*Warning – potential spoilers ahead*
Graphically, Pillars of Eternity; Complete Edition is
beautiful. The game takes full advantage
of the consoles hardware to deliver a visual treat that is on par with the PC
version at max settings. This does come
with a price though, there were times when, due to the amount of enemies on the
screen or the amount of particle effects, I experienced some slowdown in the framerate,
creating a choppy, if only briefly, visual experience. Also, occasionally when going to my journal
in order to check my quest log, the game would jumble all the lines of text on
top themselves making it impossible to read until you changes tabs in your
journal, then when you came back to the quest text the issue would be
resolved. This also happened sometimes
with the tooltips for items, weapons, armor, and spells though, in those cases,
the issue would persist.
I have previously talked about some of the performance
issues when it came to combat but there were a few more issues on top of that
when it came to performance. For one,
the load times are often very long and considering that this is a game where
you can move a few steps to reach the area that you need to go after entering
current area, this can get tedious, especially if you are having to do a lot of
back and forth for quest purposes. Also,
in the latter half of the game, including the White March expansions, I experienced
frequent crashes about every hour and a half to two and a half hours of
gameplay. These crashes would occur
either when loading into a new area or when the game was autosaving after
entering the new area. While annoying
this wasn’t too big of an issue with the one exception of the time it corrupted
my save data. Luckily, the game autosaves
after entering a new area and keeps multiple autosave files so when this occurred,
it was a simple matter of redoing what I had just finished doing in that
previous area.
When it comes to the music and the sound in the game, both
are superb. The music is perfect for the
fantasy setting with the score bringing to mind the music from The Lord of the
Rings movies. The voice acting was excellent
as well, with the actors bringing out all the fun quirks of the cast of NPCs
that join your party. My only real issue
when it comes to the voice acting is some of the overly repetitious uses of certain
lines and the, by the end of the game, highly annoying “Stand Together!” line
shouted by your sneaking thief as she moves to disarm a trap.
The combat in Pillars is, like its predecessors, all about
pausing and micromanaging your party member in order to use them to the fullest
of their abilities. The is an option to
turn on or off AI scripts that will control your party members for you and,
while the scripts are actually pretty good, that helps to fill in the gaps
between issuing orders to them but, occasionally, these scripts will leave your
party members just standing around doing nothing because the AI can’t figure
out the next best course of action.
The story of Pillars of Eternity: Complete Edition is, in the
beginning what appears to be a rather cookie cutter storyline for a fantasy RPG
but, as you progress, it turns into a well thought out tale where the current
state of the world is called into question because of the reality behind the
true nature of the gods. The decisions you
make over the course of the main story will all effect the flow of events later
on in the game and not always in the way you would expect. Also, aside from a main story that goes from
simplistic to epic over its course, each of the side quests have their own well
thought out storylines that add character and depth to the world and, in some
cases, also affect the outcome of major events.
Be warned though, due to the nature of this game and the presentation of
the story, it is very text heavy, requiring a lot of reading to follow the events
in play.
In conclusion, Pillars of Eternity: Complete Edition is an excellent
addition to the libraries of anyone who enjoys the classic isometric RPGs of
the late 1990s and early 2000s and I feel that is it an important push in the
right direction for a genre that is not often appreciated in todays over
saturated game market.
Graphics – 9Performance – 6
Sound – 9
Gameplay – 8
Story – 9
Replayability – 10
Total – 8.5 out of 10
- Arylin Michelle
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