pillars of eternity complete edition ps4 review

A spiralling staircase of radial menus attempt to tuck a volume of functions behind their own D&D click-wheels. Obsidian has condensed a complex control scheme onto a console pad. It will appeal to those of meticulous nature, and there’s a purifying sense of accomplishment in beasts bested and bouts brought to a thorough close through forethought and superior planning. Your combat pause dictates the pace of battles, victory often relying on crucial tweaks and touches in the tiniest moments – a support spell here, a unique ability there.

You feel like a chess player – the consequence of your designs playing out in fleeting moments of movement in-between stretches of stillness. On normal difficulty, the game’s attitude to you is one of disregard it’s your charge to understand the refined nuances of combat, and strategy rules the day. This isn’t to say the battles themselves aren’t accomplished, far from it. The gravitas is punctured at times when detailed text and rich back-stories end with quick, stat-heavy pause-resume battles that can make their conclusions feel perfunctory. This is why despite the obvious craft and breadth, it will fall to your imagination for depth. It’s peopled with characters whose histories are offered as if spoken sotto voce into your hero’s mind though, in execution, it falls to you to leaf through reams of text. 77,000 backers and a talented studio will guarantee you that. There’s the strong suggestion of workmanship about Pillars – of hallmarks of quality, and of sparing no expense. It’s a soft signal of the power of stories, and the craft that brings them to life. The illustrations that accompany these have the dust-worn look of woodcut reliefs, beautifully and starkly etching the world on your mind. The closest the game comes to cut-scenes are a series of still pages, as if from the learned tome of your adventures. It brings the world of Pillars into a sober focus – one of strife, injustice, cooperation, and realpolitik. It’s a relief that the world is filled with myriad races and walks of life, but that the tensions between groups aren’t the sole, leaden focus – something which at times hampered The Witcher series. With that familiarity there is an assured mark of craft the right decisions are made. Characters’ expressions and movements are described like stage directions wreathing the dialogue – written with warm familiarity by Eric Fenstermaker, Carrie Patel, and Olivia Veras. If you throw yourself in and grapple with the text, there are rich pay-offs. It’s a delicious conceit that colours the world in shades of complexity. Your hero (you’ll spend a long time crafting your hero to the precise specs you need on a granular character creation menu) has their soul awakened, turning them into a Watcher – meaning they are able to divine the secrets of people’s past lives. Naturally, this is seen by many as an affront to the gods. Enter the Animancers: a group of practitioners of animancy who think they can cure the afflicted by transposing the souls of animals into the children. The game delivers you to the Dyrwood, a place of verdant, waning beauty blighted by a curse called Waidwen’s Legacy, causing babies to be born without souls. This isn’t a showcase of raw power it’s coating your rose-tinted memories with a protective film. Obsidian leverages graphical fidelity like a ritual, pouring fresh blood on the ossified memories of Amn, The Valley of Tombs, and Cloakwood – invoking your memories and buffing them to mirror sheen.

It’s texture achieved in a logistical fashion. It’s also bolstered by subtle abstraction that affects the way you see the world: it takes eight hours to get to one place, so while you can fast-travel, your character now has fatigue from the trek they’ll need to camp, but that eats six hours, so now they’re travelling at night – that’s more dangerous. An elevated side-on view frames everything with a fixed perspective you can’t rotate the camera, only rove it around ahead of your party, taking in the layers of detail folded in. What strikes the eye first is the way you’re presented with the game’s world. And it’s no bad thing: a new audience of gamers now has a chance to enjoy one of the better pure RPGs in recent years. Paradox Interactive is happy to oblige whoever did, capturing Pillars of Eternity and its two-part expansion pack in the box below the TV. But who asked for this, a PS4 version two years down the line? Obsidian delivered on its promise, developing a game to hang high amidst the banners of Fallout: New Vegas, KOTOR II, and Alpha Protocol.

Given the $4m Kickstarter campaign to make manifest the spirits of Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, and Planescape: Torment, there was a tangible element of supply-and-demand to Pillars of Eternity when it released on PC in 2015. Pillars of Eternity has made the long journey from its native PC to console, to the PlayStation 4, but has it been waylaid?

Pillars of eternity complete edition ps4 review