![]() Since we’re talking about fine details, I should mention at this point that I’ve spent about a hundred hours playing Pillars of Eternity II in real-time mode, which is the way the game was originally presented. As a very classic CRPG, Pillars of Eternity II expects players to manage the inventories, builds and load-outs of numerous characters, of which up to five might be in your active party at any given time. It turns out that your chosen hero will be squashed by the God Eothas, who has chosen to animate a colossal statue made from the living soul-rock known as Adra.įast forward through a few hours of what is essentially a long-winded (and not especially helpful) tutorial, and you’ll be starting to get to grips with what is essentially a hugely detailed game filled with minutiae for you to manage. This time, whilst lording it over the estate they worked so hard to establish at Caed Nua. Pillars of Eternity II begins with the player being introduced to the idea that they have been killed, again. Sadly though, whilst hugely expansive and incredibly ambitious in scale, Obsidian’s sequel left me a little less engaged than the original. Make sure to check out my full review of the PC version and The White March Part I and Part II for more detail, as all of it remains true of the new console version.Regular readers of BigBossBattle may recall that I waxed lyrical about my love for the original Pillars of Eternity when it appeared on console, and it’s certainly true that I’ve been waiting for Pillars of Eternity II: Complete Edition with bated breath. Ask for anything you may want from an old BioWare Dungeons & Dragons RPG and you'll generally find it here, aside from the somewhat regrettable absence of a romance option. There's a stronghold to repair and expand and numerous factions to build reputations with. The Watcher, as the hero's known, forms alliances with recruitable party members ranging from mad, Rasputin-like wizards to a pious paladin with an oddly fitting Texas accent. ![]() Pillars, unfortunately, lacks some of the playfulness that made Baldur's Gate so memorable, but it makes up for that with thoughtful lore crammed into everything from otherwise nondescript rocks and books rotting in cobwebby dungeons to sweeping descriptions of the past lives of random NPCs you pass. It's an RPG that's as rich as any you'll find, and in some cases its sheer depth lets it surpass those with far larger development budgets. It remains a text-heavy tale, though, enhanced only with good voice acting at the most significant moments, but fortunately Obsidian ensured all that text remains legible even when you're sitting a few feet away from the TV. After two years, I was a little worried I'd find too many flaws in its sad tale of a wanderer who can see into the past lives of surrounding people, but I found myself warming to the old locales and personalities as readily as I might would with another spin with Minsc and Boo. “The story itself has aged well, to the point that I'm now convinced more than ever that Pillars of Eternity's appeal rests on more than mere nostalgia for Baldur’s Gate. Its intuitive control scheme is nothing short of elegant, and it proves that this style of RPG no longer needs to be the stranger to console gamers it once was. Sometimes it bugs a little and requires precise handling, but these moments are mercifully rare. Most impressively of all, Pillars automatically highlights whatever you're looking toward so you can easily interact with it. Pressing the square or X button lets you pause to issue orders, while the bumper buttons let you easily switch between characters. Holding down the left trigger grants access to options like the quest log, leveling menu, and inventory, while squeezing the right trigger opens the menu for combat abilities. But Paradox Arctic, which was responsible for the console port, has achieved wonders with the transition to gamepads. Pillars of Eternity: Complete Edition overcomes these obstacles, and that's why I find this adaptation so impressive.As the name implies, the Complete Edition includes all the content and patches released for the PC version to date, namely the base game from 2015 and the two halves of the underwhelming White March expansion. Obsidian Entertainment's incredible adventure draws so heavily from early BioWare RPGs like Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale that it demands the similar use of a dizzying array of hotkeys, precise mouse clicks, and menus, and that design seemed hopelessly better suited to keyboards than gamepads. If you'd asked me a year ago, I might have told you that porting an old-style isometric RPG like Pillars of Eternity from PC to consoles without making it an unwieldy mess was effectively impossible. ![]()
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