Граф Орлов
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Pillars of Eternity
Truly endless. A healthy human being can hardly handle more than half an hour, or at most an hour in one sitting -- that's roughly one combat encounter, after which you either somehow skip/postpone it or defeat it, but the point remains -- the next fight. Five to ten such grueling 30+ minute encounters per map, plus all sorts of trivia. Countless locations. How long the Walkthrough at the highest difficulty will ultimately take -- I don't even want to figure that out.
The combat isn't action-oriented, nor tactical, and isn't exactly praised for its clarity either. It's more or less beaten by abusing the rest mechanic -- spend all your spell slots, rest, manually return for supplies since you can only rest twice. Repeat. The interface is tiny, you'll definitely misclick, misclick means reloading. Didn't pick the right area -- your main gets wiped in 2 seconds, reload. Click around another dozen open locations -- one will have a simple encounter. After that, click blindly again until you hit a dead end. Turn around and guess again.
The system seems clear enough, yet somehow you still don't get it. You won't see dice rolls in the log. You can only figure out if a given map is clearable at this difficulty by reloading. There are many classes, and they're quite different. The fundamental differences only become clear when the player discovers the rest-based spell slot reset abuse. It's still faster than spamming reload hoping for a favorable run of hits. Even the developers don't know why the health-endurance mechanic exists in this game.
You can play along the meta. Read guides, dump all the story companions with randomly dumped stats, and create actually viable ones, but to me, that's cheap. On the highest difficulty, it's beatable after nuking a couple of characters; it just takes a massive amount of time.
That's probably 85% of the game. The rest is reading dreary texts, trying to parse a lore that's more convoluted than Dark Souls, thicker than War and Peace, and drier than a mop handle. Souls, Xuyushi, Guardians -- this terminology alone would be enough for a good conceptual dictionary. Does this make the texts interesting? No.
80% of the characters are handouts for donors. If you're ashamed of your first quests in expansions -- try reading their lore backstories and lose the shame. The first three story NPCs were clearly patched together in five minutes -- but it's passable. The next two, and probably all the rest, were likely scribbled on a piece of toilet paper in a second. All you could do in a second is crap out a little shit, which is exactly what we got. Actual quests are minimal.
Sure, I'm a noob, someone who can't handle it, a terrible RPG tactician, and all that. If Pwning sees this, he'll piss on my face. The problem is that it's pointless to master it. To skim through another block of dreary, but lengthy text? To trip over even more yellow text boxes -- for some reason not warned about from the start, which some random dev made? No, thanks. In Tyranny -- a review might follow later -- the combat was tolerated for the sake of progressing the story -- and even then, the mechanics weren't this dreary. No idea why you'd tolerate hundreds, maybe thousands, of these hellishly long fights towards the end of the game in the Pillars -- it's unclear.
The game is incredibly vast. Lots of locations, tons of fights, heaps of text -- only thing is, it's all shit. You see a vast expanse of water, think -- awesome, until you realize it's ankle-deep and stinks to high heaven.
And speaking of which -- despite having a seemingly passable engine, the game is rendered terribly. Not hideously bad, just... mediocre. Even the ancient first Neverwinter had more interesting graphics. Naturally not better -- but there, the artists surpassed the engine, while the Pillars artists apparently couldn't squeeze even half of it out.
And yet -- I kind of liked it, since in single-player I play to suffer. In multiplayer -- to make things difficult for others... Maybe I'll finish it, though it won't add anything new to the review. But I'd rather crank Total War to Legendary and play, say, only with cavalry -- my ass will burn from the difficulty just the same, but it'll be way more interesting and comprehensible.
4/10. If you have absolutely nothing to do -- it'll do to kill some time.
Truly endless. A healthy human being can hardly handle more than half an hour, or at most an hour in one sitting -- that's roughly one combat encounter, after which you either somehow skip/postpone it or defeat it, but the point remains -- the next fight. Five to ten such grueling 30+ minute encounters per map, plus all sorts of trivia. Countless locations. How long the Walkthrough at the highest difficulty will ultimately take -- I don't even want to figure that out.
The combat isn't action-oriented, nor tactical, and isn't exactly praised for its clarity either. It's more or less beaten by abusing the rest mechanic -- spend all your spell slots, rest, manually return for supplies since you can only rest twice. Repeat. The interface is tiny, you'll definitely misclick, misclick means reloading. Didn't pick the right area -- your main gets wiped in 2 seconds, reload. Click around another dozen open locations -- one will have a simple encounter. After that, click blindly again until you hit a dead end. Turn around and guess again.
The system seems clear enough, yet somehow you still don't get it. You won't see dice rolls in the log. You can only figure out if a given map is clearable at this difficulty by reloading. There are many classes, and they're quite different. The fundamental differences only become clear when the player discovers the rest-based spell slot reset abuse. It's still faster than spamming reload hoping for a favorable run of hits. Even the developers don't know why the health-endurance mechanic exists in this game.
You can play along the meta. Read guides, dump all the story companions with randomly dumped stats, and create actually viable ones, but to me, that's cheap. On the highest difficulty, it's beatable after nuking a couple of characters; it just takes a massive amount of time.
That's probably 85% of the game. The rest is reading dreary texts, trying to parse a lore that's more convoluted than Dark Souls, thicker than War and Peace, and drier than a mop handle. Souls, Xuyushi, Guardians -- this terminology alone would be enough for a good conceptual dictionary. Does this make the texts interesting? No.
80% of the characters are handouts for donors. If you're ashamed of your first quests in expansions -- try reading their lore backstories and lose the shame. The first three story NPCs were clearly patched together in five minutes -- but it's passable. The next two, and probably all the rest, were likely scribbled on a piece of toilet paper in a second. All you could do in a second is crap out a little shit, which is exactly what we got. Actual quests are minimal.
Sure, I'm a noob, someone who can't handle it, a terrible RPG tactician, and all that. If Pwning sees this, he'll piss on my face. The problem is that it's pointless to master it. To skim through another block of dreary, but lengthy text? To trip over even more yellow text boxes -- for some reason not warned about from the start, which some random dev made? No, thanks. In Tyranny -- a review might follow later -- the combat was tolerated for the sake of progressing the story -- and even then, the mechanics weren't this dreary. No idea why you'd tolerate hundreds, maybe thousands, of these hellishly long fights towards the end of the game in the Pillars -- it's unclear.
The game is incredibly vast. Lots of locations, tons of fights, heaps of text -- only thing is, it's all shit. You see a vast expanse of water, think -- awesome, until you realize it's ankle-deep and stinks to high heaven.
And speaking of which -- despite having a seemingly passable engine, the game is rendered terribly. Not hideously bad, just... mediocre. Even the ancient first Neverwinter had more interesting graphics. Naturally not better -- but there, the artists surpassed the engine, while the Pillars artists apparently couldn't squeeze even half of it out.
And yet -- I kind of liked it, since in single-player I play to suffer. In multiplayer -- to make things difficult for others... Maybe I'll finish it, though it won't add anything new to the review. But I'd rather crank Total War to Legendary and play, say, only with cavalry -- my ass will burn from the difficulty just the same, but it'll be way more interesting and comprehensible.
4/10. If you have absolutely nothing to do -- it'll do to kill some time.
E si sui vius, er mi grans benananza,
e si ieu muoir, er mi grans deliuriers
e si ieu muoir, er mi grans deliuriers