Set in the virgin swords-and-sorcery world of Eora, Pillars has you playing the part of a Bhaalspawn Spectre Grey Warden Watcher, which is something that caused an eye-roll of epic proportions once I realised I was going to spend yet another game being referred to as a capitalised noun that gave me magic powers. Nowhere is this more obvious than the game’s main plot. Pillars of Eternity could just as easily have been a Baldur’s Gate game had it been released ten years ago, and while that’s precisely what a lot of people who backed it will have been looking for it’s also not entirely a good thing. Now that they’re playing with their own IP and their own universe they seem to be a lot more reluctant to go off-piste. Knights of the Old Republic 2, Neverwinter Nights 2, Fallout: New Vegas - this sort of restructuring is basically their entire resume for the past decade, Alpha Protocol excepted. My problem here - and Obsidian’s problem, in my opinion - is that they’ve previously excelled at taking somebody else’s established intellectual property and driving it into new and interesting territory. Pillars has a lot it needs to accomplish in addition to ticking all of the above boxes it had to establish, from scratch, a brand new world with its own rules and foibles, and so playing it safe might have been the wiser option. Now, a “good” Obsidian RPG is automatically going to be better than 90% of other RPGs released this year since they’ve been at this a while and they know what they’re doing, so perhaps this was the right thing to do. It chooses the road-more-travelled at almost every turn in terms of its structure and themes, with only a little bit of Obsidian’s trademark choice-and-consequence to liven things up. Pillars of Eternity is a good game that doesn’t take the risks it needed to in order to be outstanding. Given that, is it really any wonder that they’ve ended up playing it safe? Strongholds! Cities! A 15-level mega-dungeon! All things that would require a lot of time and effort in order to do properly, and since Pillars of Eternity is also the most successful game Kickstarter that’s actually going to be released it’s fair to say that Obsidian must have been feeling the weight of expectation a little bit. ![]() And to the people who backed it on Kickstarter, and who have been waiting the best part of three years for the game to be finished, there were a lot of promises made. To the gaming world at large it has some sizeable shoes to fill as a spiritual successor to the old Infinity Engine games, a Baldur’s Gate 3 in all but name. ![]() To Obsidian, it’s a chance to prove themselves after years of putting out bugged/incomplete titles because of publisher interference, they can finally show what they can do when developing a game with their own funding on their own schedule. Pillars of Eternity is a game that’s trying to be too many things to too many people.
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