Important NPCs (merchants, quest-givers, etc) stand in the same place 24 hours a day, and you're free to enter any and all buildings at any time of day or night. Likewise, the game features a real-time day/night cycle with weather patterns, but it has no functional impact on gameplay. If you're a chanter, do you take the chant that will reduce enemy endurance over time, or one that will reduce enemy slashing and piercing damage, or one that reduces enemy concentration, or one that will improve your movement speed and reflexes, or one that will give a fire damage boost to your weapons? Then, do you take the invocation that will let you reduce enemies' damage reduction, or one that will stun and push back enemies, or one that will let you detonate enemy corpses for splash damage, or one that will let you summon a phantom ally, or one that will boost your own damage reductions, or one that will let you cast bolts of lightning? Depending on your class, you'll likely be given a choice to take one (or two) abilities from six or more options, which progressively unlock more and more advanced abilities as you go up in levels. While not a completely original idea, it's a clever execution in Pillars, since it serves the typical purpose of revealing critical details in the main story while giving you an extra dimension to develop your character, and thus making you feel a little more attached to and involved in what's happening in the main story.ĭespite the relative simplicity, you still have to make some pretty agonizing decisions when you level-up, such as how you're going to allocate skill points, what class abilities you'll take, and which talents you want. The actual events of your history are preset by the game, for narrative purposes, but you're free to determine why your character does the things he or she does. Throughout the main quest, you experience flashbacks (in the form of a Watcher's soul-reading visions) in which you, as the player, get the chance to role-play your character. It's an all too common trope for video games to star a protagonist who doesn't know his or her own history, who progressively learns about it over the course of the game for some dramatic reveal, but it's pretty rare that a game actually lets you shape that history yourself. While the computer keeps track of how you're acting now, in the present, you also get to develop your character's personality and backstory through visions of your previous life. I, for instance, trended towards benevolent, honest, and rational dialogue responses, although I was sometimes deceptive, cruel, or aggressive when it served my purposes. In other words, it encompasses the entire spectrum of the D&D-style character alignment, allowing you to play a "chaotic good" or "lawful evil" character if you so desire. The beauty of this system is that it tracks your disposition across 10 different categories, rather than the typical binary "good or evil" you see most often in games, and thus never penalizes you for acting "out of character" because it understands you might want to act differently in different situations. Likewise, if you develop a reputation for your cruelty, your threats will carry more weight. This affects how other characters perceive and react to you, and it even gives you extra role-playing options in dialogue if you've built a reputation for your honesty, you can reference that reputation when people question your claims. Pillars of Eternity uses a disposition system that keeps track of how your character acts and responds in dialogue. That's where some of the role-playing comes into play, and it's, in general, some of the best I've seen in a computer game.
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