It feels like I've been chipping away at Pillars of Eternity for the better part of five years. I purchased it for full price originally around its release and despite my computer's protests, I made it through a pretty significant chunk of the game and the expansion content as well. One way or another, I lost track of the game and eventually stopped touching my PC altogether in favor of console gaming. I always wanted to return to it, but because my PC is not exactly in good shape right now, I never had the opportunity. I decided that it was finally time to return to the game, but since it had been so long since I played it, I knew I wanted a fresh start--and it's not like I had any other option anyway, since this time I've opted to play the PS4 version.
It's immediately apparent that the PS4 version of the game has some performance issues. The frame rate, particularly in populated towns, has some very noticeable hitching. Because my PC never ran that game that well in the first place, it's nothing I'm not familiar with already, though, and in all honesty, it appears it runs better than it did on my PC in particular. Still, it would have been nice if the console version was optimized a bit better, since these issues don't really exist in the console version of Divinity: Original Sin, a game that has a similar level of graphical fidelity.
Playing through the game again has made me realize just how much of the game I played the first time. Many things were familiar, but a lot of the game's content held up really well to a second play-through, including the complex (and polarizing) "real time with pausing" combat system. I had forgotten why I decided to stop right near the end of the game the first time, but now that I'm wrapping up content from The White March, it's starting to become a little clearer. The expansion ruins the pacing of the game.
Pillars of Eternity is a game that's already loaded with content. There are quests and stories to find on every corner of the map. Each of the game's playable characters feature their own side-quests that flesh out their individual stories. There's a deep dungeon below the keep you maintain that can be explored as you progress. Even sticking primarily to the main story can be time consuming, but if you look for it, there really is a lot to do. I tend to play these kinds of games pretty exhaustively, so if there's a quest in my log, I'm going to do it, regardless of how relevant it is to the plot at large. As a result, it's not difficult to get burned out.
Still, the pacing of the main game seemed completely fine to me for the most part, until I took a detour from the main story and started exploring the frozen north of The White March and plumbing the depths of Durgan's Battery. Because the expansion content is concurrent with the story of the base game, it's not something that I felt comfortable waiting to do until after the game was done. It's even positioned in such a way that the suggested party levels are within the range you'd be well before you reached the endgame, at least for Part 1 of the expansion.
The expansion is also very combat-heavy, which means you'll be spending a lot of time in protracted fights, and in delving through trap-laden dungeons to collect treasures. Although there's plenty of story there, it's much barer than the base game, which is packed to the brim with dialogue and characterization at every turn. Many quests in Pillars of Eternity can be completed without combat of any kind, but these types of quests are much rarer in The White March.
All of these factors make it clearer why I fell off the game initially, especially since I had cranked up the difficulty to compensate for how much extra experience I was getting from all of the additional combat and quests. I didn't make that same mistake this time. Although fights were less challenging overall, it meant I finished Part 1 of the expansion much faster. I'm fine with that, because it means I'm even more likely to finish Part 2 and subsequently the main game, all these years later. Maybe I'll finally play Pillars of Eternity 2 as well, provided it does release on consoles later this year.
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