Pillars of Eternity Hype/Review Thread GS=8 MC=90

100 is no a stretch. I am on my 1st playthrough, which is 78 hours and had reached and had completed half of quests of Dyrwood, which means there still one major city left. I, too, look at every cranny and read every piece of dialog and investigate every cave. I had read every book in the game, for example. My 2nd playthrough will be much shorter though.

@jhonMalcovich:

I don't see that as typical. I did all the same stuff with the exception of reading all the books and flavor NPCs. I peaked out at 56 hours and that was repeating the entire endgame area twice. If I had done all the Defiance Bay factions instead of just the one (Knights) and most of the levels of Od Nua I could see pushing that to 80, but I can't see any more than that on normal.

I gotta say, This is a really awesome RPG and brings me back to the days of when I would play Final Fantasy 7, 9, or Chrono Cross on PS1.

It also reminds me of my Friday and Saturday night DnD meets, I'm really digging it and I'm only 2 hours in.

8/10. Hype met.

http://www.gamespot.com/reviews/pillars-of-eternity-review/1900-6416091/

Got an 8, good score considering the bugs.

Can't wait to get my hands on this.

8 is good.

Yeah, I think I agree with the review.

I mean, I enjoy the lore and encountered no major bugs, so it'd probably be closer to a 9 for me...but the review does a good job explaining the game's strengths and weaknesses.

Meanwhile, I'm 46 hours in, so I really should start getting into Act 2 sometime soon.

Great score and well deserved.

I hyped 8, but was honestly expecting a 9 after playing it for a while. Then again, considering the bugs he ran into, I'd say an 8 is pretty good.

Great game though, I'm hooked!

Ultimately, Pillars of Eternity does not benefit from its inconsistent acting, nor do its characters inspire the same kinds of emotional connections that Dragon Age: Origins does

Couldn't disagree more.

Dragon Age's characters was like watching thunderbird puppets, with the main plot amounting to "Dragon summons zombies". By contrast, Pillars Of Eternity uses descriptive narrative requiring imagination from the user, with an overall more meaningful plot-line.

He gave the same score to Lords of the Fallen...

My friend, you will have to expand on what is being implied by this comment.

Hype met I guess?

Score bellow Inquisition? Really Kevin? Really?

Errr... No video review?

For an industry where customers and "professionals" alike claim to care about innovation and new ideas, games that look and play like something from 10-15 years ago sure seem popular. It's almost as if people don't actually know what they want.

Probably because they are being told through narrative what to want, that doesn't necessarily tie in with, what they actually want.

Says the GTA fan............

I'm not part of the crowd of people who claims to care about innovation (for innovation's sake at least). Because honestly, I don't. If a game's good I'll play it hence why I like the GTA games. I was merely pointing out yet another example of ridiculous double standards that seem to pop up all the time, on this site in particular, so why you feel the need to post something like that is beyond me. Said double standards are becoming embarrassingly clear to anyone with eyes in their heads.

@001011000101101: People knew exactly what they wanted when they funded this game. People wanted an old school RPG and obsidian kept their promise with this game.

What are the benchmarks like for the game

Your Toaster can run it at 60fps.

lol

You just need a 64 bit version of windows, everything else is gold

sounds average

another kickstarter flop zzz

90 on MC

You'd last for about 8 seconds as a fish if you're gonna jump on that bait :P

Glad that I am a human. lol

You have no idea what you are on about. One of the devs said 45-200 hours and I agree with that, I am 120 hours in so far and I have died maybe 4 times so not alot. The game has a TON of side quests and dialogue if you want to read it and do the side missions.

I actually like to read all the dialogue and do every side mission I can find in good rpgs, this is one of them Why rush through a great rpg? 115 hours and I am not finished act 3 yet. I have been playing rpgs for over 25 years so before you call me bad at rpgs do some research before acting like you are bad at an rpg if you play it for 100+ hours. Up to 200 hours meaning anywhere up to 200 hours and I agree 100%. My first playthrough doing about 95% of the side quests has already taken me over 100 hours so nice try but I disagree.

Apparently both rich lore and having to read are bad things to have in games these days.

I guess they should have had lots of QTE and cut scenes instead of descriptive narrative.

Hype met

To be fair it does go overboard in some instances. Some of the more interesting stuff gets drowned out by piles of unnecessarily lengthy text.

Of course I'd rather have too much than not enough. Jumping to "lots of QTE and cutscenes", now that's just extreme lol. I think they could have just thinned it down a little.

Either way, it was a minor complaint in the grand scheme of things. Nobody is forcing us to read the stuff. I do find myself just skimming over most things and looking for what seems interesting or important, I'm guessing that's where Kevin was coming from on this.

I find the combat unbearable, maybe I'm doing it wrong. The pathfinding is just awful, I'll send a guy out to range kite a bad guy and he won't be able to get back in formation, the character will continually stop walking and turn around to fight and I keep clicking for him to walk and the character will be dead before he can get back in formation. Even if he doesn't turn around and attack they always are moronic when it comes to pathfinding. I'll leave an obvious opening and they'll just walk into one of the other characters and stop moving then die, it ruins the game for me.

People just want something different. They are tired of this formula; shoot brain dead enemies, watch cutscene and repeat. Devs like Obsidian and Larian want the same, so they went back to their roots and visited what made games great in the first place. Better than interactive movies for dummies and broken early access survival games if you ask me.

32bit systems were officially supported but some people were having issues, so they removed it from their minimum requirements before releasing the game. As far as I know, the game still works on 32bit systems but it's not OFFICIALLY supported, so don't expect any support if you are facing crashes and stuff. I could be wrong but I think it still runs on 32bit unlike other 64bit games that don't run at all.

It will probably be ported to tablet.

If people are finishing this game in 48 hours then they are not doing all the quests or actually reading the dialogue.

Reading the dialogue is *gasp* considered content. This game has a minimum of 100 hours of you read everything from the MC and at least 70% of the side quests.

Exactamundo.

"Upon visiting SW I found out that Kevin gave PoE a score below Dragon Age: Inquisition. Assuming that there is a mistake, I think I should find and talk to Kevin wherever he may be."

I called it, right on the money.

I was deliberately being obtuse with that comment but Kevin does actually list the lengthy dialogue and lore as a 'bad' point in his review.

It would be a downside if it couldn't be skipped and you HAD to read every line of text in the game, that would indeed be tedious. The way it's done though, a lot of it is not only skip-able but can be ignored all together, should you so wish. It's definitely not something worthy of knocking a point off the game for. If anything the effort put into enriching the lore and content is a good thing, not a bad one...

To me it just stinks of GS politics i.e. you can't score a Kickstarter PC exclusive as highly as a flagship PS4 game with the same release window and a lot of marketing money poured into GS - don't worry I'll bring my own tinfoil hat ;). Or it's pure click bait, something Kevin isn't generally known for. I guess he could be taking pointers from Eddie 'Click bait' Makuch.

That's not a pathfinding issue - that's the engagement system, functioning properly.

Melee fighters in this game are able to 'engage' a certain number of enemies around them (I think it's 2 enemies by default). Engaged units are locked into melee combat, and this is represented by a green/red line between the two characters. If a unit breaks engagement by running away from the melee unit, then the enemy unit will get to make huge attacks on them for free. This ensures that you cannot simply kite enemies, like you would in the Infinity Engine games.

If an enemy character is engaged, their AI will almost always stop moving to fight your melee character. This allows you to control the battlefield with your melee characters, keeping enemies away from your casters.

If a player's character is engaged, their AI will tell them to stop running away and turn to fight the enemy. This prevents them from incurring a huge amount of damage by accidentally breaking engagement.

If you want your guys to continue running away, you'll have to click somewhere on the screen again - but note that the direction cursor has a red tint to it, indicating that you're about to take a lot of damage if you run.

Anyway, short version is that you're not supposed to kite. Use the engagement system to keep the enemies away from your ranged units. Stun/paralyse/blind enemies that you need to get away from in an emergency.

@Planeforger: yeah I am well aware of that, running in a straight line shouldn't be impossible especially when the pc takes actions I did not command. That's not a game anymore.

IE mod turns off the shitty engagement system.

Also I have no clue how this scored lower than Divinity its so much better.

could be the bugs he encountered while doing the review

Man, can't disagree with that. They really did go out of their way to flesh out the world and characters. At the very least it should be a neutral point of the review, if not a plus.

Unless you're some OCD completionist you shouldn't feel bothered to read everything that's there. Like I said before, I do feel it gets a bit heavy sometimes, but thankfully I can take this stuff in at my own pace and ignore what I want.

No tin foil hat about it man. It's no mystery that marketing and hype factor into the critical side of this industry big time. You could very well be right.

That said though, I'm thinking that the bugs he ran into plus the fact that he was ill probably had a lot to do with it. Kind of hard to take in a monstrous rpg like this while feeling under the weather. I'm guessing that's why we didn't get a video review either.

My experience with the game so far would easily net a 9. Minor annoyances here and there, but nothing to bring down what is otherwise an excellent game. I also haven't run into any of these major bugs that are creeping up on some players, hope it stays that way haha

I did not know that's what that meant lol

Thanks.

~60hrs and just got to the End Game option on normal. spending some time finishing up character quests, bounties, and endless path. then going back to finish End Game.

i could see it being 65-75hrs easy.

8.5/10. if we're rounding, 9.