Lore too convoluted? (No spoilers)

I'm about 13 hours into the game and I am absolutely loving it. However, I find myself completely overwhelmed by the lore of this game.. just went through the dialogue with Durance, and damn he has a lot to say about everything. There are just so many concepts, nations, historical events in this world..

Am I just getting older and less patient trying to understand the story? I played through all of the Infinity engine games and I never had problems immersing myself in the world and understanding the context of the lore. But here it is just so much to grasp for me.

Am I alone in this, or does anyone else feel this way?

@osheadiesstupid: Dont worry , it can be heafty sometimes but you dont really need to care about every civilisation, god and war. Everything will come together nicely in managable chunks as you go on.

Especially Durance is just a wall of meaningless text in the start of the game and not my favourite character. But Durance being an insane rambling priest is basicly the thing about him so it is well done in a sense, you are supposed to grow confused and weary with his constant ramblings ;)

Yeah I definitely feel you on that. The sheer quantity of text in this game is really really excessive. Well beyond the amount found in any Infinity Engine games of the past. I didn't mind Durance but I found the "flashback" npcs rather annoying.

Still love the game though.

@johntunoku: you should take the "flashback npcs" for what they are. Storys by kickstarterbackers. Some of them can be really well written but as expected the quality is very uneaven. They are absolutly optional. To be clear we are walking about npcs with yellow nameplate right?

@rethla: that makes so much more sense now. I didn't know those were all written by kickstarters. I am pretty thorough in RPGs but I had to give up on reading all of them . Especially since they have zero connection or impact to my story, and they don't seem to offer any xp rewards. Some of them are good, though

@rethla: Ohhh didn't know that was a kickstarter thing.

I had a hard time telling people, gods and places apart in the beginning which made it difficult to comprehend certain events they talk about. But I usually have that problem with fantasy. It gets easier after a while.

Although I really like the game, I can't deny that all this excessive detail reminds me of Kingdoms of Amalur and when R.A. Salvadore wrote "10,000 years of lore" enough to span 5 RPGs and 2 MMOs...

I had no background in D&D at all when I played Baldur s Gate 1&2 and I found it to be an awesome self contained story.

Anyway, I am really enjoying my time with pillars and expect to do so for many dozen hours to come

The game is a little too dense with lore dumping, yeah. All you really need to know is that a few years ago they blew up someone purporting to be the incarnation of a god with a giant bomb made with the help of another god. Or something like that. Eir Glarfarth.

@arbitrarywater: The hilarious part about "The Godhammer" is that its never fully explained but it seems like a giant tribute to the atom smasher in Dwarf fortress. "The atom smasher" is a popular exploit where you can instantkill any enemy in the game by droping a drawbridge on them.

@osheadiesstupid: I never had a problem grasping the lore in Kingdoms of Amalur. It may have helped that most of the stuff I found was read by a lady with an Irish accent, which I find totally sexy. :D

I didn't think it was too dense or convoluted, to be honest. There's a lot going on, but it's pretty clear that they intend to make a sequel, so they try to dump a lot of stuff right now. Plus, the game's final portions shed a lot of light on the lore, so don't worry about it that much - Durance's story and everything about Eothas/Waidwen in particular will make a lot more sense once you get to the end of the larger plot.

And I don't know about the amount of text in previous Infinity Games - I don't have the exact number on Pillars of Eternity, but Planescape: Torment's script had more than 800,000 words. PoE might have more, but I presume that some of it would be extraneous backer content. MCA is also a crazy person, and he has much less to do with this game than previous Obsidian projects.

I feel like the game is fairly understandable if only because it's much, much less meta than previous Obsidian games - Chris Avellone has a tendency for writing stuff that has a major role in the plot, but more importantly is some sort of metacommentary on the medium and game universe (most evidently with Kreia or Ulysses). This game is much more straightforward, what you see is what you get. This is especially notable with his two censored companions, Durance and Grieving Mother, as both have angles that are supposed to provide a very different and very darker perspective on the lore and the world's rules, but Durance is pretty much just a more interesting lore dump (and has no extra dialogue with an Eothasian priest Watcher, which kinda makes me angry) while GM's "just" the game's aspect of Ravel (whose characterization actually is integrated into the game, since only the Watcher can see her).

@ghostiet: you just kinda spoiled a party member for me, one that I haven't encountered yet. But I could not care less, comparing her to Ravel from PS:t makes me even more excited to play this game more and hate the shit out of my job which is a constant obstacle in my progression.

Just made it to Defiance Bay after 16 hrs and looking forward to discovering more, as I feel like I'm still very much just starting my adventure

@osheadiesstupid: Ah, sorry, didn't think of that! But you shouldn't worry that much, they're not that far away from where you are now and are pretty obvious to find.

I wouldn't call it convoluted, unless you're using it a synonym for copious. Overall the writing is quite decent, but they don't do a great job of letting you know what is actually worth remembering, and what is just fantasy window dressing. Maybe the final act pulls everything together.

I agree fully! While I love the game; it's totally convoluted.

I've played numerous rpgs, both Black Isle, Obsidian and others. None of those games have as much shit in the story and lore as this game. When playing the other games I've always read everything related the main story and side-quests and some books etc, but in Pillars of Eternity it's just too much stuff that carries no real meaning. Be it necessary information, explanation of the world, motivation for the players' or actors' actions in the game or what have you. It's just too much shit one can't muster up any interest in!

My feeling is that other games' writing, for example Baldur's Gate 2's, had some sense as to what would be interesting to the player, not to mention, in my opinion, good motivation. In Pillars of Eternity you have to wade through text that does not contribute enough to the experience to carry their weight, and overall it's just too much meaningless, wordy blocks of text. Further, being a Watcher one can see past experiences of characters in the game but I have yet to read an interesting soul. It's like OK that chick had a good summer day at one time and that guy got beaten by a city guard yeah whatever..!

It's so frustrating because everything else about this game is just awesome, except perhaps for the all too few possible NPC party companions. I really, really hope there will be a sequel soon but please Obsidian make the words fucking count please!!

If you want to scale back on the reading, the reading of souls is the very first thing you should just stop doing.

Those are sometimes prodded by the devs to keep them inside the bounds of the lore (I assume???) but that's text from people who backed the game. If you've not found any that you've enjoyed reading, that's a really good section of the game to just not engage with. You're not missing anything core to the story or lore by just not reading KS backer fanfic.

Personally, I enjoy the depth of lore, but then you'll also find me enjoying the books of Morrowind so I clearly like my lore to be far too big for the game it is contained within.

The backer NPCs can be skipped without second thoughts and come close to being a noticeable flaw of the game if you don't have the meta-knowledge of why they're there, I agree with that. None of the other stuff is really extraneous by the end. It's simply a matter of how deep you want to delve.

Other than that people stressed PoE'S similarity to BG 2 a little too much when the game came out. It has a healthy dose of P:T influence (which I love and was pleasantly surprised by) and I'd be surprised if PoE was crazier than Torment. The dialoge trees in that game ... my god.

To me PoE is the best of both worlds in many ways. BG's polished mechancis and clear progression with P:T's heady philosophical themes. PoE frames very similar ideas in a more focussed and clear way. And though it has a tamer visual style it gets about as trippy as P:T during the endgame.

One last note: depending on how you choose to progress through the game you might be able to access pivotal pieces of information very early or pretty late. P:T "forced" you into hardcore, open-ended worldbuilding early on and then got to swift plot development later. BG2, I remember being more evenly paced. PoE has a (relatively) short intro phase and a succinct endgame and "everything else" in between.

TLDR: It's an Obsidian game, not a Bioware game. That info got a little lost.

Anyone have a good source for a summary of PoE lore shenanigans. I am about to get into the Whitemarch expansion, and while I was on board with the PoE lore during the ride for the most part, chunks of it are starting to get hazy as it was some time ago. Would be awesome if there was a solid breakdown somewhere.

@tennmuerti said:

Don't forget about the in-game encyclopedia! It is actually less bloated than one could expect given the rest of the games writing.