![]() ![]() It’s a nice, sensible tablecloth on which they lay out their delicious picnic. Rural farming communities, faux-medieval sprawling cities, and of course a green-n-naturey town further along the way. Dyrwood, where all of the game’s towns and locations exist, is Obsidian’s creation, while still a fairly conventional fantasy foundation on which to build its novel and intriguing tale. The world is also familiar while entirely new. It all feels incredibly solid, and extremely well tweaked. (Of course, encounters come thick and fast here, and each mob of enemies is considered a separate encounter, so long as you come out of attack mode between them.) Levelling is an infrequent process, working exactly as you’d expect, with alternating levels providing new skills or traits – I was level 11 by the end of the game, to give you an idea of the pace. The structure is all familiar, and attacks are based on particular attributes and their efficacy against others, with some special attacks and skills available once per encounter, or once per rest, as D&Ders will recognise. While the dice rolling is all hidden, I got the impression it used a lot of D100s. Instead, with quite extraordinary aplomb, they set about building their own game world and ruleset from the ground up. Where the AD&D universe has provided the maps and dice for BioWare’s RPGs, Obsidian’s Kickstarted endeavour meant no spending a fortune on a license. This is, of course, in an entirely new setting. A ritual that has some rather profound consequences for you, and your relationship with the soul.Īnd with local children being born without souls, something is clearly seriously wrong in these parts, and its repercussions are playing out amongst both the religious, and the scientific. In the opening minutes, on a journey toward Gilded Vale (a popular destination for new settlers in the Dyrwood), your party gets in a spot of trouble, and you end up stumbling on a very peculiar ritual. There are more defining choices to be made once the game starts, and indeed occasionally as it continues, via an intriguing ability to decide which of a selection of memories is the one you just had. You could be any of six races, eleven classes, many cultures, and seven backgrounds. That's all decided in the character creator, before starting the game. A member of the order of the Kind Wayfarers, I’m a drifter, never fixed to a location or family. ![]() (50 points to the first person who can figure out the path my brain took to that name). I, it turns out, am a paladin, a female Pale Elf from The White That Wends, called Ambrée. It wasn’t me though – it happened before I showed up. That’s what I’ve learned, within the opening hour of Pillars. You can’t kill a god without consequences. But trust me, I’m good at my job, and I won’t actually spoil anything. If you want to know why it’s good, then read on, but it’s crucial to accept that to do so, I’ll have to allude to aspects of the game that aren’t revealed in the first half hour. Let me summarise: “Should I buy Pillars Of Eternity?” Yes. Because all you need to know is in the introduction above. If you want to go in completely blank, as I did, then stop reading at the end of this paragraph. Let’s be clear about how this review’s going to go. It’s a vast, deep and wonderfully written game, malleable to how you want to approach the genre, replete with companions, side-quests, an enormously involved combat system, and lasts a solid 60 hours. This is the RPG I’ve been craving since Planescape: Torment, the first to win my absolute love since Dragon Age: Origin. ![]() After 77,000 backers, $4 million raised and nearly three years in development, Obsidian’s Pillars Of Eternity is here, and it’s just stunning. ![]()
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