I'm going to bitch about Pillars of Eternity til this Nostalgia Critic review is over.
First off, let's talk about the Recovery mechanic. This is a period of time that is in between your actions. Every attack, spell, and movement you make engages your Recovery time. We're never given any base numbers for recovery, but instead every modifier for Recovery is given in percentages. Heavier armor inflicts a negative Recovery time - even mage's robes inflict one (-15%!). Weapons inflict their own sort of Recovery time but we don't get numbers for those either, just vague weapons speed of Fast, Normal and Slow. Your Dexterity gives you a bonus to recovery time, too.
Furthermore, there are Four types of defense targeted by every attack, three of which are modified by armor, the fourth modified by your Resolve. And I do mean every attack - spells target each defense pretty much equally.
Combat is not especially tactical; the whole "real time" thing has never lended itself well to tactical combat, and the Recovery mechanic just makes it even worse, as MOVING triggers your Recovery time cooldown. You could possibly do some crazy bullshit with manipulating recovery but that's a lot of effort for minor gain.
Area of Effect abilities are weird. They have two targeting reticles - one red, one yellow. Everything in red gets hit, in yellow they become enemy-only areas. Area of Effect size is affected by Intellect. As are durations. This is sort of neat, and adds a sort of interesting targeting skill to area of effect abilities, but this is about the most interesting thing there is.
Damage reduction is provided by armor and provides different levels of damage reduction against different attacks. Let me just say this right now - the additional damage granted by Rogues more than overcomes what you might get out of Two Handed attacks later on, but involves fucking with the tactical "system".
Furthermore, if you think the idea of per-day, per-rest, per-encounter abilities would favor the Fighter type classes, you'd be wrong. Okay, they get more types of per-encounter abilities but they kind of suck. They engage directly with the tactical combat system and the real-time aspect kind of neuters them entirely.
You can play the game at three speeds, which is nice, and set up autopauses like you could in Baldur's Gate, but this is a game that cries out for a legitimate turn-based system and a grid. There is no getting around this - this game would be one million times better if it was done in the style of Troika's Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. Perhaps two million. You could still have the bullshit 4E-style abilities and the neat targeting system, and nothing would be lost over real time. In fact, you'd have made the tactical system all that much more engaging, and I wouldn't currently be ignoring it and cheating my stats to 1 million to play this game just to see how deep down the rabbit hole this story goes.
Let's talk about the characters. So far, I'm not invested. At all. The voice acting feels cheap, subdued, and not at all interesting. I long for a Minsc (which you almost have in Alvor but he never turns into a Scottish prick when you really want him to), an Irenicus... hell, I'd settle for a fucking Viconia.
I think where the story really falls down is that it's throwing a shitload of proprietary terms at you and never bothers to do anything to make you care about them. Within the first twenty minutes you hear at least eight proprietary terms and it's like hearing it all out of context. Maybe on a replay this shit would make more sense but it's especially jarring as a newcomer who is sitting down to play this for the first time. At least in Baldur's Gate you could wander around Candlekeep and learn as much as you needed to within the first hour of the game if you talked to everybody and read everything. That way when you wind up alone (spoilers: You wind up alone pretty quickly in PoE) you feel at least a little confident in your ability to fucking understand this world.
I get the feeling they were going for the Fallout feel where you're a Vault Dweller dropped into a world you can't possibly comprehend but they didn't invent a thousand new words to make you feel that way. There's a major difference between the
character not knowing something and the
player not knowing something. While the equivalency of both character and player being lost can be done well (see: Tales of the Abyss), it's hamfisted and clumsy here, mainly because nothing is ever explained.
EXPLAIIIIIIIIIN!
I blame Mass Effect. The Codex introduced in those games has basically made writers lazy - they shove everything into this out of the way area so they don't have to write any sort of dialogue that clues you in to what's going on. Don't know something? Check the Cyclopedia! And chances are the explanation's going to be just as obtuse and leave you wondering.
Having to learn a whole new lexicon has never been fun, especially if that lexicon has no origin in a language your expected player base will be familiar with. The Planar Cant, while cute, had its origins in real language. On the other hand, Sindarin was written by an actual linguist, and learning it was like learning an entire new language. That's what the language used in Pillars of Eternity feels like - studying for your final in High School Spanish. Using common language helps immerse the player because they fucking
understand what you're saying - inventing new words to help immerse you into the world isn't a bad thing, but when you run across seven or eight terms in the first twenty minutes that make you go 'What the fuck?' without proper context clues to help you along, that just jars you out rather than pulling you in.
Just fuck this game. It's been uninteresting, it's been actively trying to turn me off to it, and I can't find myself giving a shit about any of the named NPCs in what I've interacted in with them.
What would make it better? Well, context clues when you're introducing new terms so a person isn't completely fucking lost would help. More interesting NPCs in the spirit of the company that wasn't afraid to go off the rails with their writing. Less pretentious bullshit by naming things that could have been perfectly explained in English with your bullshit language. Having discarded the real-time battle system and gone with a turn-based grid-based combat system so that people give a shit about tactical options. Failing that, giving whole numbers instead of nebulous descriptors and percentages for your fucking Recovery mechanic so people can make more informed decisions. What is it about hiding your fucking mechanics behind a wall of obtuse bullshit and games these days? Trying to get rid of number crunching doesn't
fucking help when your combat system still runs on those numbers and we would really like to know the goddamned numbers so we can make better tactical decisions, especially when
everything you choose to equip affects those fucking numbers.
I don't want to call this game a complete failure, but it really approaches it. It really does. I hope these guys go back to the drawing board and give us a true spiritual successor to the games they made rather than something predicated on failed design and mechanics they refuse to explain. At least in BG/BG2 you could figure out what Speed Factor 7 meant if you could get access to an AD&D book. Here, Recovery time = ? and subtracting percentages from that still equals ?.