Pillars of Eternity: Complete Edition

Genre: RPG

Players: 1

.

Review:

Pillars of Eternity is an RPG originally released on PC in 2015, then in 2017 ported to Xbox One and PlayStation 4 in a complete edition containing The White March: Parts I & II expansions, with this version of the game finally coming to the Nintendo Switch in 2019. This game was designed to be a spiritual successor of sorts to classic PC RPGs like Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, and Planescape Torment. Given that the game was developed by Obsidian Entertainment, a company formed by ex staff members of the company responsible for those games, Black Isle Studios, it should be little surprise that Pillars of Eternity is very faithful to the design of those classic games.

Before going on, I should note that the Nintendo Switch port of Pillars of Eternity was infamously plagued by problems, most notably a game-halting “gray screen” bug that broke the game for many players. I very intentionally held off on reviewing this game until the release of a patch for these bugs, which finally saw the light of day in early 2021, with another patch following a few months later. From what I saw, the game seemed to run very stable and I did not encounter any bugs or glitches, so those concerned about these complaints and the quality of the port need not worry.

The presentation here is good, featuring some high-quality 2D backgrounds with 3D elements, and 3D characters. There’s nothing truly impressive here, but it all looks nice, and is very reminiscent of the classic games this is patterned on. The game features decent orchestral music, as well as some voice acting (though not all lines are voiced), and all-around this has a solid presentation.

However, this comes at a heavy, heavy cost – post-patch, this game comes in at a massive 29GB, which is an absolutely mind-boggling size given what’s on offer here. For the sake of comparison, the Nintendo Switch version of Skyrim, which features a massive, detailed, and fully 3D world with fully-voiced characters, comes in at half that file size. Amusingly, Nintendo’s page for Pillars of Eternity even dictates a minimum read speed of 60 MB/sec for your MicroSD card, as well. To say that these requirements are ridiculous is an absolute understatement.

At the very least I can say that the gameplay here is good, and transition to the gamepad much better than the remastered versions of those earlier Black Isle games, although this does come with a bit of trial and error figuring out both the controls and the menu layouts. The game does feature tutorial screens, but the tutorial stuff isn’t very intuitive, and I can’t help but feel like those who never played the Black Isle games may feel especially lost here. This is an RPG for PC RPG veterans, and if you’re not one of those, be prepared for a steep learning curve. Also, this game seems like it could have been improved with good use of touchscreen controls, but unfortunately the game doesn’t make use of the touchscreen at all.

However, there is one area where the Nintendo Switch version absolutely falls flat on its face, even after the patch, even dismissing the massive file size, even if you’re a Black isle RPG veteran, and even if you don’t mind the lack of any unique Nintendo Switch features – the text size in this game is atrociously small. It is clear that this game simply was not optimized for play on a TV screen, and it’s even worse in handheld mode, where some of the text is so small and blurry it is essentially impossible to read. Would it have killed the developers to have simply changed the text size, or at least give players the option?

With all of these flaws, it seems pretty clear that Pillars of Eternity, while a serviceable port of a quality RPG, it is a port of a game that was never intended to work on a console and certainly never intended to be played on a handheld, and very little effort was made to compensate for that fact. If you’re a huge fan of Black Isle’s older works and absolutely need to play this game on the go, the good news is that the worst of the bugs have finally been fixed and this game does technically work. However, this was a game designed for the PC, and if you’re a fan of Black Isle’s games, you probably fell in love with them on the PC, and that’s where you should be playing this game too. If you really want a game like this on the Nintendo Switch, get Divinity: Original Sin 2, a game that does a much better job bringing this type of game to Nintendo’s console.

tl;dr – Pillars of Eternity is an RPG designed to be a spiritual successor to classic Black Isle games like Baldur’s Gate. The controls work well enough once you get used to them, and the game’s biggest issues have now finally been patched, but the tiny and unreadable text and absurdly massive file size still make it clear this game was never intended to be played on the Nintendo Switch, and it shouldn’t be.

Grade: C+

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