Pillars of Eternity
was recently released, and Tides of
Numeria lurches on the horizon.
These old school RPGs bring me back to a process I've found compelling
since I was a young man: character generation.
In old school style RPGs, character generation was a highly detailed set
of decision trees that determined the entire game and, in so doing, eradicated
a multitude of other possibilities. In Fallout, there were traits you could
select that would open up whole new avenues of play, making the world more or
less surreal, your options more or less cerebral. Race and class choices in the Baldur's Gate series could eliminate
romantic options, but also collapse potential routes of diplomacy, or open them
up, as it happened. Neverwinter Nights, for all its failings, actually kept that
tradition alive to some extent. But many
contemporary games make a conscious effort to streamline or compartmentalize
character generation in a way that loses some aspect of the gravity or nuance
behind the process. Even games with
involved character generation frameworks, like the contemporary Fallouts, the Elder Scrolls games, or Dragon
Age: Inquisition, all feel somewhat anemic by comparison: while you can
customize your character quite a bit in each of those games, you'll find
yourself spending just as much or more time tweaking minor characteristics of
their appearance as you'll spend allocating stat points and skill focuses. And when you're done, your character will
usually unfold along a series of rails.
It's a bit disappointing, especially when you look back and realize
that, as recently as 2009, when Dragon
Age: Origins let you effectively write a backstory for your character as
part of your generation sequence.
Compare this to Dragon Age:
Inquisition, which lets you choose a race/class combo and a focus and, in
so doing, represented an expansion of the last iteration's available
choices. So what happened?
It would be easy to say that games have become less
involved, or more systematized. In Dragon Age: Origins, you might run down
a number of trees, letting your skill points unfold in one of hundreds of
potential patterns and, when all was said and done, you'd be left with a
character whose journey and skillset were both so distinct that no one else in
your friend group, even someone who played the game character type, might
actually have had the same experiences.
In Dragon Age: Inquisition, my
Carta Dwarf rogue and my Human Noble rogue might have different journeys in
some subtle ways (or not so subtle ways, like the Wicked Hearts ball) but the
core gameplay remains the same, assuming they're using the same focus. The focus shifts from occupying a space, or
the role of a character in a space, to navigating a set of systems from which a
series of play models are developed or unfurled.
In DA:I, one's
class is, first and foremost, the way one fights enemies. Mass
Effect's entries into RPG canon had a similar scope to them: your class
determined how you'd kill things, and some of your background elements might
manifest in other ways, like the way a particular piece of dialogue
unfolded. Nothing in your character
generation process would have real and lasting effects. Nothing about how you made your character
could open or close doors, the way it could in games like Baldur's Gate, or Arcanum. The art of making a character from the ground
up, inventing a story to go with them and engaging with their history and
skillset as a means of establishing them in a world you're participating in the
generation of, instead of simply moving through, dates back to tabletop
traditions, and it's no mistake that when I was flat broke and bored out of my
gourd a few years ago my favorite game actually became the trial version of the
D&D character generator that came out around the release of Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition. I'd spend hours creating and tweaking
characters, inventing narratives to accompany creations I knew I'd never have
time to play. My hard drive is still
littered with those templates, a gallery of heroes awaiting suitable adventures
through which to explore their tortured personal histories.
Enter Pillars of
Eternity.
A primarily Kickstart-funded game based on the best of these
old school RPGs, Pillars of Eternity
features a robust character generation framework is compelling robust. I spent almost two hours reviewing
possibilities, and I barely scratched the surface of what was available. Even the dishwater dull races like humans,
elves, and dwarves present subtypes and subclasses that have a direct impact on
the way the game unfolds, the backstory elements available to characters, and
the way that each character solves problems in the world. The most basic choice, like what your
character used to do before he started adventuring, has a mechanical effect on
the game, giving you a few skill-points, and opens up a whole new can of
backstory worms: certain dialogue options will be available to you based on
your selection, and new solutions to problems will become available because of
decisions you make in the opening bars of the game. I personally re-rolled my character halfway through
the prologue because I was unhappy with how my backstory was impacting my
gameplay options. I didn't want to be a
drifter - I wanted to be an ex-raider!
From specific dialogue to specific puzzle solutions, there's
a remarkable scope to the impact of Pillars
of Eternity's character generation systems.
Within the first hour of play I encountered a puzzle that only a
particular sub-group of one race could solve.
If you were a Fire Godlike, you could sort out this puzzle easily. If you weren't, tough. This puzzle wasn't for you. Move along.
That pattern has played out multiple times again for me, and I'm not
very far into the game: the choices you make while you're creating your
character are meaningful, and there's no sort of road-map there. It's one of the game-iest systems in the game
so far, and yet it's simultaneously unappologetically mechanical in its impact,
and crucial to how the narrative unfolds as well.
And Obsidian seems to know how much fun the process of
rolling up a character is for most players, since you can fill a party on the
fly with new characters that you generate from scratch on your own. Each one of these characters occupies a
subordinate position in your party, but their generation is just as rich and
rewarding as assigning traits to your main character can be. I want to meet the NPCs this world wants to
share with me, so I took it easy on generating new characters, but I did roll
up a dwarven warrior from the frozen north who made her living hunting before
coming to the south lands to seek her fortune.
She's a fan of dual wielding spears, and isn't a particularly social
person most of the time, which is fine.
She doesn't need to be social.
She's a hearthguard from the frozen north. She just needs to be stabby.
I'm looking forward to cranking out other characters in the
near future, like a merman paladin, or a godlike sorcerer with a face touched
forever by moonlight. These archetypes
are just fun to list off, and there are so many. There's so much original material to play
with in the world of Pillars of Eternity,
and Obsidian unveils so much of it through their character generation system
that it's impossible to interpret their action as anything but encouragement to
avail yourself of these systems. You can
learn about the peoples of the world, the mechanics of the game, and the
history of the landscape you're exploring, all without leaving the character
generation process. And what's more, as
you revisit it time and time again, you'll learn new facts, new bits of context
that inform things you've already learned, or preconceptions that you see
reflected in the world around you.
Obsidian has made an infinitely character driven experience in Pillars of Eternity, and your own contribution
to that conversation is just as important, rich, and fully developed as
anything their writers create. That's an
achievement, even by the lofty standards of old-school character generation
systems.
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