Obsidian's Project Eternity

Just finished the game, Steam tells me it took me slightly over 40 hours.

Warning: Rambling ahead:

I'm not a huge fan of conventional high fantasy, but I mostly enjoyed playing through it. I however do not expect to play through it more than two or three times over the next years. I'm not a fan of the used ruleset, with real time with pause combat, stuff like heavy armor giving you weird recovery debuffs but not affecting stealth, endurance vs health etc.

While it's a large world, I often felt disconnected from it. Feeling that while it flaunted choice & consequence in front of me, it mostly mattered little. You could easily see which direction the game is pushing you in and how they'd handle alternatives without actually have to branch out from their initial intent.

The quests can be resolved in multiple ways, but more often than not, logical, rational choices appear to be missing. Example: In one quest someone asks you to basically murder an infant. His son then asks you to poison his father instead. These are the only two choices given, outside of just slaughtering everyone in the room. The obviously omitted logical choice would be to inform the other tribe elders, let them sort it out?

Quest descriptions is often either too elaborate (babysitting) or too cryptic. Also don't dare make a logical jump to the answer of a quest, because you'll need to go talk to person X and person Y before you can talk to person Z who has the answer and is constantly named, but you REALLY shouldn't talk to Z because that'd be too logical.

Reputation is nice to have included both on city and faction level, but many times the reputation hits appear to be badly thought out and some actions result in unexpectedly large reputation hits for all the wrong reasons while others go entirely unpunished.

Having your own keep is not very fulfilling either, as it matters very little. You get to restore a bunch of stuff, but other than providing income & something for your unused party members to do, it didn't do much to me.
While the underlying story of the Endless Paths is not a bad one, it's largely a bore to fight your way through it. You're supposed to progress through it bit by bit, as you level up, but it's unclear at which level you're suppose to do it. Meaning you'll end up getting fucked in the ass multiple times without knowing if it's simply a leveling issue or the fact that you're totally missing something. It's not very fulfilling to fight through (though the end boss is more than a challenge if you decide to face it), though I guess it's just an elaborate dungeoncrawl with little more to it.

Plenty of annoying bugs obviously, as you've no doubt heard. Hirelings not getting paid properly half the time, item bonuses not getting applied unless you unequip them & re-equip them constantly between map changes or reloads,... Pathing issues in combat requiring you to babysit all party members at all times.

On the Troika scale, I'd put it far below Arcanum, but a rung above Temple Of Elemental Evil.

 

They removed the "offensive" joke. Totally ridiculous, given that it's not in any way saying it's good or bad. This is a game with overt genocide, racism, sexism, manipulation and whatnot, but a single little stupid user submited joke has to be removed for fear of backlash? Pffft.





edit: oops pasted wrong second image, correction below

 

Oops, linked the wrong replacement:
http://techraptor.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Firedorn-Lightbringer-Revised-Memorial-Poem.png

 

It's ironic that they removed a joke that actually makes fun of the narrowminded macho man who bedded the wrong partner & couldn't live with himself.

They removed an epitaph of a fictional in character guy that paid for the game to be developed. It was not out of place. It fits perfectly in the world, hell, the devs make fun of fucking animals and plants in the game. And even if it didn't fit, wouldn't be much of a problem since the players are already warned in game that the epitaphs are personal messages that break the fourth wall etc.

Because a person got offended, a joke was censored. And lets face it, someone is ALWAYS offended.
Censorship of this kind is dangerous. Either you can laugh at everything, or you can laugh at nothing. For who has the right to decide what is a good joke or one of bad taste? It's like discussing colors. Everyone has their own view & that won't change.

We can no longer laugh about religion, sexuality, gender, and so on because political correctness & appeasement is judged to be more important than freedom of speech and amusement.

I think the joke is rather poor, but I'll defend the backer's right to make it.

 

It's a joke. Maybe a bad joke, or even one with bad intentions (which it wasn't, since the writer is "on the same team").

They didn't need to defend anything.

The only thing they needed to say was "It's a joke, it's not ours, deal with it".

But no, they folded to the pressure because they feared social media drama of attention whores.

Exactly, so why remove it? It holds no bearing on the game at all.

He publicly stated he didn't want to rewrite it, given the opportunity, but it was either rewriting or removal.
That's called censorship.

You haven't even played the game, clearly. Since ingame it's stated that all epitaphs are not written by Obsidian.

Stop removing harmless content because some people are needlessly offended. Stop giving in and stand by your goddamn principles.