Waelkman

So what is it?

I have spent a lot of time looking at the art work while something is loading. One of the scenes has four people in the foreground and some kind of eye-monster-with-tentacles in the background. There is implied combat in this scene, but the four people in front are all facing away from the central eye and are each maintaining a static pose, holding something but not actually using it. The effect is of a group photo, in which all five participants have been told to hold still. There is no dynamic, no tension, no sense of action. Another scene has four people in the lower left corner and a fiery figure on the right. When I first saw the fiery figure I laughed, because it looked like a villain from a comic book out of the 1950s. Again, it is in a static pose, oddly with two rectangles on the top of its head. One of the four people looks like it is lunging forward, but the other three are settled into a stance. This is a Composition, not the rendering of any kind of battle. The lighting around the figures on the left is skillfully done, on the other hand. Another scene is arrayed like this, except that the figure on the right resembles an upright dragon, and it looks more fierce and active. A fourth scene has five figures fighting on the deck of a ship against pirates and against some tentacles rising from the sea. One of the figures, Maia, is firing an arquebus to the right, with a wisp of fire extending from the muzzle. The central figure, Eder, has a shield extended to the right and a sword behind him, poised to strike. In front of him is a pirate with a sword similarly poised behind. Another figure, Serafen, is aiming a pistol to the side. A fourth figure, I assume to be Pallegina, is lunging toward the right. The final figure, Aloth, is shown with a spell extending toward the lower right. The only person is in this tableau who is in any kind of motion is Pallegina, and if you look at her actual lunge, her next action is that she is going to fall down. The tentacles give a sense of movement to the scene, but the main figures are either in set poses or about to collapse. There is a sense of action surrounding a basically still center where the figures are. The fifth scene is the one that appears when the game is done loading. At first it shows a brilliant yellow burst of light, then a tablet/shield appears with choices for actions. The initial view is of overpowering, blaring light, but once the tablet/shield appears, I find the scene quite beautiful. The eye is drawn to a fire and tree trunks in the foreground, with shimmering reflections off the trees and other surfaces. The lighting is excellent, and the framing of bright light around the tablet/shield is effective. Here the artist shows their strength, with a quiet tableau and skillful use of light. If the developers wanted pleasant set pieces or instances of calm in the midst of mild threat, they got that. If they wanted art work that fires a sense of drama and conflict, then they are out of luck. I would also like to point out that the art work is strangely fuzzy/blurry, as though it was created for an older type screen and then displayed on HD.

This game can be bewildering. At the beginning, control of the starting two characters switches between joint movement and individual movement for just one character, often and unpredictably. This got me into the mindset that this game just does crazy things. Over time I learned how to recover from these changes (it involves using the L1 and R1 buttons), but I still don't understand how/why these shifts occur. Being able to move both characters at the same time is important for easily playing the game, but the game itself doesn't tell you how to make this work. Or if it does I never found it. Related to this is what happens when a party gets sick. Instead of being able to use the ordinary directional modes, you now have to use the triangle button to specify a target location and then move to that target. There is no explanation for this change. In battle mode the abilities that the player can use are normally represented by an icon. This becomes unwieldy at best, since you have to memorize what each icon represents (I wound up making sketches of each icon and writing a gloss of what it does). Sometimes a description of what the ability does would appear above the icon, but that was unpredictable. As it turns out, pressing the triangle key brings up the descriptions of the abilities, but the game doesn't tell you this. Or if it does I never found it. Within a city you can travel from one district to another. After some time you find yourself deposited in some random building inside the district when you travel in. I put up with this as another crazy game thing until I discovered that if a location in the district is underlined, that is where you will go when you enter the district. Usually you can interact with something by getting close to it and pressing the X button. Arbitrarily at times this doesn't work, and if you are new to the game you may not realize that you have to use the triangle button to interact. I was stuck in one part of a city until someone pointed out this solution. To get a chanter to use a chant you have to navigate a mysterious part of the combat bar. A character who wants to talk to you has a little light patch in the upper right of their facial icon. I didn't notice this until late in my first playthrough. And to talk to a person you have to open the combat bar (of all places) and go to the far left to find it. I mention these examples because the developers could have done a better job explaining how to manage important elements of game play or done more to eliminate arbitrariness. No doubt there are adventurous, perceptive players who mastered these elements easily and early, but for the rest of us ordinary folk, these oversights cause hardship and confusion. Difficulties like this soured me on playing the first Pillars of Eternity. When learning how to deal with basics of the game becomes a challenging quest in itself, something is wrong with the game.