Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Sun Sets on Pillars of Eternity!

I finally finished Pillars of Eternity after nearly a month of hemming and hawing at the edge of completion.  I spent most of that time working to finish off the last of the side quests, specifically the staggeringly challenging boss battle that concludes the side quest set inside of the keep you capture in the first half of the game.  Pillar's conclusion was everything I'd hoped for, resplendent with the kind of context-sensitive closure that classic CRPGs have always provided.  Character specific and town-by-town "future history" breakdowns emerging from a storyline that adjusted to decisions made in the context of the game served as a button to the entire experience. These buttons emerge along with a set of in-story decisions that establish large portions of the lost history of the world of Pillars, which made me feel like I was doing more than just divining the path my characters would travel in the future; I was shaping the world that they'd come of age in. These features, and many, many more, recalled all the things I loved about old-school RPGs, all of the things Pillars of Eternity reminded me I was missing.

It's bittersweet to be finished at last for a few reasons, among them the fact that, with Pillars in my rearview, I've now got a series of emotionally draining adventure games lined up to play.  But there's also a certain totality in completing a game like Pillars, a sort of "completeness" that unfurls in how the game's sprawling set of interests engage with your own interactions with the world and characters around you that, in a sense, "kills" future narrative in the framework of the game by eliminating or completing possibilities in favor of leaving the narrative frame open ended.  It's something that Pillars does exceptionally well, creating a cast of characters I genuinely care about with relatively little effort, and helping me get to know them better as they insert their already-bursting personalities into each interaction that the game permits them to poke their heads into.  Pillars so deftly winds these characters into its world, and uses them to bestow an already bursting narrative landscape with a very real pulse, that the closure it provides in its finishing bars is feels like closure rendered upon its entire fictional universe, as if I'm not just finishing a book, but instead watching a set of friends live out the rest of their lives in fast-motion.

That isn't necessarily a bad thing: that Pillars made me feel so invested in the first place is, in and of itself, a staggering achievement.  I'm one jaded motherfucker, and making me feel for characters is no mean feat.  That I wanted to see every single character in Pillars, even that weird little Orlan dude who didn't seem to have a developed side-quest, find the peace they were looking for is saying something.  Feeling loss at the departure of a cast of characters you love deeply isn't a negative: it means that you felt some sort of connection to the world you were inhabiting, some connection to the people within it.

What's more disconcerting is that this feeling is so rare, so exceptional in this age of CRPGs.

Or rather, it was until recently.  Even well crafted open world RPGs from the last market-cycle of games, RPGs like say, Skyrim, were fairly weak-tea in the character development department.  When I reflect on Skyrim, I have trouble thinking of characters as having distinct personalities.  But when I look at the last year  and a half, stretching back to Wasteland 2, I find myself tripping over well-crafted games whose worlds I'm missing post-completion.  There's something of a classic-gaming renaissance hitting the scene, a phenomena which seems to owe itself to equal parts market-flux (Dragon Age: Inquisition, after all, was superlative) and the realization of a number of Kickstarter backed games that serve what was perceived as a "niche" audience which, as it turns out, isn't so niche after all.  Wasteland 2, Pillars of Eternity, and the upcoming Torment: Tides of Numenera all found their backing on Kickstarter, and they're all superlative examples of world crafting that can hold their own with classics as venerable as any Black Isle title of old.

These democratized funding models, which were until quite recently all but inconceivable, are producing some pretty rousing successes.  Many of the biggest critical successes in recent memory are the product of Kickstarter funding, while many of the bigger disappointments and flops are stemming from large studios.  That isn't to say that large studios aren't killing it themselves: Fallout 4 looks superlative, and appears to be interested in the same kind of relationship-building that Fallout: New Vegas so aptly engaged in.  But these games are still exceptions: in the world of CRPGs, you're less likely to hear about that cool character interaction that spun out of your gameplay experience, and far more likely to hear about a given set piece, or series of set-pieces, that players had a chance to interact with.  The shift away from "characters" to "things" is demonstrative of an overarching trend towards spectacle, one that's dominated many games, and game franchises, in recent history.  Consider the Call of Duty series, which spent itself in a single title creating characters that players found memorable, and then stretched the spectacle of their series out over a dozen or two games, constantly upping the stakes for each new title, demanding that players invest themselves in a series of explosions devoid from any context, beyond that drawn with the broadest of strokes.  Even games like the Borderlands series, bursting at the seams with personality, often don't give players space to form meaningful connections with various characters.  When I think about Borderlands 2, which was stuffed to the brim with interesting characters, I don't really reflect on the way those characters changed or engaged with the world in new and interesting ways during our time together.  I don't fondly recall the connection I felt to, say, Lilith, or Roland.  Instead, I find myself thinking of the cool things they did, and then puzzle at how they changed or developed after the closing bars of the game.

It's not that spectacle is bad, or that a spectacle of characters is bad.  It's that there's something to be said for a small number of meaningful character interactions, and that the native space for that, the light-tactical story centric RPG, has been relatively uncurated in recent gaming history.  Now, as these spaces re-emerge, it's clear that the market for these experiences, left largely fallow by Interplay's bankruptcy, never really went away.  It was just separated from its various consumers, hungry, and clamoring for more game.  Now that there's finally a way for these people to communicate directly with the people who make these games, to communicate directly with these people and collectively back them in a heretofore unheard of kind of direct communication, it's only natural that a renaissance of character could emerge.  For these titles, these small-party RPGs, rely almost entirely on their characters to drive their stories forward.  Their struggles become our struggles, and, as such, their departures remove connections that we've forged from our own lives.  Let us hope, then, that the loss of these connections is merely temporary, as it was in the old days, the heydays of the CRPG that we are just now beginning to see a return to.