Pillars of Eternity
Pillars of Eternity is a 2015 role-playing video game developed by Obsidian Entertainment and published by Paradox Interactive for Windows, OS X, and Linux. The game is a spiritual successor to the Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale series, along with Planescape: Torment. Obsidian started a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter for it in September 2012, raising over US$4 million. The game uses the Unity engine.
The game takes place in the fantasy world of Eora, mainly inside the nation of Dyrwood. The infants in the Dyrwood are plagued by a recent phenomenon in which they become "hollowborn" upon birth, meaning they are born with no soul. During the beginning of the game, the protagonist experiences an awakening of power due to a disastrous supernatural event, discovering they are a "Watcher": a person who can see past lives and interact with souls. The objective of the game is to find out what caused their awakening and how to solve the hollowborn problem.
Pillars of Eternity received generally positive reviews from critics, who praised the game for its world and immersive writing, along with the strategic combat, and also said that it is a worthy successor to the games it was inspired by. The game also won various awards and accolades, including best RPG of 2015. It had sold over 700,000 units by February 2016. A two-part expansion pack, The White March was released in August 2015 and February 2016, respectively. A sequel, Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, was released in May 2018. A game set in the same shared universe as the Pillars of Eternity games, Avowed, was announced in 2020 and released in 2025.
Gameplay
Pillars of Eternity sees players assume the role of a character defined as a "Watcher"a person able to see and interact with the souls of people, viewing the memories of those deceased or communing with those who lingeroperating on role-playing mechanics that include party-based real-time-with-pause tactical gameplay. The game is played from a fixed isometric viewpoint consisting of 3D models against two-dimensional pre-rendered backdrops, in a similar vein as its spiritual predecessors Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, and Planescape: Torment.New games begin with players creating a character, with the choices they make on the character's race, background, stats, and class except their appearance impacting what choices can be made in dialogues with non-player characters or interactive objects. Each class of the eleven available fighter, rogue, ranger, barbarian, monk, paladin, wizard, druid, priest, chanter, and cipher benefits from certain prominent stats in the game, and features a set of abilities unique to them, which can be used in battles with hostile enemies and creatures: for example, the cipher can use the soul of an enemy in order to attack them, and druids can shapeshift into a beast and cast spells. In addition to these, the character may make use of five skills Stealth, Athletics, Lore, Mechanics and Survival which confer bonuses in various situations, such as unlocking containers and gaining bonuses when resting outside inns. The character classes and game mechanics are similar to Dungeons & Dragons, but are a proprietary system created for the game. Characters level up upon acquiring experience points from completing quests and certain situations battling enemies does not reward experience, meaning conducting non-violent approaches can be just as rewarding.
Exploration of the game world involves visiting locations as they become unlocked, with some only accessible after progressing the main story whereupon players can freely explore the location to find enemies, items, and objectives for quests they are on. Most locations feature a fog of war effect, a dark, black one for regions not explored, and a lighter effect for areas that have already been explored and have been moved away from. Alongside the main story quests of the game, players can engage in optional side quests which feature fleshed out supporting characters and multiple outcomes, most of which are not typical "fetch quests" in role-playing video games. To assist in their adventures, players can create a party of up to six characters with the help of both companions characters found in certain locations, each with their own personal story and quest, and unique personalities and appearances, who will join when they offer assistance, of which the player can recruit up to eight to make a party from and player-created characters these can be made at inns, for a fee based on the level the player wishes their creation to be at.
During the course of the game, the player will build up a reputation with various factions, depending on the decisions they make in conversations and with resolving quests. This system effective denotes how NPCs of that faction will react to them and how traders will treat them when buying items. In addition, such choices will also impact the outcome of events when the game is completed. Players can enter scouting mode with certain characters or the whole party, which, impacted by a character's skill in Stealth, allows them to sneak around enemies as well as spot hidden items and traps, the latter of which can be disarmed and be later used against enemies. After making some progress in the game's main story, the protagonist will take over a stronghold, which acts as a base where players can improve it with new buildings.
Battles in Pillars of Eternity focus on a system in which each enemy in the game has a set of different defensive stats. Alongside a general defence bonus, they have different resistances to certain weapon types and element types, which impacts how much damage they take, as well as certain status resistances that impact the effect of spells and abilities. Thus, players will find it useful to sometimes equip characters with different weapon types and use different spells to take advantage of enemies with weaker defences against certain types. For example, an enemy who can resist harm from piercing weapons would be better attacked with a different weapon type. A bestiary is provided which records information on creatures and enemies encountered, and adds more information the more they are encountered, effectively allowing players to see their stats during combat and determine how best to combat them. When an enemy attacks and damages a character, it impacts both their endurance and health: while characters will be knocked out when they are drained of all their endurance, which regenerates after combat is over, being drained of all their health effectively causes them to die permanently. To recover lost health and endurance, as well as certain abilities, players can either rest by setting up a camp or buying a room at an inn.
Story
Setting
The story takes place in the world of Eora, in a region placed in the southern hemisphere called the Eastern Reach, an area roughly the size of Spain. The Eastern Reach contains several nations, including the Free Palatinate of Dyrwood, a former colony of the mighty Aedyr Empire that won its independence through a revolutionary war; the Vailian Republics, a confederation of sovereign city-states; and the Penitential Regency of Readceras, a quasi-theocratic state ruled by priests of the god Eothas.Technologically and socially, most of the civilizations in Eora are in what roughly corresponds to the early stages of the early modern period. Firearms are a relatively new invention and are cumbersome to use; as a result, their use is not widespread. They have, however, proven quite effective against magic users.
A factor of great conflict all over Eora is the recent scientific discovery that souls are real and can be transferred, stored, or molded. Souls are the basis of magic, as accessing their power is what allows certain people to use it. Souls leave the body upon death, and go through a largely unknown process before reincarnating into a newborn body. Every soul does, however, have embedded memories from their previous lives, and through certain processes a person's soul can be "Awakened", meaning they gain awareness of these past lives. There are people in the world who have the supernatural ability to perceive people's souls, which allows them to access memories, among other things; these individuals are called "Watchers". Though the study of souls, called animancy, is a young field of science, the implications for society at large has been vast, led to rapid advances in technology, and caused several rifts and clashes in the different religious communities, which has marked the era as a time of great turmoil.
Characters
The player character can be male or female and one of six available races, and the game typically refers to them as "The Watcher". Over the course of the adventure, the player can recruit up to eight secondary characters as companions. Available companions include: Edér, a fighter and worshiper of one of the god Eothas; Aloth, a wizard and child of parents who served nobility; Durance, a disillusioned priest and follower of Magran, a goddess of war and fire; Sagani, a ranger who is on a quest to search for an elder from her village; Grieving Mother, a strange cipher who cannot normally be fully seen by other people, and has a personal connection to the hollowborn problem; Pallegina, a paladin who works for the Vailian Republics; Kana Rua, a chanter who was sent by his people to recover a book of sacred text; and Hiravias, a druid who has been banished from his tribe.Plot
The player character is a foreigner who arrives in the Dyrwood. Their caravan is hit by a mysterious storm that kills everyone but them. Taking refuge in a cave, the player character witnesses some cultists perform a ritual on a machine that can strip souls from their bodies. Exposed to these energies, the player character becomes a Watcher, a person able to read souls. The player character also becomes Awakened, able to access memories of their past lives. This curses the Watcher with waking visions and an inability to sleep. In time, the Watcher will go insane from this, so they must track down the cultists and reverse the curse.Dyrwood is cursed by the Hollowborn Plague: children are being born without souls, leaving them totally unresponsive, in a way similar to a permanent vegetative state. Many people blame animancers, the scientists who study and manipulate souls. Investigating the curse, the Watcher discovers that the Hollowborns' souls have in fact been stolen by a cult known as the Leaden Key, led by a priest named Thaos, and that Thaos is framing animancers for the Plague. This eventually leads to a riot in the capital city where animancers are lynched and their college is destroyed.
The Watcher and their companions pursue Thaos to the city of Twin Elms, where they learn the truth behind Thaos' actions. The gods of Eora are synthetic beings created by an ancient civilization known as the Engwithans. The Engwithans were master animancers, and through their science they discovered that the world of Eora had no real gods. This created an existential crisis for the Engwithans. The world of Eora was plagued by religious conflict, and the Engwithans had hoped to end these by discovering who were the true gods. Furthermore, most societies used gods to validate their moral systems, and the Engwithans feared that if others discovered that there were no real gods, this would cause amoral behavior to worsen. So the Engwithans decided to create some artificial gods by fusing their own souls into magical constructs. These constructs presented themselves to the mortals of Eora as the true gods of the Universe. The people of Eora were united in worship of a common pantheon, ending centuries of religious conflict and promoting the spread of civilization. Thaos is an Engwithan animancer who has survived the centuries by transferring his soul from one body to the next. His life mission is to ensure that nobody discovers the truth about the Engwithans' artificial gods, otherwise people might question their legitimacy. Part of this mission involves suppressing the science of animancy, because animancers might discover the truth through their science just as the Engwithans did. Thaos stole the souls of the Hollowborn to empower the goddess Woedica, who hates animancy and would see it destroyed.
Though the other gods have an interest in protecting their secret, they do not want Woedica to dominate them, and so they help the Watcher breach the defenses of Thaos' lair. The Watcher slays Thaos in his lair. The player must decide what to do with all the souls Thaos abducted: return them to their original bodies, let them reincarnate in new bodies, or feed them to Woedica. Other choices the player made throughout the game will affect the epilogue.