Eventually, we come to the same conclusion every single time, innovation isn’t always the best option. It’s important to innovate, however, it seems that the classical development of game genres should be kept in that same state from a couple of years ago. Pillars of Eternity has been inspired by the RPG series “Baldur’s gate”. It’s an excellent example to prove that old school RPGs can still be enjoyable and time investing. Seeing this game come in a portable version of the PC version makes me a happy gamer!
Pillars of Eternity is that type of game that’ll make you fall in love with the old school classic RPGs. The game started as a Kickstarter and I’m very grateful for how it turned out. It’s not perfect but the adventure is solid and interesting, to say the least. The portable version has been a great port, but not without its flaws. The Switch console is a great portable device with lots of popular games that’ll capture your undivided attention, however, a lot of these games weren’t for me. This time around, there’s actually a game that sparked my interests immediately. Pillars of Eternity is the game that made me hooked on playing the Switch. Pillars of Eternity has already been released on PC, Xbox One and PS4. The scores looked promising and now it was my turn to test it out. Pillars of Eternity shines brightly on the Nintendo Switch with its simplistic graphics but yet intriguing as well. The game has lots of different environments with a couple of “changes” that are very keen on the eyes. However, the game suffers from technical aspects that break the immersion. Often, my dialogues or combat text would become unreadable, but the moment you continued your adventure, the problems moved over.
In the end, the dialogues and combat text segments are big enough to read and don’t take too much space on the display of your Switch or television. Even though the game’s a big RPG with a lot of elements, they wouldn’t fit all on to your screen. The developers managed to squeeze all of the commands into this wheel of abilities or featured options. The triggers of your switch will help you cycle commands or options that’ll make the gameplay less painful. On PC it’s always very easy to access all of your features because of all the customization tools that have been made available to the player, but I’m surprised to see that all of these “tabs” are available due to the radial menus. Just a simple touch, gives you access to all. Loading times are dreadful as well and there were a couple of crashes that can probably be fixed with patches.
Even though, the radial menus are the best way to go… I couldn’t help but notice that the system does have flaws. Handling the joysticks to go through these different menus was a pain to use. My joystick would often skip over some skill slots and it felt like the game didn’t calibrate the joysticks to make venturing through these skill slots user-friendly. Another annoying thing was the targeting system during combat, I often felt like I had to stop my “pause”, let my characters handle the situation for a couple of seconds and “pause” it again, to get a better overview of the battlefield which would help me with my targeting. There were a lot of times, I couldn’t target the enemies that I liked but I realized I should have targeted the circle around the enemy and not the enemy itself. The highlighting system needs some improvement. In the end, it’s something you get used too but the first hours were a bit annoying. Eventually, the game’s core mechanics helped me to continue my adventure.
Set aside the targeting system, the game’s combat mechanics truly shine above all the rest. The combat is based on real-time strategy. You encounter an enemy, you choose with whom your party members should battle, choose some skills during the battle and watch the outcome. The system also offers opportunities to buff party members before you actually start combat which is a nice touch. During the battle, you’ll be able to pause the game and select different skills for each party member. During this “pause” you can also re-target some enemies to change the main focus of the battle. This system makes up for some intriguing battles that should keep your full attention because mistakes are quickly made.
The game also offers a deep character creation system. You choose your race, class, origin, etc. After all the customization you also get some skill points that you can divide as you choose. These skill points build up the traits of your characters and will help you create a character that suits your playstyle or RPG character. With the choices you make, the action-reaction type of combat and interesting storytelling, I really felt like I was in a visualization of a D&D adventure. Which is a good thing! The way the story’s build-up, is just like you would aspect from a D&D scenario. The storyteller tells the story and explains what’s happening around you. At some points during the main dialogues, events happen, and you get to make a couple of important question that would influence the story ahead and can help you to get an edge over the enemy before a combat situation’s at hand. Some remarks can even lead to other quests that could influence your party members positive or negative. Most of the dialogues are spoken which is great because there are a lot of dialogues in the game, but a couple of these dialogues are written text which slows down the pace of the story.
Conclusion:
Pillars of Eternity- Complete Edition is a great port for the Switch. Even though I spent a lot of hours into the game, going from one quest to another, I enjoyed myself immensely. It’s good to see that Nintendo also sees the diamonds in the rough and gives some indie games a chance. No, the game isn’t perfect and probably won’t be for everyone but the fact that the game gets its influences from D&D and other pearls like Baldur’s Gate, everyone who buys this will be in for a treat! Problems like scrambled text dialogues, loading times, crashes… can all be fixed with patches in the future but the game’s core features are truly the components that make this shine bright among other RPGs.
