Being sneaky is a lot of hard work. Sometimes you just want to summon bolts of lightning and furious firestorms down to incinerate everyone in your path. For that, you’ll definitely want to roll a wizard in Pillars of Eternity, who really corner the market in visually impressive slaughter. Obsidian’s clearly been working on the RPG’s spell effects, which bathe the screen in explosions of colour – oh the joy of a well-placed Wall of Fire. This time Obsidian was showing off a new section of its sprawling fantasy adventure, an entirely optional assault on a fortified temple guarded by some grim and sturdy paladins. Forgoing the stealth approach, which sees you sneak through some monster-infested sewers into the castle basement, this time our party opted for the less subtle tactic of fireballing everyone in their way.
Pillars has a nice mix of character classes that all seem to have a distinct impact on each combat encounter. Rogues disappear into the shadows, re-emerging to deliver punishing sneak attacks, and use their various ‘get out of jail’ powers to swap positions with allies and avoid being surrounded. The game has a neat ‘melee engagement’ feature that simulates the attack of opportunity found in tabletop D&D – run your characters out of melee combat and enemy fighters will get a free swing at their back as they pass. This results in fighters and barbarians being far more valuable and tactically useful than their burly counterparts from classic D&D 2nd Edition games like Baldur’s Gate 2; whereas in those games they were little more than blocks of hit-points that continuously swung their broadswords until the enemy fell over, in Pillars they’re part of a constantly shifting battlefield that rewards smart tactical movement and punishes poor decision-making.
That’s one example of the way Obsidian has clearly recognised the flaws of Pillars spiritual predecessors, kept the things that made them great, and ditched the clunky and awkward systems that translated poorly from tabletop to PC. Massive open world maps remain, but there’s a fast travel speed option to ease the frustration of back-tracking. Combat still uses the real-time with pause system, but the developers have added a slow-motion mode that gives less experienced players time to think. Character stats are useful for every class, preventing you from making a rubbish wizard with an inflated strength score because you don’t know the system. There’s a frankly massive amount of auto-pause options for you to tinker with; you might, for example, want your game to throw up a pause whenever your forward scouts discover a trap. Helps prevent some irritating and unpleasant accidents.
The new resting system is another key change; rather than repeatedly jamming the rest button, which takes a lot of the challenge out of the game, in Pillars you have a limited number of camping supplies, meaning that you can only do so much adventuring before you’ll need to head back to a safe haven to restock. Characters now have spells and abilities that are available a certain number of times per rest, so you’ll need to consider how much strength you have left before pushing on further into that skeleton-packed dungeon. Very much a consideration that tabletop role-players will be used to, but one that usually doesn’t come up in CRPGs.
Despite the solid and intriguing combat system, this isn’t an Icewind Dale-style dungeon crawling hack-‘em-up. While wholesale murder is an option, there’s room for both stealthy and talkative parties. For example, in the fort assault mentioned above, our band of heroes managed to enter the main floor of the tower. Slipping into a barracks, they discovered a full set of robes worn by the paladin order that held the fort. Throwing them on, though for some reason declining to remove either the rogue’s swashbuckling feathered hat or the chanter’s mighty stag helm, they marched out into the corridor and bumped into a patrolling guard. A quick chat, a few well-chosen words, and the paladin shrugs and moves on his way. Again, it’s a neat nod to the kind of clever approaches you see in tabletop roleplay. Murdering everything in sight isn’t always the smart option. Well, until you mess up and say the wrong thing in front of a suspicious priest and his cadre of full-plate armoured warriors, anyway.
Snazzy graphics and spell effects, and enjoyable combat are both nice things to have in an RPG, there’s no doubt, but in some ways they’re the easiest things to get right. What a lot of games miss out on is that sense that the player has options, that if they’re clever there’s always another way to solve a problem. Admittedly this is a segment of Obsidian’s game they’ve specifically chosen to show a more peaceful approach of, and there’s no telling how much of the game assumes you’ll just march in and start magic-missiling every poor sod in the room, but Pillars looks like it’s also taking welcome inspiration from the frantic, making-it-up-as-we-go-along spirit of tabletop role-playing. This can only be a good thing. Pillars of Eternity is creeping ever closer to its March 25 release date, and I’m itching to get my hands on it and see if can live up to the promise of what I’ve seen so far.
Most Anticipated Feature: Digging in to the subtleties of the character development system. Or exploding people with fire magic. I’m easy.
