There's no point in playing Pillars of Eternity - nobody wants a game like this. That's what the publishers decided, right? Sure, it raised over four million dollars through crowdfunding - that money coming directly from those who actually decide what they do and don't want - but the publishers couldn't have been wrong, could they?
Well yes, actually. They were. And thank crikey for that, because some time with Pillars of Eternity's early backer beta shows a game with an extraordinary amount of potential and promise. It's not there yet, of course, but the skeleton of a great role-playing game resides under the - right now - rather flaky exterior.
Even through all the issues, which will be touched on shortly, there's enough here to drag you in and keep you playing for hours. Not enough to recommend going and putting down the extra $25 required to get beta access if you didn't already put down the $110 required to originally get it. But those with access can have a surprising amount of fun.
Pillars of Eternity immediately brings to mind the Baldur's Gates and Icewind Dales of gaming's history. Not odd, as that's precisely what it's meant to do. A party of fantasy tropes in hero form (one created in a robust character editor), a village with missing pigs, a nobleman with his honour besmirched by the working stiffs and reports of an ogre to the east.
If you've been missing these computer role-playing games, you'll immediately feel right at home.
You'll be toying with your formation, figuring out the best way to approach a battle (hint: pause it a lot), forgetting to cast buffs on your party, getting killed by horrible massive spiders and then realising a quest has branched many more times than you ever expected it to.
What to Read Next
While initially daunting - at least if you're out of practice - Pillars soon enough becomes a comfortable mix of role-playing, exploring and killing bandits / wolves / those damn spiders.
Just as you take on your new role as devoted explorer, you'll stumble across a hidden temple. Do you want to go in? Maybe not now, back to the village first to trade and rest. But back in a minute. And then the temple opens many more storyline paths, which lead you to more areas, which push you to play more. And before you know it, yep - that's hours gone. On a game that's clearly nowhere near finished in this version.
It's probably ("definitely") not fair to criticise Pillars of Eternity for the myriad bugs, errors and crashes experienced while playing it, because of the game's very early nature.
But it's fair to point them out for the sake of those who might not be aware, or take issue with said issues: you will encounter problems playing Pillars of Eternity right now, today.
From graphical ghosting through party members randomly disappearing, missing text boxes and missing tooltips causing crashes, endlessly looping attack animations and the odd gigantic 'nope' as your computer decides it doesn't want to run the game anymore - there's a lot to get through. But that's the nature of the beast - it's just something to be aware of, and not something to complain about.
It's especially not worth complaining about when the game that does work is so intriguing, showing an early promise that a hell of a lot of role-playing games in recent years haven't even hinted at.
It's something also seen in Pillars' Kickstarter stablemate Wasteland 2 - these are games the creators really wanted to make.
There's a lot of love gone into them, and with love comes care, attention to detail, and those old school role-playing features some of us forget we loved. Formations! Ahem.
Developer Obsidian knows what it's doing with the genre, and there's nothing - so far - that feels wrong or out of place in Pillars. The writing is succinct and effective, the look is pretty much perfect, it's customisable enough - both when it comes to how your characters act and the selection of in-game options, like an automatically-enabled colourblind mode - that you can play it in almost any way you want.
As said earlier, it's not worth putting down extra money for right now - Pillars of Eternity's early backer beta is just a special taste for the committed. But what it does show is a game with the capability to be something special when it's actually finished - and something a lot of us have been sorely missing for many a year.
Pillars of Eternity will be released on PC, Mac and Linux by the end of the year.
