I’ve had Pillars of Eternity(PoE) in my steam library for a long time. It’s one of those games I’ve begun half a dozen times but never really managed to get past the first few hours. It first happened when it came out, then during the pandemic and more recently just after I finished Baldur’s Gate 3.

The first two I bounced off mainly because I just probably wasn’t in a mood for reading a bunch of text, but the third time it was because I was in the “hangover” period you get just after finishing a fantastic game. Where you wander around your games collections, looking for something, anything, that’ll give you a similar rush to what you just completed.

However I bounced right off it because PoE just wasn’t BG3. Finally, late last year, while my partner dove into BG3 for the first time, I decided to give PoE another chance (partly out of jealousy).

There’s been a lot said about PoE vs BG3, the creator bemoaning it was just a difference in budget, other players of the former bemoaning it’s more sophisticated and plenty of other hot takes across the world wide web. So allow me to add my n + 1 opinion to the pile.

There’s a lot to like about PoE, the world is genuinely really well fleshed out, with some lovable characters, interesting quests and genuinely grey moral decisions. However it gets in its way a lot. Early in the game you get a lot of the classic Fantasy Proper Noun fatigue, constantly asking “What the hell is that? Who is this?”, that only really wears off for me in the latter parts of the game after some heavy wiki searching to remember things.

It’s also just a real bummer in terms of tone, the first thing you come across story wise is “all the new born children have no souls” as you stand next to a tree decorated with the corpses of locals. Look, I like grimdark stuff as much as the next nerd who grew up in the 90s but even I find this a bit much. The only real “fun” comes from some of the characters you meet across the way, Kana being my absolute favourite. PoE is a serious game, and it wants you to know it.

The other obstacle I found with the game is that Real Time With Pause is just not for me, at least not in an RPG. In Crusader Kings or Europa Universalis I’m very happy with it but in RPGs its frustrating. It is a relic of compromise from a by-gone era. From a time when people were trying to make systems like DnD more action-ey and exciting but still respecting the ruleset. Well these days if we want action-ey and exciting we have plenty of amazing modern games that do that well, have a look at The Witcher 3. Whereas for me true tactical depth needs to come from a turn based game, it lets you consider your actions and learn in the moment what would be a good move. Real Time With Pause is the worst of both worlds: Its not exciting and it’s hard to learn information from it about what is working and what isn’t working.

All of this though isn’t the big reason why Baldur’s Gate 3 is much more popular than Pillars of Eternity. It’s that Pillars treats combat and story role playing as two entirely separate parts of the game. At no point do your abilities, spells or any physical interaction with the game world impact the story. The story happens all within that small text box at the bottom centre of the screen. Yes, your skills can impact what your dialog options are, but the game is rigid in its story telling. Whereas Baldur’s gives you all manner of freedom to do things. You can cast darkness to allow you to sneak to an area and loot an object that you can’t normally. Or cast charm on a character to get more information. Or cast speak to animals on a rat to hear nearby gossip about the story.

None of that is present in Pillars, and its a real shame. How cool would it be to have Kana start a chant and distract guards while another member of the party sneaks past. I worry that the reflections from the creator amount to “we didn’t have as much money” because I think even if you gave Pillars of Eternity the same budget as Baldur’s Gate 3, it still wouldn’t enchant people in the same way.

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