Man Period

You will always be my favourite.

Funny thing - Baldur's Gate is quite possibly my favourite game of all time and there's this new RPG, which every idiot out there hypes as "Baldur's Gate 3" and I can't help but feel fucking annoyed about it. Heck, these days I'm annoyed about a lot of things and I'm not entirely sure why, so I must be on some kind of period. I miss enjoying things.
Anyhow - Pillars of Eternity is a great game, but it's not the fucking messiah, it's not the one true RPG to end them all and if you're one of those nutjobs, who keep on blabbing about how it's oh so much better than Dragon Age: Inquisition, then you seriously need to have your head checked.

Pillars' non-D&D setting is interesting enough, though it also means you don't get to play cool multiclass characters. It also means no D&D ruleset and some of the most fucked up class balancing I've ever seen. A few hours into the game I've settled for a party that consists of nothing but rangers and rogues, all of which use bows or pistols or any variety thereof. You see, each ranger comes with a free, immortal tank pet. They can be knocked out in a fight, but they never die, so there's your bunch of frontline fodder right there. Park a ranger behind a bear, deal a shitload of damage with a blunderbuss, job done.

Meanwhile, rogues don't get pets, but they can oneshot most enemies from stealth even with a ranged attack, so why waste any time using fighters, chanters, wizards or whatever other fucking useless classes there are? Besides, the AI in this game is so hilariously braindead, it's not like melee classes were any useful without massive amounts of hand-holding and babysitting. Case in point:

Fucking pillars, man! How do they work?

This spider kept on running into the pillar during the entire fight. It couldn't figure out how to walk past it, it couldn't get through it, so it was sweet face time with Mr. Pillar here until my rangers finished it off. Is this the dreaded 'Pillar of Eternity'? Oh the excitement!
The same kind of shit happens with your own melee units. Rangers will stand and block doorways, melee characters can't get past, so they sit around and do nothing. Sometimes they stand right next to an enemy and do nothing. Remember how in Baldur's Gate you could set up basic AI scripts, which made characters switch from ranged to melee, allowed them to use certain spells and basic tactics if the situation required it? They weren't so clever and sophisticated enough to make the game play itself, but they helped. There is no such thing in this "Baldur's Gate 3", 16 years later.

Yes, battles without pillars, doorways and other such nasty obstacles can offer a lot of tactical depth, at least until you run into a certain boss, who takes over ten minutes to kill on god mode if you don't exploit the crappy AI. Stop reading here if you don't want spoilers.

Shittest boss battle since Conker's Great Mighty Poo.

The artwork is beautiful, I love the character portraits, but the 3d models are some of the ugliest ones I've seen in any modern RPG. They're not Wasteland 2 ugly, but they're still pretty bad.

Meh.

The story is pretty great, the writing is good, but not perfect. Shit such as, "I could care less". That's not how you use this phrase. Saying it like that means that you do care. Of course I'm nitpicking here, the really awful shit happens in the localized versions. Then there's the fact that the game world is littered with random useless NPCs and their incredibly retarded names, because those were all added as a thank you for backers, who donated a substantial amount of money for the development of the game. Which is great, mind, the game is still good and everything, but I don't need a ton of people named Yakatomi Yoshikama all over the place in my generic high fantasy games. You're not fucking Japanese, stop using names like that!

What really annoys me is how certain reviewers rave about the freedom this game supposedly gives you with the story and with how you want to progress through the content, because that's a big load of bullshit. Not only is the progression almost entirely on rails, but the game does nothing to tell you how or why you can't progress if you're trying to do stuff in the wrong oder.
For instance, you get your own fortress very early on in the game, which comes with its own dungeon underneath. And a quest, telling you to go all the way to the bottom of said dungeon to meet its master.

So I went into the dungeon, fought my way through level after level until I ended up in front of a talking door, which would not let me pass. Dead end. No hint as to what I was missing, no nothing. That's until Google revealed to me that this door won't budge until I've finished a certain part of the main storyline. I just thought I missed something or maybe this part of the dungeon was broken. Instead, I had to leave, play the main quest some more, then come back to the dungeon to talk to the fucking door again.

Alright, dungeon is closed, let's run all the way back and play a quest!

And that shit happens in other dungeons as well. Second floor or another dungeon I went to for a quest? Flooded. The game doesn't say how or why or how to get around it. The water just magically disappears after finishing Act 2 of the storyline. Again, no hint as to why the water is disappearing, the game sure as fuck doesn't tell you and I just found out via Google. Some "Baldur's Gate 3" this is.

And every review is full of how incredibly polished and bug-free Pillars of Eternity is. That is, until you try and equip new gear via double-click, which strips you of all buffs and bonuses. Ranger pets can turn invisible and will forever stay that way if you save your game before you notice their disappearance. Some voiceovers don't work and some of my party members are mute, whereas one of my pets didn't get its name saved, so he now known as Lion Companion.

Pillars doesn't suck. It's not a bad game and I'm deliberately pointing out just the flaws and problems. And I'm doing so, because this game is not the hottest shit since the invention of tits. It's not fucking Baldur's Gate 3, just because it uses some cursors and sound fx and visual elements from the old Infinity Engine games, you click-hungry, lying shitbags! And it's stupid, exaggerated, overhyped reviews, which cause me to enjoy this game a lot less than I should. It ain't bad, but it only makes me want to play Baldur's Gate for the nth time. I'm not giving this one another playthrough.

And why the fuck are massive walls of text with almost no voiceovers suddenly better, more sophisticated storytelling, which allegedly beats the action-packed cutscenes and story elements of Dragon Age: Inquisition? Are you fucking kidding me? You're like those poncy-ass cunts who "prefer the weight of a real book" over a Kindle, so everyone can see what you're reading and who tell everyone that the book was better than the movie, in any movie, whether you've read the book or not. I'm so very sick and tired of all that stupid indie game hype and how it's super hip to hate on Bioware, because they're suddenly "too manstream". Right. Because Dragon Age, Mass Effect and KOTOR were total niche-games for only the truest of core gamers or what. And then you're already waiting to go premium on Star Wars: Battlefront and to preorder the next Assassin's Creed.

In other news - no more expansions for Everquest 2. Instead, they're now offering overpriced DLC packs with almost zero value. The first one is titled Rum Cellar and has been slated to hit live servers at the end of the month. It contains a solo stealth section, a heroic group section, which takes 30-60 minutes to finish (since when does ANY group dungeon on EQ2 take 60 minutes to beat?), as well as one raid. I don't raid, so I'd get about 30 minutes of content out of this one - at the price of 15 Dollars. Except, I can't fucking play it, because it's level 100 only, which I can't reach, because I didn't buy the game's last expansion. In the past, every expansion would be included in the following one for free, so I was waiting for AoM to go Free2Play, which isn't going to happen now. Oh yeah, future cap increases, new races, classes or any other actual content ain't really gonna happen now, either.

So much for the whole, "Don't worry, you won't notice any negative changes and we'll have more resources than ever to work on this game" bullcrap. Though I should have figured that out when they said their community always comes first and will always be their top priority, whilst cancelling the annual fan convention the exact same second. Oh well, I guess there's always Elder Scrolls Online, which is now better than ever.

- Cat