the hardest of the hardcore when it comes to RPGs, and they’re not pedestrian at all. Sure, you have the Story Mode, but be prepared to read a lot, manage a six party team, and also juggle lots of skills and items. These are hallmarks of a great RPG, and that’s precisely what PoE is, but it’s not something you pickup casually and hope to excel at right away, which is why I say it’s fairly intimidating.
All that aside, PoE is an experience I am still working through at the time of this article. It’s tough and long, but absolutely rewarding, and it makes it very clear why games in the lineage of the genre — Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, and so on — are still held in such high regard today. Someday I hope to tackle those, but until then, PoE will keep me very busy.
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