Hello! This is my first post and I did not yet buy the game, however I checked into whether I buy it more than once and always thought the same conflicting thoughts about it:
I am highly sensitive and thus I am very careful at what content and what visuals I expose myself to. So for example it does not work for me to see all that gore that is in many first person shooters and immediately stop watching a lets play or review if I see such. Even the gibs I saw in the trailers for PoE I´d say is a bit too much for me when exposed to it for a longer time – but then the trailers focus on displaying combat scenes. I found already in this forum I can disable flying gibs, yet this wouldn´t remove blood depictions completely. I would be interested to see how the game looks with flying gibs disabled, to see whether that would be acceptable to me. I think I´d need to see some fights to know for sure whether that can work for me.
I am playing games for recreational purpose, maybe one or two hours at a time and I am more into the story, than into anything related to combat, yet… yet I immerse fully into the game to the point where its difficult for me to tell game and reality apart at least for the time I am playing.
I found in Youtube videos that much of Pillars Of Eternity is exploring. On the other hand trailers paint a picture of mostly a dark story about doom and grief, maybe for advertisement purposes. So I wonder, is it possible to play PoE in a recreational way with a party that actually cares about not harming anyone unless there is really no other option? I wonder how many fights are unavoidable? And how good a character can still progress without fighting any wolf or lion or other beast out there? Is it possible to advance the characters by peaceful crafting? How much of the game can be light exploring and how much needs to be conflicting choices, combat and drama in order to fulfill the story line?
I am not interested in any spoilers here and in this forum they are forbidden anyway, so this may be difficult to answer, but maybe it is possible to give a more general answer that does not spoil on specifics of the story line. However, if its not possible to answer that question without some spoilers, I am okay with moving this question to one of the other boards.
I am also fine with an answer that this game may likely not be suitable for me. Currently for me PoE is more likely to be a good choice for me than most of the other games out there. Right now I found only three RPG games that work for me. One not so massive MMORPG rather good, as it does not show any blood at all and as my char does not have to fight at all in it (but could) (I think this is really rare with graphic RPG games), one old CRPG quite good as well, as blood can be disabled completely and one does not need to attack any living beings, and one old CRPG with limitations due to somewhat dark and conflict rich story and some short blood like effects during hits in combat, but still much of open world exploration. (Not posting names for now, as it may be a violation of forum guidelines.)
PS: Please just take this as my desires, preferences, maybe even needs for playing. No offense meant to anyone who has different preferences. Please just respect my preferences as my preferences instead of arguing against them. I am solely interested to get an initial idea about whether PoE can be an enjoyable game for me or not.