Pillars of Eternity (2015)

I had my fun for a few hours with this RPG. However, the wait times are insane and the maps are not that interesting to play in to justify them. The characters were interesting, but not enough for me to even remember their names. The story was promising at first but gave little choice of how to mold it once you make progressions. The world was also not that unique or different from your run of the mill medieval tale. The combat at least was cool, although at times cluttering, and the variety of spells and attack forms was appreciated. Equipment, items, weapons diversity was severely lacking, unfortunately. Talking about equipment, the inventory system was not the most user friendly and difficult to traverse. All in all, there are not that many things I enjoyed from this title outside of its cool esthetics and old school memories.

The White March: Part 1

Just finished The White March Pt.1. expansion content. It was a nice diversion from the main plot and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was about 10 hours long and added two new characters, one that I'm entirely too fond of(Devil of Caroc). She's a character whose soul was bound to metal armor, ala Alphonse from FMA, but she's far from the benevolent and good-natured personality that Alphonse is. It had about 10 new sidequests, several new tasks, new additions in the form of soul-bound weapons, that require certain objectives to be fulfilled to unlock their full potential, a level cap increase, and improved A.I.(Which is still terrible).

The story revolves around the sudden interest that has taken hold of the citizens in the White March region regarding a massive fortress( in Durren's Battery) that has been closed off for 2 thousand years, and the sudden appearance of a door near the base of the structure. Of course, being a rpg, your party takes an interest in exploring the mysteries surrounding this sudden turn of events, and off they go.

All in all, I'd say it was a great part one, that seems to be leading into something with bigger stakes, and I'm really look forward to playing the continuation of the story. The time between now and the next part will give me a much needed break, however. My eyes were kind of tiring of the mountains of text!

On the technical side, it appears that the White March: Part 1 was never intended to be end-game content, so if you've played the base game to the end, you'll get the option of re-balancing the content in the White March region to match your current level, so that it's not too easy. Unfortunately, this leads to some very mixed difficulty levels, and the encounters range from still being too simple, to some being ridiculously cheap, like the Ice Dragon and Concelhaut fights. Even so, I kind of appreciated that the game started to test my mettle and I was able to overcome said encounters. *gasp* I actually had to use food and scrolls!

So to sum things up, at 14.99, you can't go wrong if you enjoyed the base game. 10 hours may not seem like much, but I feel it's justified given how much of a labor of a love this entire project has been, and the X-pac felt meaty enough to warrant it. Part 2 will be 10 dollars bringing the total cost of the expansion up to 25 dollars, which isn't too bad. If you're still on the fence or starting the game for the first time, wait for a sale if you're unsure that you're getting your moneys worth.

3.5/5 -Liked it a lot

26 hours in. Based on average playthrough estimates, that would put me at around the halfway point. The game has a pretty interesting core plot and some cool sub plots, but I can no longer bring myself to read the hit-or-miss random NPC dialogue that comes with "peering into their soul". Most of it isn't very compelling.

Combat is rather solid. After about 5 hours into the game I started to dislike it because I didn't fully understand the notion of controlling the flow of a battle without having a tank that could taunt. Apparently, in crpgs, your positioning is what's most important, and sending in your tank first is all but necessary, otherwise characters in your party closest to the enemy units pull aggro. Sadly, this isn't a fully infallible course of action as tanks have a limited number of engagements(number of enemys they can attract at any given time) so having more than two mobs, without using the environment to create a chokehold preventing enemy units from getting to your squishies, often leads to a hectic battle experience. Fortunately, I've gotten better at using crowd control. I still think I should've gone with a two tank party.

Oh, and the monk class. Just avoid it. I made the huge mistake of making my character a monk, and they have to take damage in order to build up Wound points to use their abilities. The problem is, they're entirely too flimsy. In hindsight, it would've been much better to go the route of ranged attacker or Fighter to double up on the tanks, which would make battles much more manageable.

Another thing about combat, your NPC units have NO A.I. That's right. You are expected to micromanage every little thing they do. If you set them to attack a unit and it dies, you have to manually set every character to attack a new target. This becomes problematic, cause the easiest way of doing this is pressing Z, which highlights your entire party, and clicking another enemy unit. The problem with this is that it interrupts any special abilities or spells they have queued, so you have to go back into their action menus and re-input those same commands. If you don't manually attack a new target after one dies, for every single character, they just stand there being all dumb while their comrades get slaughtered. Don't get me started on the path-finding. It's absolutely atrocious. Casters in my team often prevent the tank or monk from getting to the necessary targets because the pathfinding is so terrible that unless you have a clear path from your party member to the enemy, they usually get stuck on the group. It's kind of funny to see though. Fortunately, version 2.0 of the game is coming soon, and it's supposed to fix things like pathfinding and give your party members a.i. options(think gambits from Final Fantasy 12) which causes them to auto-perform actions of your choosing, like "auto-attack nearest enemy unit" after you deliver the deathblow to your current target. This will be a game changer.

On plus side, I enjoy building up my stronghold and listening to the interactions between the games 9 or so non-generic party members. You can play with the games pre-made characters with backstory or make your own. It's really a non-choice, though. Eder, Aloth, Durance, and Kana are all hilarious!! Making your own party members takes away party interaction as they're just cookie cutter characters that fill a role and have no personalities to speak of. The only benefit to doing this is to access classes like the extremely powerful Rogue that none of the pre-made characters happen to be. Still, it's not worth it in my opinion, cause it takes away from immersive conversation and liveliness of having a non-generic, cheeky, well-written party of characters.

Despite some minor issues, it's mostly an enjoyable game. I rarely finish games in this genre, since they're so long winded and I feel the side stuff tends to overshadow the core plot, but I'm really interested in seeing how this one continues to unfold.