Pillars of Eternity is a CRPG created by Obsidian Entertainment after a successful Kickstarter campaign and released in 2015. The game was a bit of a Hail Mary for the company which faced financial difficulties after games they were developing for Microsoft and Sega fell through, but critical acclaim saw the game sell well, allowing the company to recover and eventually be bought out and prosper (by the same Microsoft that got them into trouble in the first place, but that's a whole other discussion). Pillars of Eternity also became the first game in a franchise, with direct sequel Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire following in 2018 and then a first-person spin-off, Avowed, in 2025.
Mildly embarrassingly, I started playing Pillars of Eternity in the week it came out and got about 15 hours into the game before I was distracted by something else, and additional sidetracking took place for, er, eleven years. But in the last few weeks I managed to circle back and finally complete the game and its expansion, The White March, with all the benefits of eleven years of patching and extra additions to the game (including a much-requested turn-based combat mode).
Pillars of Eternity is a spiritual successor to the old Infinity Engine games, and Obsidian are well-placed to handle that. Before they were Obsidian, some of the same team were at Black Isle Studios (the internal development studio at Interplay before Interplay went bust in 2003) where they created Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale and Icewind Dale II, as well as providing additional dev support on Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate II. This team is well-versed in the structure of these kind of games and what made them tick and so successful.
As with the Infinity Engine games, you view the game from a top-down perspective, controlling a team of six (from an eventual pool of eleven). You create your main character, the Watcher, and can then recuit additional named NPCs as the game continues. Intriguingly, if you find none of the NPCs are what you're looking for, you can also recruit random hirelings at inns, or create a whole party from scratch yourself. The named companion NPCs do have a lot of unique dialogue and banter, and each one has their own chain of side-quests, so there is value in bringing those characters along and interacting with them. There are numerous classes available, including the bog-standard fighters, mages and paladins, but there are some interesting classes like the chanter, a spin on the traditional bard. Being able to replay the game with a different class adds a lot of replayability. Not being based on a tabletop rule set, the game does have the advantage of not having to shoehorn awkward or barely-applicable tabletop rules into a video game, which can give a more focused experience.
The game has two modes, realtime-with-pause to replicate the classic Infinity Engine experience or turn-based, which was added to the game only this year, presumably to cash in on the success of the turn-based experience in Baldur's Gate III. Realtime with pause (RTWP) allows you to hit spacebar at any moment to pause the game and given fresh orders, very useful when you want your cleric to start healing frontline fighters or mages to use specific spells. I think the turn-based implementation in Pillars of Eternity is awkward at best, and doesn't mesh well with the absolute masses of combat encounters in the game. In BG3 it worked because each combat experience was tailor-designed to be interesting, with environmental factors and special skills to make each battle memorable. Pillars of Eternity has far too many random fights with easily-defeatable mooks and making each fight ten times longer does nothing other than make combat more tedious. RTWP makes fights more dynamic and fun, and much faster. RTWP can be horrible when badly-implemented, with Pillars of Eternity is one of the best implementations of the concept, so it works quite well. There's a solid variety of enemy types to fight, and some of the bigger creatures are genuinely imposing to face down.
Pacing-wise, the game starts with you investigating the Hollowborn crisis and discovering your Watcher powers through a linear, quasi-tutorial section before the game opens up into a wilderness area where you can travel to various small towns, caves and ruins. You acquire your first companions (I recommend getting six ASAP as the game's early difficulty spikes can be brutal) and pick up initial quests. These will eventually take you to the abandoned fortress of Caed Nua, which you inevitably end up taking ownership of. Repairing Caed Nua becomes the major subplot of the game, as you have to rebuild the crumbling defences, hire staff and manage the surrounding area, as well as clearing out the massive, 15-level dungeon below it, the Endless Paths, with huge rewards if you succeed. The Endless Paths are a significant challenge and are best tackled intermittently, with you periodically returning to them after levelling up a few times through quests elsewhere.
After pacifying Caed Nua, at least a bit, the game takes you to the great city of Defiance Bay, where there are an absolute ton of side-quests, factions to align with and enemies to find and defeat, as well as a legal challenge to your ownership of the castle (which can lead to a massive field battle). As with most RPGs, the big challenge is mixing this side material with following the main questline. Once you're ready to move on, the game takes you into additional wilderness areas to the east and eventually an elven city where you pick up the trail of those responsible for the Hollowborn. However, you can be sidetracked by visions of an encroaching threat, which takes you to the northern area of the White March and a series of lengthy quests involving the rediscovery of a magical forge. This is the game's main expansion which is now integrated into the base game, and both provides a lot of extra content and also adds additional weapons, gear and plot revelations relevant to the main quest. All-told, you can finish the game in around 50 hours, but completionists can probably push that past 65 hours by doing unnecessary-but-fun side-quests and exploring different endings and builds. This makes for a game longer than Baldur's Gate but still nowhere near the length of Baldur's Gate II or III.
Pillars of Eternity is a very solid and sometimes exceptional game. The writing is strong, and the game is dealing with philosophical concepts around life, death, souls and faith that is more interesting than many video game plots. The game tries to give you lots of ways to solve quests other than just through violence, and some of your companion characters are fascinating in their worldviews (whilst others are...there). As it's an Obsidian game, there is not a lot of outright goods vs evil choices, with you having to consider arguments where both sides have merits before coming down on one side or the other. Even by Obsidian's standards this can get a little out of control with moral murkiness absolutely everywhere, and sometimes you do wish for a few more quests where one side is obviously in the wrong. Even their New Vegas wasn't afraid to say that no, one side is a bunch of fascist slave-owning rapists, and it's fine to shoot up those guys, even if their opponents are stuck-in-the-past has-beens with questionable expansionist motives. Still, some of these morally grey areas are well-constructed and well-written.
The game's biggest problem is the tonal dissonance from these morality labyrinths where dialogue and diplomacy is key to the absolute shedloads of combat the game throws at you every five seconds. Every bit of wildlife in the game has a psychopathic need to kill you, spectres attack without warning, and the hostile native tribes of xaurips kill-on-sight (apart from one quest that hints that you can mollify them peacefully, and then immediately forgets about it). For a developer who has sometimes made it possible to do total pacification runs through games and who has included so many quests with a non-violent outcome, the focus on mass slaughter as you just walk around can be jarring, not to mention making turn-based mode almost non-viable unless you want to triple or more the length of the game.
There are also some UI weaknesses such as the lack of a customisable hotbar, which was pretty standard at the time, and some questionable gameplay decisions. Rationing the number of camping slots, forcing you to periodically abandon your adventuring to find somewhere to buy rations, is deeply stupid. Since overcoming this issue is fairly straightforward, since you can leave any dungeon or quest mid-flow and come back to resume it immediately even if three weeks pass, there was nothing gained by forcing this limitation on you.
Pillars of Eternity (****) is a fine-but-not-flawless roleplaying game with weaknesses that are not negligible, but they do not detract overall from the beautiful, hand-painted environments, great music, very strong writing, thought-provoking storyline and well-characterised companions. Managing your home base is fun, the Endless Paths is an enjoyable challenge, and the White March expansion is excellent, working as a good story in its own right as well as a homage to Icewind Dale (and arguably White March has a better story than Pillars itself). The worldbuilding for Eora is excellent, taking what appears initially to be a standard sub-Tolkien setup of elves, dwarves and trolls and quickly complicating it through the stuff about souls and faith. Combat can be superb, though there is too much of it, and the game may be a little bit overstuffed. But it's better to have too much to do than too little. The game is a fine spiritual success to the Baldur's Gate series even if it can't quite match that trilogy's overall very high standards.
Pillars of Eternity is available now on PC, Linux, PlayStation, Xbox and Switch.
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