Pillars of Eternity. Not enjoying it

maximaz

maximaz

Sonny, I Watched the Vault Bein' Built!
I'm only about 10-15 hours in but finding myself really bored with this game.

How is a game made 20 years after Baldur's Gate (the obvious inspiration here) so much worse than Baldur's Gate?

Visually it looks cheap as fuck, from character models to the environments to the effects.

Most spells suck, that is if they even work in combat because my character might decide that he needs to get closer to cast a spell but gets stuck against some bush. The spell durations are also so short that it's not even worth casting them.

Quests have been awful so far. Some random guy just asked me to kill Raedric, a prince of the area. This is like my 4th quest in the game. Why on earth would I ever agree to do that? My character has just arrived at Gilded Vale. He doesn't know anyone and isn't from around there. Why would anyone ask him that?

There are no NPC's for me to talk to about this Raedric to really find out what he's about. When I get to his Hold, everyone is just hostile. I'm supposed to just kill all these guards to meet Raedric to see if I want to actually kill him?
?Stuff like this really takes me out of an RPG. Does it get better? What's everyone's opinion on this game?
 
Bought it on PS4 a while back and dropped it as soon as I got to the first city with the mass executions because soulless babies. The game has sat firmly in my backlog ever since Hitman 2 came out.
 
Sucked hard before first city, huge ass stoney structure with rotating parts in the wilderness doesn't fit the setting.
 
It's not a bad game.

It's a good game.


That being said I don't like it either.
 
I tried to get into it like 5 bloody times. Always get bored the moment i reach the city. I dont know, it just feels boring.
 
Yeah I'll jump ontop of the pile here and say that I too found it boring. The setting was just very flavourless. I'm sure the gameplay was fine it was just that nothing about the world, characters or premise grabbed me at all. It felt like a GM who created their own homebrew 5e setting but did nothing of any interest or meaningful difference from FR to distinguish it.
 
I guess the setting was a common criticism because as I understand it pillars two has the world flooded and basically created an entirely new setting.
 
I kinda feel like most fantasy settings are flavourless.
I mean, there was a time when I was first exposed to elves and I'm sure it was a really interesting concept then.
Same with a lot of things.

But then the standard fantasy tropes and elements started to get repetitive, uncreative and boring.

And so if you're going to create a new fantasy setting, brand new, then for me it needs to be as alien as a lot of Tolkien's stuff when I was first exposed to it.
The fantasy aspect should basically only be "no modern stuff, anything medieval esque and older is fine" and "high fantasy means crazy magic".
Apart from that, I want something unique.

PoE felt like it didn't do nearly enough to set itself apart from typical stuff. And maybe it's because it was intended as a successor to Baldur's Gate which was based off of DnD, which is fairly typical for its fantasy genre.

I had an idea for a fantasy setting race which was basically a semi-humanoid looking (shoulders and arms) land-based anglerfish esque creature who's large and grotesque body would be hidden behind layers of clothing. A deeply devoted race towards magic who lacks the finesse for anything like being a rogue or even a warrior, but an absolute tank int the ways of taking punishment as well. However as fearsome as they look they are often times very secluded to oasis' in deserts which they are extremely protective of and in which they mostly value art over all else. Pilgrimages to the outside world is mostly to experience other culture and bring back inspiration for new works of art. They don't value what you can become as a being, they value what you can conceive of and what you can create.

As far as I know that's, not necessarily unique, but it isn't traditional. It isn't a trope. It isn't the same old same old.

PoE did do some things that weren't just straight copying old tropes but it always felt like they couldn't commit or the lore they told of past events or outside areas of the region was far more interesting than what I was currently doing in the playable area.

I will return to it and give it another fair chance. But I might just be over this kind of setting tbh.

Like, imagine if there was, what, hundreds? Of Fallout-esque settings in films, books, tv-shows, games, PnP, comics and, I don't fucking know, toys? I'd get fucking sick and tired of that too.
 
Mr Fish said:
I kinda feel like most fantasy settings are flavourless.
Click to expand...

They are. They don't tend to evolve - neither as settings or inside their fiction. Nor does one tend to offer anything over another one. And if it does, it's extremely rare and tends to still be generic. Torment games are a notable exception (settingwise).

One would think the point of "fantasy" would be to offer something "fantastic"; elves, dwarves, orcs, mages and paladins haven't been "fantastic" in a long time anymore.

Fantasy nowadays tends to be boring and repetitive. You could say the same about any often used setting (like post apocalypse), but then again, there's the context of "fantasy being fantastic".

Fantasy as a genre is either creatively bankrupt, or the their developers are afraid to explore what all fantasy could offer beyond what it does (and has done for decades) possibly in fear of losing the familiarity the audience has for it.

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As for PoE... I don't think they're necessarily bad games. It's just that they are victims of their thematic genre, and as such, a bit tedious.
 
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