Pillars of Eternity

Ouch. No, I have no love nor trust for MMORPGs, it's a kind of game that really doesn't appeal to me (at least the WoW style ones which everyone seems to try copying). A single player RPG involving some ex-Black Isle devs though? I nearly just handed them my credit card details and the rights to my body after I die.

Got my beta key at midnight last night, just before I'd gone to bed for a 7am start. It's nice when Kickstarters start delivering, although the timing wasn't helpful. Today is a long work day indeed.

Yup, was quite surprised to find myself dumped straight into Dyrford Village with a load of XP and a party consisting of generic "Backer Beta Fighter/Rogue/Wizard/whatever" characters. I tried the ranger, who starts with a bow and an animal companion that provide massive flanking bonuses, and more when you level up and strengthen the bond between the two. Had a brief look at the Cipher class too, which seems to be kind of like a close combat mage from what I could tell. Character generation has plenty to see, although portrait pics are pretty thin on the ground right now.

It's pretty much Baldur's Gate, but oh so much prettier. There's a missing noble, a shady double-cross, an alchemist looking for drake eggs, and a farmer complaining about the ogre that stole his pigs. Might be other quests, not sure yet. Bard in the inn has a few lore stories to tell, interesting background fluff. There's an explorable area outside the village, full of "feral druids" and motherf*cking lions, not an easy place to explore. There's some kind of crafting system, the levelling system is pleasant and gives everyone interesting perks and skills...

I'm liking it. Few small bugs, like the music from the level continuing when you quit to menu, or a couple of items named *missing string*, but it's pretty, it's slick, and there looks to be a lot of depth to the mechanics. It feels for all the world like an Infinity Engine game, but with a modern smoothness to it that just feels good . It's looking very promising for the full game.

One thing I like is how all the stats are relevant to pretty much everyone. The stats do what you'd expect in a straight fight, but abilities are more closely tied to them, so for example a character with high Intellect will have a larger radius on his AoE abilities and longer ability duration, whether he's a fighter or a mage. It's a neat way of discouraging cheesy min-maxed characters. That and the cutscene screens where you may be required to test Might to climb a wall or Perception to notice a clue.

Combat needs a bit of polish, the visual feedback isn't great so I have trouble seeing whether a sword swing actually connected without looking at the text (and who the hell wants to read a bunch of dice rolls?), but the combat looks solid, and everyone has a use.

The more I mess around with this, the more I like it. It looks really promising. and seriously, it looks and sounds utterly beautiful.

Spent a few hours mucking about with a cipher character, mostly Might/Dex/Con heavy, because old habits die hard. They're an awful lot of fun. Basically you build up focus in combat by hitting things. You can then spend it on magical effects. Blinding, charm, fear, a magical strike that chains to other enemies, cone-effect attacks that deal knockdown, things like that. As long as you're in combat to generate focus, you don't run out of abilities, where the mage or cleric have per-encounter or per-rest abilities that run dry. Ciphers don't have any protective abilities though so they still depend on clerics and other fighters to protect and tank.

Saw a post on the Obsidian forum about creating a muscle wizard, apparently it's a whole load of fun running a mage straight into the thick of it and flinging Burning Hands about with gay abandon, not having to worry about friendly fire or traditional mage flimsiness. The stats system seems to be doing a good job of making any build useful in some way.

Still bugged to hell though, but I guess that's why it's a beta.

There was a big update to the beta the other day, only got around to trying it out last night.

They've improved combat a lot, by adding more feedback and changing the pacing. It's a little slower, and much easier to manage party members and abilities, although some of the cooldown times for both weapons and abilities are quite silly at the moment. The quest system has been cleaned up nicely, and they've done something to the XP system so that while combat still doesn't give you XP, it's nevertheless doled out more regularly (I think you get a portion for each time a quest is updated, which is nice) so you keep that feeling of progress and advancement.

The fixed quests meant I could actually complete some. I was unreasonably delighted to get a little piggy as a pet for completing the ogre quest. I was finally able to explore the main dungeon quest too, and I was pleasantly... well, not surprised, because I had high expectations for Obsidian's writers. Pleasantly satisfied? There's at least one very interesting god in this game's pantheon, and he's kind of a c*nt.

I also discovered the Deep Wounds debuff down there, and it's broken to bejaysus at the moment, one archer can kill your whole party in seconds if your cleric doesn't spend all his/her time protecting from debuffs and healing constantly, which might be workable against one archer on his own, but when he's got friends it's just too much to handle. Lot of people complaining about poison as well, although I think that's much easier to deal with. At least there are antidote potions.

If each update improves the game at this rate, it'll be an absolute gem on release. Still a load of butthurt Baldur's Gate fans whining about things like Might covering both melee and spell damage, but they're best ignored. The system's shaping up well.