Pillars of Looternity

Pillars of Eternity by Obsidian was a Kickstarter darling impulse buy while making the rounds of some of my favourite blogs (and reading praise for the game). I bought it, loaded it up, tried it, and abandoned it. I had mostly forgotten about it until this weekend. Now that I have completed X-COM 2 I decided to wait before an expansion to dig back into it in Ironman (Ironperson?) mode. I don’t want to burn out on its glory.

POE was loaded and in my active games library. I thought back to why I didn’t enjoy it, and I was having a hard time finding a class I liked. Nothing more frustrating than spending an hour or two in a game just to find out you don’t like your class, and have to re-roll in a static game story environment. After doing that four times I dropped the game completely. I decided to try again. Each time I tried the first time around I would go for interesting sounding classes, only to find that I had no tank style class to protect me quickly in the game. So, I tried rolling a Paladin this time to cover that big hole.

And it worked.

I put in some major hours in the game on the weekend and it has been fun. They spent a lot of energy and time on lore (and it shows) and i find myself reading a lot of the books and scrolls I find. The party I have put together so far is a nice cross section of style, skills and attitudes and I find myself very much completing every task, quest, and major story plot. I am in completionist mode – when I uncover an area I carefully remove fog of war on the area entirely, and go “door to door” to NPCs to see if anyone needs my help (I am a Paladin, after all – one of the good guys!)

My gripes are small with this game:

• The polish feels a bit off (does feel like a Kickstarted title instead of the type of look and feel you would get from a professional studio. That is more a personal opinion than fact.)
• I dislike the movement during combat and find non-tank melee particularly difficult to keep out of danger.
• There is this pause between slow mode and looting at the end of a fight that feels like it lasts 10 seconds before I can loot. With the amount of fighting in the game, it is starting to drive me nuts. It should turn off faster and allow faster loot! It is consistent that this happens after every fight. Admittedly it is pretty minor but still, it is starting to get on my nerves a bit. One of those little annoyances that repetition makes larger
• The loot system. After an epic dungeon crawl I sold (what felt like) no less than 300 swords, shields, random weapons and armor. 300! My little party of four has amazing large pockets. Or head balancing skills. Or muscles. Or both.

Everyone likes loot and in a game that requires money to advance well (if you like having a nice home) it does a poor job. Make everything worth way more, but give limited slots to carry it around. Make people pick and choose what to take. Add packmules or other methods to increase this size in a reasonable manner. Currently it seems there is no limit to what you can carry. This hurts immersion.

Once again I find myself starting games many have already long forgotten. I never did promise to be on the cutting edge of game releases!