Five minutes into Pillars of Eternity: The White March Part I, a snowball thrown by an ogre smacks Durance the fire priest dead. "Looks like we lost the angry one," my tank calls out. Not thirty seconds later, Sagani the ranger goes down to a cannon blast. It was all tough, frantic, and a little absurd, but it led me to believe that this little patch of content would live up to the greatness of the base Pillars of Eternity experience. The hours ahead, though enjoyable enough, proved otherwise though. Despite the fun of tougher encounters and a new setting, The White March often feels like a step down from the greatness of the vanilla release.
The high point here is the setting of the White March mountains themselves, whose icy expanses provide a welcome counterpoint to the forests that characterized the base release. It's a land that's more crowded with loot and little tidbits of mouseover lore than the leafy expanses we've seen up until now, and it mercifully features more NPCs with their own quests and conversation options instead of the original's Kickstarter NPCs with bite-sized fan fiction. It's a shame, though, that the vaguely Nordic shacks and pitiful puddles of its hub town end up being used for little more than bleached backdrops for battles and conversations with the gloomy populace.
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The high point here is the setting of the White March mountains themselves, whose icy expanses provide a welcome counterpoint to the forests that characterized the base release. It's a land that's more crowded with loot and little tidbits of mouseover lore than the leafy expanses we've seen up until now, and it mercifully features more NPCs with their own quests and conversation options instead of the original's Kickstarter NPCs with bite-sized fan fiction. It's a shame, though, that the vaguely Nordic shacks and pitiful puddles of its hub town end up being used for little more than bleached backdrops for battles and conversations with the gloomy populace.
Continue reading…
Continue reading...