Pillars of Eternity (1 and 2) is a fantasy RPG duology made by Obsidian.  Now everyone I’ve known always tells me Obsidian always has the best writing, but honestly I’ve never seen it to be true myself.  I remember booting up Fallout:NV (seen by some as their magnum opus) and thinking “THIS is the bad guy factions?  A bunch of technologically illiterate spear-wielding Roman cosplayers is supposed to be a scourge of the wasteland?”  And the game never did enough to justify to me that these cosplayers were indeed deserving of their status as world-conquerors in a universe where GUNS are plentiful. Instead the game just wants to go into excruciating detail of their evil deeds like it’s written by an edgy teenager, and then I read afterwards in interviews and the like that Fallout:NV was supposed to be “morally gray,” like wtf? 

So I’ve never played an Obsidian game for the writing, the way I’d play an Atlus game for the writing or a Bioware game for the writing.  Obsidian to my mind is best at making interesting systems and gameplay loops that I want to interact with, OR by using someone else’s assets to make a follow-up sequel. They’re good at those, but I don’t expect them to be the best writers.

So with Obsidian’s first wholly new IP since Alpha Protocol (criminally underrated and overrated simultaneously) I jumped into Pillars of Eternity.  How would Obsidian fair when they don’t have a publisher breathing down their neck? 

It turns out publishers aren’t evil and all Obsidian’s bad habits reared their ugly heads.  Let me start by saying I do like this game (I’m replaying it) but I don’t think anyone besides me would ever like it and I can’t think of a single person I know who I’d recommend the game to.  I like it because it is an extensively deep Dungeons and Dragons-type game with real-time-with-pause combat.  I LIKE that. 

But there’s FOUR different saving throws and EIGHT different damage reductions, plus about two dozen weapons and a hundred different status ailments that can occur to your character.  Are you charmed?  Confused?  Dominated?  Those are all different.  Are you hobbled, dazed, dizzy, sickened, weakened, fatigued? The list goes on and on and each one does a different thing using a different skill targeting a different saving throw. 

You can specialize in 1-handed weapons, sword n board, two handed weapons, and dual-wielding and they will all force you to build your character a little different.  And if you want to play a barbarian I hope you know that Intelligence increases the range and duration of ALL abilities meaning a dumb barbarian will rage for mere seconds and then get slaughtered while a barbarian with a PhD in Barbarity can rage for days slaughtering his enemies before him.  Obsidian doesn’t like dump stats so every single stat does something for everyone, a wizard needs high Strength or his spells do no damage, a priest needs high Strength or his heals heal almost nothing, etc.

With all that said it’s the type of game that takes hours just to understand the combat systems and if you’re not the type of person who will read every tool-tip and check both the in-game manual AND the forums to understand how everything fits together, then you are going to have a rough time of it and won’t even know why you’re losing battles until you’ve already replayed them a dozen times. So while I like the combat I can’t imagine how most people would.

But the writing in this game is just not good.  There’s too much of it and every character will talk your ear off at the slightest opportunity without saying much more than “our village of Schitzville is so morally gray that by solving all our problems you’ve just creating new ones.”  The game is a lot less smart than it thinks and that runs through both the first game and it’s sequel. 

It also feels like a game written by teenagers that is so desperate to show you how mature it is that in the sequel half the characters will end every one of their sentences with a sex joke or innuendo.  I’m an adult, most of my friends are adults, sex has not been a common topic of conversation since we were teenagers (or when most participants are blackout drunk).

Finally it makes me sad that although I like Pillars of Eternity 1, Obsidian basically made me never want to play another Obsidian game when they released Pillars of Eternity 2. 

For as long as I’ve known them, fans of Obsidian have said that Obsidian makes the best games but gets screwed by publishers and forced to release buggy, unfinished messes.  Well Obsidian was given a big crowd-funded budget with no publisher to answer to, and they were tasked to follow up on their own IP. And in the end, they made a buggy, unfinished mess.  Combat just didn’t work, the story went nowhere and was a blatantly unfinished sequel hook to drum up interest for a third game that will now never come.  I remember getting to the end and audibly said “that’s it?” when the credits rolled.  Nothing happened and nothing mattered, and now I just don’t care to play new Obsidian games.