I played Pillars of Eternity in 2015. But only for 16 hours, never even finishing Act I. In 2015 I was still playing World of Warcraft, and we all know how time-consuming that can be. But as I wrote in my previous post, I have been watching a streamer playing Baldur's Gate 1, and that revived my interest in games that use this sort of graphics engine. Now I have two problems with games like Baldur's Gate 1: Real-time combat with pause isn't really my favorite, and the pre-rendered rectangular maps are often too large; that is to say, the game doesn't really have enough content for the size of the map, and you end up spending hours walking all over the map just to uncover the fog of war. Now Pillars of Eternity, having been released 17 years after Baldur's Gate, is already a lot more modern, didn't fall for the same trap, and made maps somewhat smaller than BG1. And then Obsidian Entertainment in a somewhat surprising move added turn-based mode to Pillars of Eternity this year in April.

So I decided to give Pillars of Eternity another try. To my surprise my save game from 2015 was still there due to the power of Steam cloud saves. But I prefered to start afresh. In my 2015 game I had played a rogue as my main character, for the simple reason that this was the character class most notably missing from the early companions you can pick up. In my 2026 run I went with a priest as main character because I like playing priests, and they are rather strong in Pillars of Eternity. And then I used previous knowledge as soon as I reached the first village to hire a rogue hireling to fill that lockpicking / trap disarming gap; and I skipped ahead a few zones to collect the first 4 companions: Edér the warrior, Aloth the mage, Durance the priest, and Kana the chanter. This allowed me to do the quests and the first dungeon of the starting village with a full group, which worked very well.

I'm only 8 hours into this second run. Apparently doing the main story plus side quests without the DLCs takes up to 70 hours. I don't know if I'll make it to the end game screen this time, but I'll give it a try. And then there is a still unplayed Pillars of Eternity 2 in my Steam library, so I'm unlikely to run out of 2D pre-rendered isometric map games anytime soon.