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About the game (Official)
Prepare to be enchanted by a world where the choices you make and the paths you choose shape your destiny. Obsidian Entertainment, the developer of Fallout: New Vegas™ and South Park: The Stick of Truth™, together with Paradox Interactive is proud to present Pillars of Eternity.
Recapture the deep sense of exploration, the joy of a pulsating adventure, and the thrill of leading your own band of companions across a new fantasy realm and into the depths of monster-infested dungeons in search of lost treasures and ancient mysteries.
So gather your party, venture forth, and embrace adventure as you delve into a realm of wonder, nostalgia, and the excitement of classic RPGs with Obsidian’s Pillars of Eternity!
Tech specs
MINIMUM:
OS: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 64-bit or newer
Processor: Intel Core i3-2100T @ 2.50 GHz / AMD Phenom II X3 B73
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: ATI Radeon HD 4850 or NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT
Hard Drive: 14 GB available space
RECOMMENDED:
OS: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 64-bit or newer
Processor: Intel Core i5-2400 @ 3.10 GHz / AMD Phenom II X6 1100T
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: Radeon HD 7700 or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570
Hard Drive: 14 GB available space
My thoughts
We would have had this up a lot earlier, but after speaking to Paradox, Obsidian weren’t giving out any Linux keys before release, but they were giving out Windows keys, odd. I find that a bit concerning, and it tells me that Linux isn’t high a priority.
Luckily, we had a generous email with a key from a supporter, so thanks to them we can still cover it properly, after the release.
Annoyingly, Steam decided to change to “Coming Soon” when the timer was up. This actually happens quite often with bigger releases, but it was no fun waiting around. It took a good 15 minutes to finally decide it was released!
It’s especially important to test Unity based games on Linux, as their performance is quite often very poor, so without further rambling here’s my early look at it.
Remember, these thoughts are mine, and mine alone. Any review/port report/initial thoughts are from my personal point of view.
The actual port report
It launches and actually works, so that’s a good start at least! Nothing like a new game actually launching properly to get you excited!
It starts off with a nice little intro story to set the scene, and you proceed to setup your character.
Setting up your character!
This is where you could probably spend a long time deciding what you want to be, and like every RPG that gives me the option, I chose to become an Elf! Each race has different statistics, so choose wisely! Once you pick your favourite race, you also get to choose a sub-race, and that changes your statistics again. I decided to go for a Wood Elf, and that enables me to be better at ranged combat. I always love being an archer, so this pleases me to not only be my favourite race, but to also setup my character exactly how I like.
It has the standard class chooser as well, so as you might imagine, I chose to be an Archer. There are 11 different classes, so there’s plenty of options for everyone’s play style.
There’s even more to chose from, as you go through picking a starting ability, and an animal companion. I am simply loving the amount of options you get.
When I thought I was finally done, nope. You then need to arrange your starting statistics, and it gives you a handy star beside the statistics that are most beneficial to your class.
You’re still not done yet, you also need to pick your Culture. Each different culture gives +1 to a specific attribute, so again, choose wisely adventurers!
Are we done yet? Nope! You also need to pick a Background. Each different background will again add to your different attributes.
Finally we get to change our appearance, and this is the only place it fell a tiny bit flat for me. There weren't as many options as I had hoped, but sufficient enough for me to feel my character looked awesome.
The game, the most important bit right?
Once I finally got into the game, I am pleased to say that it’s not entirely text based. There are some voice overs. I do love RPG games, but I also don’t like reading paragraphs of text often, as this actually reminds me I am in a game, I do prefer speech to really get me engrossed in a game.
The voice acting sounds great, and some of the start even made me chuckle a bit with the banter between the caravan owner and the guide.
I’m not entirely sure if the VSYNC option is working, there’s no difference with it on or off, and either way I notice a bit of tearing, not a lot, but it’s there.
The FPS seems to refuse to go above 60, but it does give me a mostly solid 60, so it performs pretty damn well.
The graphics are really quite nice, and it really does feel like the older Infinity engine RPG games, but with everything updated for modern gamers. It’s actually quite beautiful to look at, and considering my FPS hasn’t dropped below 59FPS I think I’m going to enjoy this.
I wandered around a bit doing the first quest, and killed a couple bandits and everything seems to be going swimmingly.
The combat is real time, but like with FTL you can simply press space and have it pause. You will need to pause often to give different orders to your followers, so remember it.
I didn’t really notice any performance problems during combat, or during the small cutscene I saw, so it looks like it’s a pretty good release for us.
One thing I really love, is that after certain scenes have played out, you get a story board of what's going on. What was completely unexpected was that it gives you options you can take sometimes to help or not help someone in need (trying not to give spoilers here!).
The one thing that does bug me are the tutorial scrolls that pop up, as sometimes they vanish too quickly, and you then have to scroll through the text history to know what they were describing.
The production quality seems pretty high, and that's not surprising coming from Obsidian Entertainment.
After putting some time into it, the part that is really annoying me is the amount of micromanagement your team requires. Sometimes it seems like there is zero AI to your members, and even on the easy setting where you're not supposed to have so much of it, my team seems to stand around often during fights not attacking.
I don't want my hand held the whole time, but having a little more AI scripting during fights allowing my team to do the occasional spell and attack by themselves would have been great.
Sadly, I feel the fights are confusing. It's hard to tell who you have selected and who is where while lots of spells and attacks are going on.
Final Verdict: I haven’t seen a release this smooth in a while, and I imagine it's a great experience for big RPG fans, but the combat ruins it for me.
Check out Pillars of Eternity on Games Republic. Buying it there on the Linux store supports us directly!
It’s also on GOG for a DRM Free build. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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There seem to be some tricks and similar on certain encounters, because some encounters I can't even beat on easy.
@Swiftpaw yes, it is a in-house linux release by obsidian / paradox. The reason we got it is because we matched the goal at kickstarter, and they were nice enough to ensure a day1 release.
@Swiftpaw yes, it is a in-house linux release by obsidian / paradox. The reason we got it is because we matched the goal at kickstarter, and they were nice enough to ensure a day1 release.
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Ok, which difficulty to choose..?
Last time I played BG more than a decade ago and wasn't a master either.
According to the hints, I should take the 'easy' route.
What's your experience in a similar situation and what did you take?
Thanks!
I played a lot of RPGs of that kind, and I tell you for this one, easy on the first play-through is hard enough on some encounters, because you need to get used to certain abilities of the classes, need to figure out good tactical standings for certain encounters, and the "special" classes do not make it easier :D.
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And for notice, who didn't get it yet, I've offered Liam a key for the game and he accepted it, so we'll hopefully see a lottery on the title in the next few days.
I even went the way to ask Obsidian, and have an official statement by obsidian that we can do that and they're perfectly fine with the lottery.
I even went the way to ask Obsidian, and have an official statement by obsidian that we can do that and they're perfectly fine with the lottery.
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Does this work with the FOSS radeon driver?
It works at least with Mesa 10.6 (from Oibaf). Probably it will work with the normal version too.
I have a Radeon 4870 and I am quite happy with the game so far. There are some complaints in the forum about bugs, but no Linux specific stuff I noticed.
1 Likes, Who?
oldrocker99 Mar 29, 2015
This was an in-house Linux release, so it's really not a "port", right? It's just a Linux release.
Just saying because not all Linux games are ports. We get a lot of in-house Linux releases on day one for example.
I backed the game on Kickstarter specifically because it was promised that it would be available for Linux, which is why they chose the Unity engine.
I know a lot of people I see on the various forums do a lot of hating on Unity, but all the Unity games I have bought have run just fine, and I appreciate the frequent ability to select graphics in the launch box, too.
The only wrappers (not native ports) that I have so far seen on Steam, besides legacy DOSBox games, are the Witcher 2 (which currently runs like a top) and Eador, which sucks so badly that they removed the "Linux" on their Steam page.
Just about every other Linux game I have bought is native. Life is good.
1 Likes, Who?
Just a heads up getting it to work on archlinux is a little tricky, steam tries to show you as a 32-bit OS when you need to be 64-bit for this game. I have gotten PoE to work by installing steam-native from the aur and running LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/usr/lib" STEAM_RUNTIME=0 steam
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Just a heads up getting it to work on archlinux is a little tricky, steam tries to show you as a 32-bit OS when you need to be 64-bit for this game. I have gotten PoE to work by installing steam-native from the aur and running LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/usr/lib" STEAM_RUNTIME=0 steam
Huh? Worked flawless without any manual intervention here.
After some hours played, I've to say this might be the best game (for me) since several years.
Honestly, it's extremely entertaining and worth every cent (if you at least liked the Baldurs Gate series).
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Just a heads up getting it to work on archlinux is a little tricky, steam tries to show you as a 32-bit OS when you need to be 64-bit for this game. I have gotten PoE to work by installing steam-native from the aur and running LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/usr/lib" STEAM_RUNTIME=0 steam
Huh? Worked flawless without any manual intervention here.
After some hours played, I've to say this might be the best game (for me) since several years.
Honestly, it's extremely entertaining and worth every cent (if you at least liked the Baldurs Gate series).
I dunno, it just crashed for me and after some googling it looked like it could be a 32-bit issue so I tried STEAM_RUNTIME=0 now it works flawlessly.
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Works out of the box running from Steam with Manjaro and Funtoo. Performance wise, It's one of the best Linux games I've experienced in quite some time.
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Finally got to play some tonight -- I'm liking this one a LOT so far!!!
:D
:D
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Ok, which difficulty to choose..?
Last time I played BG more than a decade ago and wasn't a master either.
According to the hints, I should take the 'easy' route.
What's your experience in a similar situation and what did you take?
Thanks!
From what I understand even easy is not quite easy. I chose Normal because I read the game is fairly challenging as it is and it's true. Normal is probably what would constitute as hard is most modern games but still not unfair like Dark Souls for example. The game is hard in the sense you have to figure out the right way to approach a battle and not how many times you replay an encounter till you manage to make it through. In the 10 hours I've played so far, the game managed to throw a new challenge at me every time I was starting to feel a bit too comfortable with the enemies, without me feeling overwhelmed.
PS A free tip - when you first meet Shadows - leave at least a mediocre fighter near your wizard or you're in for an unpleasant surprise :)
2 Likes, Who?
Ok, which difficulty to choose..?
Last time I played BG more than a decade ago and wasn't a master either.
According to the hints, I should take the 'easy' route.
What's your experience in a similar situation and what did you take?
Thanks!
I'd say just go with easy and if it's not challenging enough just change the difficulty. Fortunately the difficulty can be changed at any time (I really hate it when the difficulty can only be set at the beginning, when I know little about which level is right for me. A frustratingly hard level is as annoying as a non-challenging expererience). HTH.
2 Likes, Who?
Ok, which difficulty to choose..?
Last time I played BG more than a decade ago and wasn't a master either.
According to the hints, I should take the 'easy' route.
What's your experience in a similar situation and what did you take?
Thanks!
I'd say just go with easy and if it's not challenging enough just change the difficulty. Fortunately the difficulty can be changed at any time (I really hate it when the difficulty can only be set at the beginning, when I know little about which level is right for me. A frustratingly hard level is as annoying as a non-challenging expererience). HTH.
From what I understand even easy is not quite easy. I chose Normal because I read the game is fairly challenging as it is and it's true. Normal is probably what would constitute as hard is most modern games but still not unfair like Dark Souls for example. The game is hard in the sense you have to figure out the right way to approach a battle and not how many times you replay an encounter till you manage to make it through. In the 10 hours I've played so far, the game managed to throw a new challenge at me every time I was starting to feel a bit too comfortable with the enemies, without me feeling overwhelmed.
PS A free tip - when you first meet Shadows - leave at least a mediocre fighter near your wizard or you're in for an unpleasant surprise :)
Thank you, guys!
I realized only later that you can change the difficulty on the fly.
Now with easy difficulty it feels easy enough but, indeed, not really easy.
Funny that you mention the Shadows. The first encounter with three of them -
I had only one other group member at that time - required me to earn enough money to
get a second group member. I was lost otherwise.
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For me, hard is good right now. But don't know what it's like above that (right now), but once I got all the mechanics it's probably not too difficult either.
Easy was just too boring, because you can get to the drake at level3, and do the first two levels in lighthouse at 4-5.
What's really strange about the game: I can skill whatever I want, it does not matter, it makes it a bit easier certainly, what really decides it the level (I tried that trying to clear lighthouse with a Fighter l5 full def, and l7 full int - rest of the party wrong-skilled as well, which isn't of any use there at all).
Easy was just too boring, because you can get to the drake at level3, and do the first two levels in lighthouse at 4-5.
What's really strange about the game: I can skill whatever I want, it does not matter, it makes it a bit easier certainly, what really decides it the level (I tried that trying to clear lighthouse with a Fighter l5 full def, and l7 full int - rest of the party wrong-skilled as well, which isn't of any use there at all).
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For me, hard is good right now. But don't know what it's like above that (right now), but once I got all the mechanics it's probably not too difficult either.
Easy was just too boring, because you can get to the drake at level3, and do the first two levels in lighthouse at 4-5.
What's really strange about the game: I can skill whatever I want, it does not matter, it makes it a bit easier certainly, what really decides it the level (I tried that trying to clear lighthouse with a Fighter l5 full def, and l7 full int - rest of the party wrong-skilled as well, which isn't of any use there at all).
Well I'd argue that there is no wrong skilled character in this game. That is what makes PoE's system superior to D&D and especially the AD&D the old Infinity games were made after. Why shouldn't Might (Attack) matter for a Wizard and Intelligence matter for a fighter. Fighters always had to be dribbling morons. Why? In Bauldur's Gate half your character didn't matter and in Planescape: Torment only Intelligence, Wizdom and Charisma really did and considering you gained a skill point with each level, by the game the Nameless One is for all intents and purposes a living god (which admittedly was more or less the intentional).
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darkone778 Apr 1, 2015
So having spent a good amount of time with PoE now. I most definitely have to say that I am so glad that I back this game on Kickstarter. I have always been a big fan of the Infinity Engine games. I know for myself I have backed Wasteland 2, PoE, and Torment. I have yet to be disappointed in them thus far.
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So having spent a good amount of time with PoE now. I most definitely have to say that I am so glad that I back this game on Kickstarter. I have always been a big fan of the Infinity Engine games. I know for myself I have backed Wasteland 2, PoE, and Torment. I have yet to be disappointed in them thus far.
I've put 40 hours in to it and really haven't been disappointed. Wasteland 2 was one of my favourite games from last year too. I didn't back Torment but going off the strength of this, I wish I had. Kickstarter has been really good to me so far.
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Plintslîcho Apr 1, 2015
The game does look very good and interesting. And all the reviews I've read so far suggest that it is a very good game.
I've never really played Baldur's Gate, never really was interested in it. But this game got me interest.
I'm still torn between picking this up for the full price (and which of the different versions) or wait till it get's a little cheaper.
Now it's the Humble Indie Bundle and Torchlight II first for me anyway.
I've never really played Baldur's Gate, never really was interested in it. But this game got me interest.
I'm still torn between picking this up for the full price (and which of the different versions) or wait till it get's a little cheaper.
Now it's the Humble Indie Bundle and Torchlight II first for me anyway.
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Wow! I finally succumbed and got it. First impressions - it's REALLY good.
I'm also able to play it on my laptop with an Intel HD4000. Frames rates are low, around 16-20fps, but I find that's playable for this kind of game. It might get worse in busy combat, but I'm still starting out and so far so good.
I'm also able to play it on my laptop with an Intel HD4000. Frames rates are low, around 16-20fps, but I find that's playable for this kind of game. It might get worse in busy combat, but I'm still starting out and so far so good.
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