Transitory

I think this is the first time since 2012 that I haven't had one or more RPGs in my gaming queue. That means time to play other video games, and finish ones I started long ago! Fortunately, all other video games are shorter than RPGs, and I'm looking forward to broadening my horizons a bit. Possibly until Torment finally comes out in 2017.

First on the list: Transistor. I started this almost exactly one year ago, before getting distracted by The Caldecott Caper and the universe. The summary description sounds like my kryptonite: stylish cyberpunk game featuring a female lead and awesome music. It delivered in spades.

Gameplay itself is terrific. It mainly focuses on battles, which you can either fight in realtime or by using a limited "Turn" ability, which lets you pause time while you plan your actions, and then execute them almost instantly. I did almost all of my fighting in Turn mode, which appeals strongly to my preference for tactical gameplay and limited hand-eye coordination, but I think it would be totally doable in realtime if that's your preference.

Transistor is technically an action-RPG. As you progress in the game and level up, you'll unlock new abilities ("Functions") for your character, as well as other benefits like more equipment slots ("RAM"). You can only use a limited number of abilities at a time, but different abilities can be combined in various ways to create new effects. For example, "Mask" can be used by itself to turn yourself invisible for a short time, but you can also combine it with "Crash" for a more devastating backstab attack. There are story-based reasons to experiment with different configurations of your programs, which keeps the gameplay fresh and interesting throughout, rather than just sticking with the same strategy throughout.

That said, I definitely found a loadout that appeals to me, mostly based on the earliest functions you find. I slotted Crash with Mask and Ping for a cheap and powerful backstab. I would follow this up with Breach for a combo. I can typically repeat this in a single Turn, which will destroy most enemies and seriously damage the rest. My third slot is Jaunt, which is useful for efficiently setting up backstabs or as a quick get-out-of-trouble button while Turn is on cooldown. My fourth slot rotated based on what I needed to unlock, but otherwise would remain empty to free up memory for my passives. At the end of the game, my passives were Void (boosts base damage of all attacks), Help (25% chance to become the superuser on each Turn, giving a powerful AOE attack), Bounce (blocks an attack from doing damage), and Tap (extra HP).

There isn't much of an exploration focus in the game - at any given time, there's only one or maybe two places you can go, with possibly a few nooks or crannies that hold a terminal or point of interest. That said, most of the pleasure I got from the game came from moving around, gaping at Cloudbank. It's absolutely stunning. Being an isometric cyberpunk game, there are scenes that are strongly reminiscent of the Shadowrun games, but where Shadowrun often goes for grimy and lived-in locations, Transistor is one of the most beautiful games I've ever seen. It combines cyberpunk elements (neon signs, enormously tall buildings, omnipresent digital terminals) with a fantastic arc deco architecture. These are some of the most graceful and elegant elevators you will ever see in a video game.

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As everyone knows, I'm a sucker for story, and Transistor's is absolutely fascinating. Partly for the story itself (more on that later), but even more so for the unique way in which it's told.

I tend to think of video game stories as being synonymous with dialogue. Well, there's no dialogue in Transistor. That's by necessity, since Red (the protagonist, who you play as) has lost her voice. We only get to hear from her in flashbacks, after everything went wrong, or "hear" from her on the very rare occasions where she can type something into a terminal. When she does this, she'll type and then erase, which at first I thought was a form of self-editing, but now I realize was her attempt at carrying on a conversation. As soon as she pressed Enter, she would lose that input prompt, so she needs to reuse it for everything she wants to say.

In most RPGs, the plot of the story is communicated through critical-path segments that the player is guaranteed to experience. These are often cut-scenes, or crucial interactive dialogues that the player must complete in order to proceed. These are often supplemented by additional materials found in the world that will add in additional background or flavor; these can safely be ignored, but fans like me who want to learn more will gain a deeper understanding of the world and plot by finding them. These include codex entries in Dragon Age, books in the Elder Scrolls games, emails in Fallout, etc.

Transistor has a very full and complex story, but extremely minimal storytelling. The only way you can piece it together is if you combine everything you know. That means using all of the different functions in all of their configurations in order to unlock the characters' dossiers, AND paying attention to Breach's comments, AND finding and reading the terminal news reports, AND listening to Royce's rambling monologue. Each individual piece doesn't make sense. Reading Kendrell or Asher's dossiers in isolation won't help, but after you read both of them, you'll make the connection and realize how the Camerata came to be.

None of this is required to enjoy the game. The atmosphere is fantastic, and you'll be able to pick up on the gist of your motivations even if you never read a word of text. But it's impressive to see a game that's comfortable with such an opaque (but fair) system for communicating with its players about what the heck is actually going on.

MEGA SPOILERS

So, no guarantee that this is correct, but here's my own understanding.

Cloudbank itself is a purely digital, virtual city. The people we meet may have real physical selves, but the community only exists because of their decision to participate.

It is a democratic, collaborative community. I find myself thinking of it as an ultimately-evolved BBS, though of course it would be more relevant to compare to something like an MMORPG. The best comparison might actually be something like a MUD or MUSH. Participants help build the environment that they live in.

The "Administrators" are users who volunteer to help keep things running smoothly. They're the equivalent of the forum moderators or webmasters. They have a position of authority, but their purpose is to implement the will of the community. They aren't dictators, they're the civil service of the digital world. Most administrators will serve for a time and then step back down to being users, similar to many volunteer forum moderators. Some will tire of Cloudbank and log out completely. Kendrell is one of the few who has served for a long time, outliving many different trends and fads.

This is a democratic community, hence the ubiquitous polls. However, this democracy leads to mediocrity. Nothing unexpected can ever happen, because people vote on everything that happens. Everything is just always sort of fine, never wonderful or terrible. The people always vote for mild weather, so they never experience epic thunderstorms or frigid blizzards.

Kendrell becomes disillusioned with the status quo, realizing that democracy can't make the city great. He starts the Camerata, whose goal is to improve the community by surprising it. He and Asher recruit two other people to their elite conspiracy: Sybil, an extremely well-connected woman who knows everyone in the community, and Royce, a brilliant engineer.

In order to make changes without going through the standard voting system, they will need to access the lower-level functions of Cloudbank. Essentially, access the operating system rather than the user-level program that everyone else is running in. This will let them bypass the community's democratic will. Again, their intention is to do good - "When everything changes, nothing changes." They create plans for a new form of Cloudbank, with some immutable features that cannot be modified by popular will.

Royce eventually invents (or perhaps discovers, I'm not clear) the Process, a low-level program that can rewrite Cloudbank. The Camerata begins using the Process. Some people find out about this, and are forcibly exiled from Cloudbank, never to return. When they leave, Royce uses some aspects of their avatars to modify the Process, making it more adaptable and training it to behave differently. I think that this is the purpose of the Transistor: it is the interface between avatars and the process, or perhaps between avatars and the OS where the process resides.

The Camerata is patient and works slowly, converting one person at a time. Things go wrong when Sybil, who feels jilted by Red, plots to use the Transistor to get back at her. Ostensibly this is just another step in their plan, to inject a necessary element for the Process, but it's actually driven by her own jealousy. "Breach" gets stabbed and pulled into the Transistor, Red takes the Transistor and escapes.

At this point, everything starts to go wrong. The Transistor was the interface between the user-level world of Cloudbank, where the Camerata avatars reside, and the OS-level world where the Process runs. (The Process manifests inside Cloudbank, but it's a one-way street. System-level code is allowed to access user-level processes, but  user-level code cannot access system-level processes. The Process can thus attack Cloudbank, but Cloudbank cannot retaliate without root privileges.) The Process no longer receives guidance from Royce or the Camerata, and so it acts on its own, drifting from its original purpose.

The Process begins deleting things. Avatars, buildings, entire blocks. All of the architecture that was built over time and colored by user consensus is erased, replaced with a blank slate. The Camerata, horrified, pursues Red to try and regain the Transistor. She, understandably, is not inclined to let them have it: it holds all that remains of her boyfriend.

In the end, Red and Royce agree to a truce. Red returns the Transistor, plugging it into the interface so Royce can access the root system and destroy the Process. He succeeds (in an astonishingly elided scene). However, there's a problem. Both he and Red are inside, and only one can come back out. She triumphs, and Royce is gone.

Red logs back into Cloudbank, but now as a superuser, rather than a regular user. So, she has the privileges that the Camerata wanted all along. Earlier in the game she cast meaningless votes; now she can do anything by willing it. (In both cases, it was the system itself that ultimately did the work, she's just bypassing the previously-mandated method of doing so.) With her newfound powers, she's able to restore the damage done by the Process. She creates the buildings and plazas and bridges anew, replacing the blank slate with a glorious new canvas.

But... she cannot bring the people back. Everyone else has logged out. (My theory is that they've returned to the "real world", though I'm not sure if the game makes that clear. If there is no "real world" and only the digital one, then all of the users have been deleted.) She's a goddess, but a lonely goddess with no living souls around her.

Except for Breach. He's still trapped in the Transistor. He begs for her to stay in Cloudbank. I'm not totally clear on why, but my theory is that, because Breach is stuck in the Transistor, he's unable to log out. Red basically has three options at this point. Remain in Cloudbank and create a beautiful city that nobody will ever see. Log out and return to the real world, leaving Cloudbank and Breach behind. Or enter the Transistor and spend an eternity with Breach.

She chooses the last option. It's a shocking ending, but after I had time to think about it, it does make sense. Red loved Breach so much that she would give up everything else in her life to be with him. That's really sweet.

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Anyways, that's my theory! The game can feel very impressionist at times, and I'm certain that other players will come up with their own interpretations of the game. It's a story that really resonates with me, though, so I'll continue to believe it until persuaded otherwise.

So, yeah! I absolutely loved this game. It's the only thing by Supergiant that I've played, though I'm now very interested in Bastion, as well as the upcoming Pyre. I'm also amazed that they managed to build this incredible game with such a small team - the entire credits fit on a single screen with a lot of spacing. That says a lot for their talent, and also for the power of modern game engines. I'm looking forward to whatever they do in the future!

Oh - as per usual, here is an album with tons of screenshots from the game. Spoilers, spoilers everywhere!

Road to Perdition

The works of China Mieville have been on my radar for many years. He’s often brought up when people discuss Fallen London, a gothic Victorian web-game that I’ve enjoyed playing. Fallen London is such an odd, unique, specific game that its fans have very few alternative sources to get more of the same; it isn’t like a fantasy role-playing game where you have your pick of many competing titles in the same genre.

I picked up Perdido Street Station, the first of China’s books in the New Crobuzon series. It’s fantastic. Really dark, macabre, depressing, well-written, fully-realized. I should avoid comparing books to other books, but to me, it felt like the spawn of an unholy triple union between Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, the works of HP Lovecraft, and Terry Pratchett’s Ankh-Morpork books. It combines the relentless pessimism of the first book with the eldritch horror of the second author and a setting that feels like a nightmare vision of the third.

Much like Fallen London, it’s difficult to quickly summarize Perdido Street Station to others. I’ve fallen back on “Lovecraftian steampunk,” which sort of gets at it but isn’t quite right. The overall setting FEELS Victorian, but isn’t, really… this isn’t Earth, it’s another world, complete with both alien species (the bug-people Khepri, the lizard-people Vodyanoi, the bird-people Garuda, and the cactus-people Cacti) and different metaphysics. Magic isn’t just real, it’s the subject of study, centered in its own version of Unseen University. Parallel dimensions aren’t just theory, they’re well-established reality, and the source of frequent threats. The overall technology level does roughly parallel that of late 19th-century London, including trains, dirigibles, pistols, and daily newspapers, along with pneumatic tubes and political parties. There are some elements that do feel particularly steampunk, most notably Constructs, golem-like automatons driven by steam power who use mechanical systems of switches and flywheels as their on-board computers.

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The adjective Lovecraftian doesn’t really get at the tone, either. The Slake-Moths do seem like Lovecraftian villains, and the focus on madness and the loss of the mind are very reminiscent of Lovecraft. But the writing styles themselves are very different. Lovecraft was all about absence, writing around topics that were too scary to directly address, building up a sense of horror at the unspeakable. Mieville is all about specificity, detail, lingering over every bubbling pustule and blood-stained tooth and writhing tentacle. It can feel overwhelming at times, and it is relentless.

His writing is very vivid and powerful, and before long the corrosive miasma of New Crobuzon settles over you, filled with decay and filth and corruption. It’s a very distinct vision of entropy that he presents here. Not the long and graceful decline of Tolkien’s Middle-earth, but a self-satisfied wallowing, a bureaucratic malaise. We don’t get the sense that New Crobuzon was a once-great city that has fallen. We get the sense that people have always been a little selfish, a little cruel, a little deceitful, and all of those small sins have accumulated over a millennium into the rotten edifice that they now inhabit.

My favorite example might be the weather machine. Centuries ago, in an effort to protect the city from reality-warping winds, they built a vast edifice that can control the weather. But it's fallen into disrepair now. Nobody has bothered to tear it down, so it still looms over the city, awkward and ugly and useless. It has its own bureaucracy, employing people who uselessly attend the inert machines. No-one knows how to fix it, or could operate it even if it was fixed. It's just one more thing for people to complain about, another pointless eyesore on the city's landscape.

One thing that surprised me was just how many strong parallels I found between this book and details in Fallen London. I don’t necessarily think that Failbetter directly adapted parts of this book, but both might be drawing from similar original sources, or have coincidentally stumbled on the same flavor. Anyways:

Jack-of-Smiles <==> Jack Half-a-Prayer

The Brass Embassy <==> The Ambassador from Hell

The Vake <==> The Slake-moths

The Bazaar <==> The Bazaar

The Battle of Wolfstack Docks <==> The Keltree Docks Strike

That said, while both works share a quasi-Victorian setting that’s literally quite dark, the overall feel is very different. FL is occasionally scary, but more often is delightfully weird, indulging in melodrama and humor as often as the macabre. It is kaleidoscopic where Perdido Street Station is relentlessly focused on maintaining a single discomforting mood.

Both settings do delight in unusual characters. Isaac is a fascinating choice for the protagonist of a story. He doesn’t fit the visual mold of the typical hero, being massively overweight. His background is unusual as well: he’s a disgraced academic, a lousy teacher who squandered his reputation by pursuing overly abstract research goals. He now ekes out a marginal existence, accepting occasional research gigs that give him an opportunity to pilfer laboratory equipment.

Over the whole arc of the book, though, Isaac reveals himself to be a very sympathetic character. Yes, he can be blustery and selfish, but he’s very self-aware of his own faults, and pushes himself to be better. He offers an appealing mixture of ethics and rationalism: he believes in doing the right thing even when it’s hard, and overcomes his fear with his dispassionate judgments of what must be done.

Isaac is a through-character, but up until the end I was never sure if he would last. The book surprised me again and again with the characters it killed off: people who had been built up to seem like crucial elements of the ongoing story would be brutally and/or casually knocked off, increasing the overall sense of hopelessness and shoving the story forward.

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There are a ton of plot threads that arise and become prominent but are not resolved by the end of the book. Ordinarily that would annoy me, but in this case it feels like it’s being done in service of worldbuilding. A horrifying as the Slake-moths are, they’re just one of the many, many issues with which the world must grapple. I’m not sure if future books deal with Rudgutter and the Weaver and the Construct Council and Jack Half-a-Prayer, but even if they don’t, just the knowledge that they’re still lurking in the world makes things a little bit weirder, a little big more dangerous.

The biggest dangling thread of all might be the crisis engine itself. It was fascinating to realize that, among the most powerful forces behind New Crobuzon, this source of perpetual energy was a bigger threat than the moths. Money is more important than the lives and minds of the city’s citizens. That’s very dark, but also feels depressingly believable for any world in the multiverse where people are motivated by greed.

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This was a great, horrifying book. I’ll probably try a palette cleanser before proceeding to The Scar, the next book in the series, but I’m sure I’ll reach it

Paratheo-Anametamystikhood Of Eris Esoteric

Woo! I finished Pillars of Eternity! I've been looking forward to this for a while... partly because it's a fun game, but also because, for the first time in many many years, I don't have any major RPGs waiting in my gaming backlog. I'm eager to broaden my horizons for a bit. I recently picked up the "Humble Narrative Bundle", which included a bunch of story-based games I've wanted to play, such as Her Story and Broken Age and Read Only Memories.

Before I get ahead of myself, though, let's wrap this puppy up!

I think that, on its own terms, Pillars of Eternity is a great game. It has a fantastic tactical combat system, solid level design, and deep gameplay and lore. Its story and characters are well above the industry average, but in my (highly subjective) opinion, are a step below the heights achieved by BioWare, Harebrained Schemes and some of Obsidian's other games.

I'm a little conflicted on the worldbuilding. As I mentioned in my first post, I have decreasingly little patience for vast and original new fantasy worlds. After absorbing dozens of unique fantasy settings over the years, it's hard to get excited about yet another configuration of new gods, nations, races, and factions. That said, I did warm to Eora as the game went on, thanks in large part to a few unique things it does.

One thing I really appreciate is how cosmopolitan the world is. Most fantasy worlds feature racially-pure homelands with monolithic cultures: Lorien is home to the elves, Orzammar is the city of dwarves, Ogiers live in the Stedding, etc. That may have been true far in the past of Eora, but by the "present", all of the settings are diverse. You might be an aumana from Raedceras origin living in the Vailan Republics, or a Glanfathan Orlan who has relocated to Aedyr. Race still matters, but culture matters more, and nationality tends to have the most immediate impact.

While characters on the whole tend to be interesting and well-drawn, the companions in this game didn't quite strike the highs that I'd hoped for. There are a total of eight (in the base game, I haven't picked up either White March expansion), and each is unique and fairly interesting. Every person gets their own companion quest. These are all optional, and there doesn't seem to be a pressing gameplay requirement to finish them - it's not like Baldur's Gate where Minsc would leave if you failed to rescue Dynaheir in time, or Nalia would get upset if you spent too long before reclaiming the de Arnise keep. But the quests are a good way to learn more of each person's personality, and you'll have some opportunities to guide their path and persuade them to follow certain courses, which will ultimately affect their ending.

That said, each individual quest is pretty short and simple. The most extreme cases just require going to a place (where you're going anyways) and speaking with a person (who you're talking to anyways). Others require a bit of exploration or a new fight, but that's about it. They're a step up from the companions in BG1, but a lot simpler than, say, the loyalty missions in the Shadowrun games or personal quests in the Dragon Age games.

The companion interactions themselves also felt pretty limited. There are a handful of banters between party members. These are usually just three or four lines, and pretty formulaic: person A says something, person B reacts strongly, person A ends with a quip. They definitely aren't bad, but it's disappointing that that's the entire extent of their interaction with other party members. The PC never gets involved in the banters, asking them to get along or fueling rivalries. Companions will sometimes interject during other conversations, but those interjections are always in isolation: they never respond to something that another party member has said. The more I played, the more I found myself missing the sniping between Morrigan and Alistair, or Gobbet and Is0bel looking out for each other, or Minsc's joyful adoption of Aerie as his new witch. Each individual companion is good, but since they rarely bounce off of one another, they don't reach the heights that they should be capable of.

At the top of my list of disappointments was a lack of romance options. I'd assumed all along that there would be romances - after all, this game is a spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate, which practically invented RPG romances. It wasn't until after I had entered Act 3 and started getting worried that I might have missed a crucial romance kick-off that I researched the topic and found that I had missed nothing.

I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised. Chris Avellone was one of the main narrative designers of the game, and he's clearly stated his aversion to romance in the past. The story doesn't need a romance, but I think it could have absolutely accommodated one, especially since the main plot of the game deals with procreation and may have had higher emotional stakes and stronger personal connections with an optional romance angle.

MINI SPOILERS

For the most part, the lack of romances makes sense at an individual level. I really wanted to romance Sagani, but she has a husband and children back home, and I can totally understand why she would rather not get involved with the crazy lady who sees dead people. Likewise, the Grieving Mother is... well, honestly, anyone with a name like The Grieving Mother is not going to be an eager love interest. Pallegina seems the most eligible of the bunch, and I dug her pride and competence and self-reflection, but it was not to be.

On the other hand, many of the male companions seem to be crying out for romances. Part of the reason I was so convinced that PoE had romances was because Eder seemed like a tailor-made love interest. Aloth also has several moments of vulnerability which seem like they would naturally lead into a romance angle - which could be very intriguing, depending on how you resolved the Iselmyr situation!

While not directly romance-related, I was slightly bummed to see that the game only featured 3 female companions, compared to 5 male ones. Worse than that, you'll most likely only start recruiting the women after you've recruited at least 4 men. Since most players tend to stick with the first people they accept into their parties (because they've already figured out how to use them and have built the rest of their teams around their skills), a lot of players will end up cruising through the Dyrwood with an all-bro squad. This is a recent and hopefully short-lived but worrying trend, following up on Dragon Age Inquisition's 6 male companions to 3 female ones. Not too long ago, you could expect that fantasy role-playing games would feature a roughly equal number of men and women as potential party members, and it's a little distressing to see those casts becoming less diverse. (DAI had the excuse of many significant women in NPC roles, which is less true in PoE.)

So, yeah, I was a little bummed about the non-romance. On the plus side, the stronghold was very well-done, both narratively and mechanically. It took me a little while to figure out the mechanics of the timeline. You finish building upgrades and pay your hirelings based on in-game time. Time you spend resting or traveling will help these things be done. However, you finish stronghold quests and collect taxes based on "turns". As far as I can tell, a "turn" occurs when you make progress in a quest. Therefore, there are a limited number of turns available in the game, which means that you can't just sleep for 100 years to collect a ton of taxes.

This seems to be balanced pretty well. I was always busy with my stronghold, making sure to always have something under construction and doing any quests as soon as they popped up, and I finished building my last expansion shortly before the end of the game. I focused early on security; I fought three battles early on (two against undead from the dungeon, one against invaders in the courtyard), but after I had finished the Endless Paths and got my Security over... hm, about 35, I no longer got any invasions.

As in other RPGs with strongholds, my favorite parts were scenarios where a petitioner would ask me to do something and I would need to make a decision. Unfortunately, I only had two or three of these over the entire game... once for a vassal who was being cruel to his subjects, once for another noble who suspected his rivals of plotting robbery, and... I think that was it. I would have loved more of these, I'm not sure if there just aren't that many or if I was unlucky in which events I got.

Mechanically, the two big benefits of the stronghold were the herb garden and the warden. Any time I came by the keep, I had a TON of new ingredients to collect, so I never needed to purchase anything for my (limited) crafting. The bounties that the Warden gives you are some of the best sources of XP in the whole game, and also pay out a good amount of money and items.

I hadn't realized at first that the different resting bonuses for Brighthollow were mutually exclusive, though I can now see how overpowered it would be to get all of them. I almost always chose the Woodland Trails option, which gives an impressive +3 CON in addition to 2 Athletics.  I was tempted to use the one that gives a boost to Mechanics, because I always seemed to be low in it, but since that's useless to most party members I never bothered.

Speaking of which... while I got more used to the talent system and general builds over time, I also got increasingly irritated at the skill system. In practice, what you need to do is pick one party member to be your honorary thief, and bump their Mechanics as high as possible. This will let them actually see traps before stepping in them, unlock doors and chests, etc. This means giving up points in Athletics and Survival, which provide combat bonuses that are useful more often. More annoyingly, it also means giving up Stealth. So, you'll most likely end up with one party member who can pick locks but can't sneak, zero or one party members who can sneak but can't pick locks, and everyone else who can do neither.

All that to say, while there are a few parts of the game that seem like they would lend themselves well to stealth-based approaches (as opposed to the more normal "kill everyone and take all their stuff" approach), in practice it ends up being tedious and difficult instead of fun. The main example I'm thinking of now is the temple in Noonfrost near the end of the game. I eventually was able to clear it without any fighting, but yeesh, it was annoying. Sagani was my dedicated stealther, so she would creep forward, check if the coast is clear, then motion for Aloth (whose Stealth was only about 3) to come forward so he could pick the lock, then he would rush back while Sagani crept forwards, etc. I probably reloaded over a dozen times... I really wanted the pacifist conclusion, but with such unbalanced character builds and no margin for error, a single mis-step would aggro the entire building.

This isn't a completely new problem - after all, back in Baldur's Gate you would need to divide between Pick Locks, Move Silently and Hide in Shadows - but it felt particularly harsh in PoE. I think part of that is because of the more open-ended nature of skill allocations in this game. In BG, you just know that you need a thief, and there's a very logical way to build them so they can take care of thieve-y things for you. PoE deliberately avoids having required classes like this, which is an admirable goal, but I ended up feeling like no character was able to fill the role required.

That was a broader thing that I struggled with, unlearning my habits of RPGs. I'm used to putting my frontline fighters in the heaviest armor possible and sticking my wizards in the back with light clothes. In PoE, though, that might not be the best approach. My chanter (bard) started off in medium armor, but I ended up loading him down with the heaviest plate possible, and he was a frontline tank who sang Broadway show tunes into his opponents' faces. Many fighters might choose to pick lighter clothes, since they are the primary damage dealers and can get in more hits with less armor. And it might be perfectly valid to, say, have your priest carry around three blunderbusses (blunderbi?). Since all three are loaded before combat starts, he can get off three shots in quick succession before needing to worry about reloading, at which point he can focus on spellcasting.

For the most part, I like the way they shook up the traditional build system. I was also intrigued by what they did with some of the new characters, particularly the Cipher. A Cipher builds up "Focus" by attacking enemies, and then can use that to unleash spell-like special abilities. One nice side-effect of this is that trash fights become meaningful: they are a valuable way for your Cipher to max out their Focus prior to facing down a boss. It vaguely reminds me of the Guard system in Inquisition, which similarly adds value to previously pointless trash fights, and both are interesting alternatives to the prospect of simply eliminating trash fights altogether (which the upcoming Torment game still aims to do).

Okay... that was very rambling, but I think those are most of my mechanical thoughts. Now, let's talk about plot! For most of the game, I thought it was fine - again, above average, but not as gripping as the best RPGs. That said, some big revelations that dropped near the very end of the game recast a lot of the background in a different light, improving my opinion of the story's quality and giving me a lot more to chew on.

MEGA SPOILERS

Dragon Age and Pillars of Eternity are both descended from Baldur's Gate and its Forgotten Realms setting. Both games seek to "fix" the problem of D&D-style gods. Forgotten Realms talks about gods and religion and temples, but it really isn't at all analogous to our own world: if you pray to the right god in D&D, they absolutely will send down a lightning bolt to zap your enemy, or raise your friend from the dead. There isn't any "faith" in the way we would think of it, just super-powerful beings that regularly and predictably manifest in the world. The idea of being an atheist in Toril is ludicrous.

Dragon Age "solves" this problem by making God unknowable. There are certain aspects of religion that can be verified - the Black City, the elven pantheon - but central questions like "Does the Maker exist?" and "Did the Maker really speak to Andraste?" are unanswerable. Individual people, tribes, and nations make their own answers, which leads to conflict. This feels very realistic and compelling.

Pillars of Eternity, by contrast, takes a tack that felt closer to that which Philip Pullman used in His Dark Materials. It's driven by atheist sentiment, but rather than denying the existence of gods, it makes gods real but corrupt, unworthy entities. In PoE, there is a truth that you can discover and know, but it may not be a truth you want to hear.

Near the very end of the game, we learn that in the cosmology of PoE, "gods" exist, but they were created by us, rather than us being created by them. This is different from the metaphysical idea that "gods become real when people believe in them" (used to good effect in Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman and other modern authors). In PoE, they were created before people believed in them; they have "real" existence and can affect the world. As in D&D, you can verify the existence of gods by watching a priest cast a spell, or by speaking to one in a vision. But the fact that they exist and are powerful does not mean that they are gods or are worthy of our worship.

This was a fairly surprising revelation, but it also worked well as the capstone to a recurring question that ran throughout the game: should kith (mankind) put their trust in gods, or trust in themselves? In Act 2, this mostly revolves around the issue of animancy, using science rather than religion to understand souls. The question arises again in Act 3, when you meet the Ovates and the druids of Ethik Nol, who have defied the gods and claimed immortality. The question is, is that actually a bad thing? Why should mankind bow to the demands of the gods? This isn't a straightforward question: we see much harm done through animancy (children's bodies implanted with the souls of animals turning feral and mauling their families) and the rituals of the Ethik Nol (convincing others to sacrifice themselves that you might live longer). But, we also see much blood spilt in service of the gods, whether through the Saint's War or the Leaden Key's machinations.

Dragon Age makes religion interesting by looking at faith itself, people wrestling with the decision of whether to choose to believe in things that they cannot prove with certainty. Pillars of Eternity makes religion interesting by looking at the purpose behind religion: why it exists, what effect it has. The arguments made within the game have strong parallels to the sorts of arguments we frequently hear here on Earth: that religion provides a necessary moral compass, that a belief in higher powers and an afterlife curbs the worst impulses of the cruel and the powerful from abusing their meek victims. (I found myself thinking of Patton Oswalt's Sky Cake routine here.)

While processing this in-game, I found myself very much on the side of exposing the "gods" for who they were and encouraging the kith to look to their own strength. That said, there's one final piece of information that gave me pause: before the Engwithians created the gods, they were in the same sort of situation that we're in here on Earth: people believed in thousands of gods, and those beliefs led to terrible wars, slavery, and other ills. It was that very situation which led them to create the "real" "gods" in the first place. So, in the understanding of the Leaden Key, unverifiable belief in gods leads people to do evil, while verifiable knowledge of gods leads them to do good.

That said - as far as I can tell, nobody in Eora has made a serious attempt at building a society based on the knowledge of the absence of gods (well, other than Iovara I guess, but she didn't succeed). I don't know if it would necessarily be any better or worse than the alternatives; but since we know that the alternatives have both caused problems, it seems worth at least trying something new. So I ultimately shut down the Leaden Key.

One thing that I'm still unclear on is exactly what the gods are... we're told that the Engwithians created them, but how? I wonder if they were extremely powerful Engwithians, similar to the elven pantheon in Dragon Age. Or, they may have been purely artificial beings, carefully designed and constructed. Perhaps that is what the Engwithian machines were for: to collect enough soul power to combine them into new, immortal, powerful, near-omniscient entities.

And, yeah, while there are some cool and powerful parallels between PoE and our own world, there are definitely big differences as well, one of the biggest being souls. On Earth, souls occupy the same sort of faith-based category as religion: some people believe they exist, others believe they don't, many aren't sure if they do, and those who believe in them believe different things about them. In Eora, though, souls are measurable, verifiable, quantifiable, capable of being combined and divided and destroyed and recycled.

I complained in my earlier album about how I was confused about the main plot, particularly the stuff about memories and past lives. I eventually figured it all out, at the same time as my character. I think it would have been clearer if the game had just said "You don't understand what this vision means or why you see yourself doing this." I'd thought that I'd missed some earlier conversation or explanation that would explain why the flashbacks were occurring, but I think it's intentionally structured to drop you into the middle of past-you's relationship with Thaos.

However, I did still have trouble accepting that the Awakening was a bad thing. You're told a couple of times that it's dangerous, but there really isn't any in-game penalty or problem that makes you feel like you need to get rid of it. On the contrary, it seems like a cool new power, and frequently comes in handy for a wide variety of quests. I found myself wistfully thinking of the Spirit Eater / Hunger mechanic of Mask of the Betrayer, which is one of the few games that has managed such a powerful connection between your character's narrative struggles and their in-game mechanical struggles.

Once I finally figured out the Awakening, though, I thought it was an interesting situation. At the start of the game, you define your own character's background. You do some of this in the character creation screen (race, gender, culture, class, etc.), and other parts of it in dialogue (your reason for traveling to Dyrwood). After connecting to your Awakened soul, you define that character's backstory via dialogue, and it's kind-of-but-not-really-you. It reminded me a little of cases like in Shadowrun Dragonfall where you can define what your runner's relationship with Monika was, or in the Mage Origin story in Dragon Age where you can define your family background. Here, it's at more of a remove - you're defining another character, separate from your player character, but one who carried the same soul.

It's hard to decide how to shape that character. You have limited options - the broad strokes of history are already written, so you can't, say, decide to rescue Iovara. From the remaining options, I'm usually tempted to pick the ones that feel most "good" and most in line with my main player character's. In retrospect, though, I kind of wish I'd gone the other way. Redemption stories are more powerful, and I could have created a more conflicted, dark past without diminishing my player character. Heck, she would have seemed even better in comparison. But it's hard to claim the bad story for "yourself" while in the moment.

All that said, though, the game is really good at tracking those past-decisions-about-not-quite-you. I'd almost forgotten the choices that I'd made - that "I" had loved Iovara, that "I" had joined the Leaden Key because I had been abandoned by my family - but the game continued to track those choices, and they made a significant impact on the dialogue at the very end of the game. I suppose that I ended up getting a kind of back-door romance after all, albeit one that was far in the past and was hopelessly doomed (in other words, the kind that Avellone might approve of).

The end itself was very satisfying. You make meaningful decisions at the end, along with decisions you've made throughout the course of the game, which combine in interesting ways to influence the fate of yourself, your companions, and the world around you. In my case, I had agreed with Hylea's request to restore the stolen souls to the children for whom they were intended, delighting the Grieving Mother. I'd supported Pallegina in thwarting the Republics' aggressive trade takeover from Dyrwood among the Glanfathans; the Republic ended up seizing control of trade anyways, and so she was disgraced and exiled, but if I had chosen to distribute the souls among the living, she would have been vindicated and honored. The endings are shown in slide format, which more and more seems like the best way to handle endings in epic RPGs.

All right, final round-up time!

Favorite Companion

Sagani.

Favorite NPC

Iovara.

Favorite Voice Acting

Lots of great choices. At the moment I'm leaning towards Pallegina.

Best Insults

Durance, with an honorable mention for Hiravias.

Favorite Banter

Either Eder hitting on Iselmyr or Iselmyr hitting on Pallegina.

Favorite Music

Hard to choose one, but I really dig the Thaos theme.

Favorite Class

I loved playing as a Chanter, but I'll probably roll a Cipher if and when I play again.

Favorite Map

The Ducal Palace. Runner-up: restored Caed Nua.

Favorite Weapon

Honestly, nothing was too memorable. I ended the game wielding Sheathed in Autumn.

Favorite Spell

Pretty sure I (well, Aloth) used Fireball more than anything else. Lighting Storm was fantastic.

Favorite Invocation

At the Sound of His Voice, The Killers Froze Stiff (paralyzes enemies in a cone) was my favorite, but when enemies were immune or had high resistance, I would instead use Gernslic Slew the Beast, but Soon Faced its Kin (summons 3 wurms).

Favorite Caed Nua Upgrade

Mechanically, the herb garden. Aesthetically, the laboratory.

Favorite Monster

Cean Gwla are nicely frightening, though they're either too hard or too easy depending on whether you're able to suppress their Domination.

Favorite Boss Fight

The first fight against Raedric was probably the most enjoyably challenging. The Battle of Yenwood Field was the most epic. The Master Below was the hardest (and the one I did not beat).

END SPOILERS

Here's a look at Venyan near the very end of the game.

Not too bad! I'm not sure where the Aggressive point came from, but otherwise this seems like an accurate reflection of my character's personality. (Quick side note: my actual CON was 18; she was suffering from cracked ribs at the time this shot was taken.)

So, yeah. I had a great time in PoE, and will likely pick up any sequel. I'm not currently planning on grabbing either White March expansion, since they sound more like Icewind Dale-style dungeon crawlers than BG-style narrative games. That said, the new companions do look great (one of them was drawn by psdo!), so I may weaken in the future.

At this point, I've played substantial portions of all of the modern isometric RPG renaissance games (though I haven't yet beaten Divinity or Wasteland 2). In my entirely subjective opinion, I would rate them thus.

1. Shadowrun Returns series (internally: Dragonfall, Hong Kong, Dead Man's Switch).
2. Siege of Dragonspear.
3. Wasteland 2.
4. Pillars of Eternity.
5. Divinity: Original Sin.

All of them are great, and the ordering has more to say about me than about the games themselves. Divinity arguably has the most interesting tactical combat of the whole group, with each encounter its own little puzzle to solve, and also features the most innovative approach to PC creation I've seen in a while.  Pillars has the most original and ambitious worldbuilding of the group. I rate SoD highly thanks to its story and my longstanding affection for BG, but I'm sure newer players who are not already familiar with the arcana of AD&D 2nd edition rules would place it much lower on the list.

Basically, I'm saying it's a great time to be alive and playing video games, where I can snark about a game not featuring romance or having companions who are just good instead of awesome. It wasn't that long ago that people worried story-based RPGs would be driven out, replaced by MMOs and action-RPGs; and not long before that when people worried that CRPGs would fade away and we would be left only with console-exclusive JRPGs. Here in 2016, the RPG ecosystem is healthier than it's ever been, from the varied AAA RPGs of BioWare, CD Projekt Red and Bethesda down to scrappy little independent studios telling compelling stories with 1990s-style design.

So, as I plan to take a little break from RPGs (possibly until Torment: Tides of Numenara leaves Early Access), I'm glad to see that the genre is in great shape. This may be the last ridiculously long album that I post for a while - this one features Act III (and the short Act IV) of Pillars, including copious spoilers related to the ending.

Pilloried

This is a quick check-in on my progress through Pillars of Eternity. I recently completed Act 2, and feel like I’ve gotten a better feel for the overall story and design of the game. Most of my reactions are covered in this fairly spoiler-y album of screenshots, but there are a few additional things that didn’t fit in there very well and so are covered below.

They really aren’t afraid of grasping the “Spiritual Successor to Baldur’s Gate” monicker with both hands, and the game is filled with very on-the-nose ties to the classic game, often going beyond mere tributes to straight-up repetition. One of the most obvious is the “You must gather your party before venturing forth” message being written and spoken whenever you try to leave an area while your party is scattered. That’s kind of fun, and also an odd choice, since over the years I’ve heard a lot more complaints than praise for that line. It is one of the most iconic elements of BG, though. The audio nods continue, down to a particularly boisterous drunken laugh that you hear in pubs in both games. It’s a distinctive sound, and not necessarily a pleasant one, but instantly reminds you of similar social experiences from the prior game.

 The (excellent!) soundtrack is also quite evocative, though not just of the BG games. The Caed Nua theme sounds a lot like the main Hobbit theme from Lord of the Rings. Which isn't a bad thing! I do love that music, and it fits the fantasy setting very well.

Most of the monster manual also seems to have been lifted from the earlier game, with monsters haphazardly renamed but recognizably the same. The first creatures you encounter, Xaurips, are a clear replacement for the goblins or kobolds of BG. Vithracks are exactly the same as Ithilids (Mindflayers). Some of the substitutions are just silly, as in Fampyrs replacing Vampires. These seemingly-pointless updates make the remaining races feel stranger and more arbitrary: how come they replaced goblins and vampires, but left ogres the same?

That’s all just nitpicking for fun, though. The core game has been great, and I continue to appreciate the modernized engine that retains old tactical challenges while reducing pointless frustrations.

The voice acting has been interesting. Most of the "isometric RPG renaissance" games fall into the category of "semi-voiced", but what that means has varied from game to game. Back in Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, whenever an NPC spoke, you would usually hear an actor speak the first line or two, and then would read the entire dialogue in text. Siege of Dragonspear followed this design, but with a bigger ratio of voiced to non-voiced lines. Wasteland 2 (Director's Cut) was largely voiced, which was nice in parts but felt grating in many places.

Pillars of Eternity is a little different: instead of speaking the first part of a chunk of dialogue, each individual "node" is either fully-voiced or not voiced at all. Minor NPCs usually don't get any voice. Major NPCs will usually be voiced for their main critical-path dialogue, but non-voiced for branching and reactive dialogue (which fewer people will see). Unlike most dialogue in Baldur's Gate or Wasteland, dialogue in PoE frequently includes non-verbal descriptions, like "he says angrily" or "she pauses to brush the cobwebs from her face" or "Eder lets out a loud snort". None of those are voiced, even if they're describing non-speech sounds.

On the whole, it works pretty well. I still feel like it would be better to either go fully-voiced or cut way back, but I've been liking the voice acting in PoE better than in WL2 so far. The actors on the whole seem better, they rarely hit the wrong emphases, and I almost never find myself skipping past them (one major exception: Lady Webb, who has a nice tone but speaks. Far. Too. Slowly. To. Tolerate.)

Uh, I guess that's it for now. No story spoilers in here yet (other than what's in the album), I'll probably hit those in a final write-up after I finish the game.

From Infinity: To Beyond!

First of all, a little housekeeping: it's been a while since I wrote about Wasteland 2. Unfortunately, I ran into a nasty bug late in the game. I'd gotten in the habit of using the quicksave, and couldn't fix the quest without re-playing many hours of progress, so I kicked it to the curb. I'm cure I'll come back to it eventually, but in the meantime, there's plenty of other games in my queue that deserve my attention. Next up on the list: Pillars of Eternity!

This is the last game I've played from the original trio of the so-called "isometric RPG renaissance", a group of successful Kickstarter campaigns back in 2012 that revived beloved retro properties. Pillars of Eternity was a little unusual: unlike Shadowrun Returns and Wasteland 2, which were both explicit follow-ups to existing franchises, PoE was pitched as a "spiritual successor": an original IP that would carry forward many of the things people liked about its predecessor, while creating an original world and story.

That predecessor was the Baldur's Gate series, which I repeatedly cite as my favorite game of all time. Many other people agree, and PoE was (at the time) the best-funded Kickstarter game project to date. I neglected to back it, partly due to Kickstarter fatigue, and also because of franchise fatigue. Honestly, after several decades of absorbing lore about Middle-earth and Midkemia and Britannia and Thedas and Westeros and Randland and Forgotten Realms and Tamriel, the prospect of yet another original fantasy setting fills me with more dread than delight. Not to say that new settings can't be good - Thedas was the last one I really embraced, and it does many interesting things with its fantasy trappings - but each additional new environment needs to be increasingly valuable to prove itself to me.

All that said, though, I knew I would eventually check the game out. I've heard good things about it, both through the press and general online chatter, and Obsidian has been responsible for some of my favorite games, so I've had it on my list for quite a while (thanks, as always, to Andrew's generosity). My recent foray into Siege of Dragonspear left me hungry for some more classic isometric fantasy RPG action, and so I've begun!

I'm still pretty early into the game. I've just recently reached Level 5, have acquired 4 party followers, and completed several early major quests. I won't talk at all about plot or characters or anything in this post, but I do have a lot of thoughts on the mechanics of the game and its engine that I wanted to put down sooner rather than later. I may revisit these in a follow-up, but otherwise this should free me to exclusively nerd out about story in the future.

So, broadly speaking: PoE is terrific. It's made by people who clearly love the old Infinity Engine games, but have also recognized that games have evolved over the past 15 years, and have made the base mechanics of the game a lot more enjoyable. It specifically addresses a bunch of the complaints I have about those games in particular and RPGs in general, in both obvious and in original ways. I shall detail several of these below!

Inventory Management

This is probably my main bête noire these days. I get really irritated whenever I realize that I'm spending hours of playtime fiddling around inside of menus, scrolling through lists of loot, deciding what to sell and what to keep. The old IE games are particularly annoying, with their double limitations on inventory space and weight.

Shadowrun fixed this problem by getting rid of loot, which was a fine solution. PoE keeps the loot mechanic - if you defeat a party of 20 goblins, you'd better believe that you'll be looting 20 spears and 20 helmets and 20 shields - but makes it seem like a bonus rather than a chore. The simplest part of this solution is the addition of a party stash: individuals can only carry 20 items in their pack, but it doesn't matter, since your stash is unlimited. It's also accessible at any time outside of combat, so there's no reason not to use it. (Yes, it's unrealistic. No, it doesn't matter.)

When time comes to sell things, I'm usually out of the shop in well under a minute. Items in your stash are sorted logically, and there are clear markings showing the relative rarity or value of different items. I can blow through those 20 spears in a few seconds, then spend a few more looking at the actually-interesting enchanted sword to decide whether it's worth keeping or not.

It's too early to tell yet whether this will grow unwieldy later in the game, particularly after I have more people than will fit in my party and need to compare multiple unique items. Thus far, though, it's been a great experience, with all the variety of items from Baldur's Gate but without feeling like I'm running a supply chain.

Area-of-Effect

The single greatest advantage Dragon Age has over Baldur's Gate is that, when you prepare to cast a fireball, you can see exactly how big its blast zone will be, and who will be caught in it. PoE adopts that visual indicator, and does it one better. Now, AOEs can come in three flavors. "Friendly AOE" only affects allies; "Foe AOE" only affects enemies; and "AOE" affects both. Something like Fireball is a standard AOE, but! It has two separate radii, a bigger one that affects enemies and a smaller one that affects party members. This retains the sense of danger of a fireball - you can't just toss it willy-nilly into the fray where your tank is trying to hold firm - while also making it much more forgiving if someone takes a step in the wrong direction.

Flexible Builds

This is a bit more of a mixed bag for me. I'm a little annoyed that, at level five, I still haven't found a thief/rogue to join my party. But, as I'm learning, that distinction isn't nearly as important in PoE as it is in BG. Oh, sure, you need thief skills, someone to pick locks and find and disarm traps. But anyone can pick up those skills. If, like me, you neglected them while initially leveling up, it's fairly cheap to respec and pick your designated thief.

Your companions do have some natural tendencies towards one role or another, based on their pre-allocated stats, but your PC him/herself has much more freedom. Unlike in BG, you don't really need to worry about locking yourself out of certain builds based on stat allocations: you'll just be relatively better or worse at different things. At the same time, the strong class focus makes progression a lot simpler than, say the classless builds of Shadowrun or Neverwinter Night's multiclassing. Once you've developed your PC's overall concept, each individual level-up has fairly straightforward choices to make.

Resting

The old Baldur's Gate system is much-maligned. Particularly with the OG Infinity Engine, you would end up with ridiculous situations where, say, your party would fight a group of foes, then sleep for 40 hours to recover their health, then sight a second group, then sleep another 40 hours, and so on. It was a weird mixture of too easy and too difficult. There's no real time pressure for anything (at least outside of Ust Natha), so there's no mechanical reason NOT to sleep a ton to re-learn your spells and restore your health. Conceptually, though, it was a bit bizarre. I suspect that the "monsters attack while you sleep" idea was intended to discourage too much resting, but in practice, it made you want to rest more frequently: if you rest while you're just slightly injured, you can easily fend off nighttime ambushes; if you wait until you need to rest, though, then those attacks are much more deadly.

Dragon Age and other modern games have significantly streamlined this mechanic, generally by fully refilling your health after each combat. There may be other complications, like Injuries, that still encourage you to protect your health and occasionally return to a home base to recuperate, but fundamentally they're designed to keep you moving along as smoothly as possible.

PoE brilliantly restores the concepts behind the original BG resting system, while fundamentally revamping them to be much more enjoyable. It does this in several ways, but the biggest is separating Endurance from Health. You can lose Endurance during a fight without worrying too much about it, but after the fight is done, you should keep an eye on your Health. Once it starts getting low, you need to give serious thought to camping or returning to a safe city to rest. This gives a really nice rhythm to the game: as you get stronger, you can range further afield; but you still want to have a "home base" to return to.

This dovetails nicely with supplies. You can only carry a limited amount, although they can easily be replenished in major stores or found during your journey. Each rest consumes a supply, which keeps you from cavalierly resting after every single fight. And, because the supplies limit the number of rests, there's no reason for the threat of monster attacks. Thus, you can keep adventuring until you're running low on health, then confidently spend a Supply to rest.

Reputations

My distaste for D&D-style binary morality systems is well-established at this point. I'm really digging the reputation system in PoE, which is closer to that seen in Fallen London. As you quest, you will gain various reputations, which are orthogonal to one another. I currently am known as "Benevolent", "Diplomatic", "Honest", and "Passionate". I'm not yet sure what impact this has on the game, but so far I'm really digging the complex characterization it supports.

You also gain reputations with specific factions, similar to the system in the Fallout games. Again, I'm not far enough to see what impact, if any, this has on the game, but I already like it much more than the global reputation system in the Baldur's Gate games.

Bards

Not a specific mechanic, but worth shouting out: I love being a Bard (called "Chanter" in PoE). That was my initial character in my first run through the Baldur's Gate games, and I absolutely loved how ridiculous it was. It's less ridiculous in PoE, but does play a similar role of buffing your party. Chanters are a bit more active: they can continue singing while taking other actions, so I directly attack as well (generally ranged with my crossbow, switching to mace-and-shield if I get swarmed). There's a bit more prep as well - Bards generally only had a single song, with maybe another one with a kit or higher levels, while Chanters can learn many different "phrases", and strategically shift between them depending on the nature of the conflict, as well as selecting powerful invocations that cash out on the song buffs for bigger one-time effects. (Which is a very similar mechanic to that of the Minstrel that I play in Lord of the Rings Online!)


Economy

Again, it's too early for me to make a final declaration, but I really like what I've seen so far. Loot that you collect can be sold for a decent (not huge) amount of cash. There are a ton of ways to spend that cash. Unlike most traditional RPGs, this isn't primarily in the form of new equipment: stores do carry some good stuff, but (at least so far) nothing significantly better than what you can find while questing.

On the other hand, money can be used to:

• Inscribe new spells from captured grimoires into your own spellbooks.
• Enchant items (upgrade existing equipment by adding new abilities).
• Rest in better rooms (gaining long-lasting buffs).
• Hire new adventurers.
• Respec existing adventurers.
• Pay for upgrades and upkeeps of your stronghold.

That final bullet is the most interesting to me - I love strongholds, and can already see myself investing a ton into making it better. But, from what I can tell, it looks like the game is designed to give you a lot of choices and support whatever priorities you have. If you only care about questing and fighting, then you can dump your cash into making your weapons and armor as powerful as possible.

Anyways - just seeing that there's a big variety of money sinks available makes me optimistic that, even in the late-game, money will continue to be useful. I think it's a good approach, and frankly also easier than fine-tuning a simpler economy that just revolved around purchasing items. You can give players enough money to buy everything in one category, and not enough to buy everything in all categories, and boom! You've set up a system where they can make interesting choices that reflect their interests and those of their character.

The Mixed

These are things that I thought were interesting, but the jury is still out on whether they're actual improvements.

Party Chat

I am a HUGE fan of banter in general, and companion conversation in specific. Baldur's Gate pioneered this, using an interesting and fairly complex system that was primarily time-driven. After journeying with someone for long enough, and at what would seem like a random moment, a companion would interrupt you and bring up something on their mind. This felt very realistic and surprising and was always very welcome. It was a complicated system, though, that required a lot of work behind the scenes to make sure they didn't interrupt you while in the middle of a fight or start making romantic overtures while you're wading hip-deep in a pool of blood.

Dragon Age updated this system so it was location-based rather than time-based. It still seemed random, but on later replays, you would eventually figure out the triggers: walking over the Redcliffe bridge would start a banter, for example. This let the developers keep an element of randomness while also having a more manageable set of variables to keep track of: you're never in combat while crossing the Redcliffe bridge, so it's always safe to chat there. The most important conversations were held back in camp, in a controlled location, and at a time of your choosing.

In PoE, when a significant conversation is ready, an icon appears over your party member's portrait. You can then initiate the chat at any time that you like. This is a little less surprising than the BG and DA:O approaches, and I think it suffers slightly as a result; but there are probably a lot more players who would get annoyed at seemingly ill-timed interruptions, and welcome the opportunity to be in control of these conversations.

Combat

At first I loved it (real-time-with-pause! streamlined! clear! visible dice rolls and logical summations!) By the time I'd reached a four-person party, I was much less enthused (tedious! time-consuming! micromanage-y!). I've since enabled Party AI and am finding it much more enjoyable. In a typical fight, I just control my PC and let everyone else do their thing; that was what I do for the Dragon Age games as well, and is the perfect level of mental involvement on my part.

During particularly challenging boss fights, I'll still jump in and manually fire off special abilities for the whole party, but for most fights I can just let it run on auto-pilot. It's not technically optimal, and I probably need to rest slightly more frequently as a result, but it's definitely worth it for the faster playtime.

That said, the party AI approach wasn't feasible at all until I recruited my tank (who was the last of the 5 party members to join). There's a pretty rough difficulty curve when you're at low levels and have few friends; for a long time, my party was me (Chanter), a mage, a priest, and another chanter. "Squish City", I called us. Granted, when you're comparing yourself to Baldur's Gate 1, your difficulty curve is bound to look smooth in comparison. Still, it would have taken only a few small changes to make it even slicker.

The Bad

None of these are deal-breakers, of course, but minor annoyances that stand in contrast to the general improvements of the game.

Damage Types

There's a huge variety of damage types (Slashing, Piercing, Freezing, Corrosive, etc.), as well as a lot of different resistance types (Will, Deflection, etc.). This is very D&D-ish, very evocative of Baldur's Gate, and does support tactical gameplay (evaluating enemies' weaknesses and modifying your tactics appropriately). But it's also very complex and makes it harder to compare the relative worth of different items. While many players will disagree, I personally would have been happier with a simpler system.

Weapon Selection

This continues the theme of the above: do we really need daggers and hatchets and rapiers and stilettos and clubs and flails and maces and war hammers and spears and swords and battle axes and sabers and estocs (?!) and pikes and greatswords and poleaxes and quarterstaves and morning stars? And that's just the melee weapons! Especially since talents are tied to specific weapons. This makes me incredibly reluctant to invest in any weapon abilities, since I have no idea whether it will match the better weapons I'll find much later in the campaign.

Again, this makes perfect sense given the pedigree - AD&D 2nd edition had a huge arsenal of weapons, and you could gain skills in any of them. But these days, I'm much more a fan of simplified weapon skills: say, ranged vs. one-handed melee vs. two-handed melee. If you want to have dozens of weapons for flavor and general coolness, go right ahead, but I'll just end up feeling paralyzed by choice.

Counter-Intuitive Skills

This is something I'm still coming to grips with, but... if you see a skill called "Lore", you'd think that it would make sense for your wizards to focus on it, right? Due to their magical interest and all? Well, you'd be wrong. Lore is used for casting spells from scrolls, and wizards already can cast spells from their grimoire, so lore isn't very useful. You're much better off putting Lore on your beefy, dumb front-line fighters, who ordinarily can't cast spells but can with the right Lore and scrolls.

I get the feeling it'll be a similar story for my fabled, yet-to-be-recruited thief. You would think that they would need Stealth and Mechanics; but those can just as easily be put on anyone else, and are arguably better on, say, a wizard who doesn't need Lore.

None of this is necessarily bad, more of a manifestation of my pre-existing assumptions being incorrect, but it does go against the flavor a bit and seems counter-intuitive.

That's That!

I think that about sums up my mechanical ramblings. I went ahead and threw together an album of my screenshots thus far, which is a new low record at only 28 images. I'm really enjoying the game so far, and more so since unlocking my stronghold, so I'm sure I'll have more posts in the future. Lucky you!