Pillars of Eternity 1's Downloadable Content

I have to confess something.  Something terrible and degrading, a secret which has festered within me for 7 years now, like a lingering, decayed fragment of me at odds with the rest of my soul.  But I’m tired of it--tired of keeping up the facade of a discerning, cultured critic, tired of trying to maintain this farce that I’m respectable, that I’m worthy of your time and consideration.  Because the shocking, dismaying truth is...

Pillars of Eternity 1 just didn’t really do anything for me.

Woedica knows I wanted it to.  PoE1 was 1 of the first RPGs I ever helped crowdfund!  I was enamored by its theme and concepts, and by the idea of the writers behind it being able to make what they wanted without the pressures and expectations of ignorant larger publishers restricting them.  And I DID like it, and appreciate it, make no mistake.  I recognize how interesting and thoughtful its setting and lore are, I recognize that it has a good story, I recognize that much of its cast is terrifically written and unique!  There is a ton about Pillars of Eternity 1 that is great and even brilliant, and I see this and acknowledge it and respect it...objectively.

It just somehow never really managed to get past that point of appreciation from afar, for me.  A few parts of it managed to penetrate deeper, like the Grieving Mother--such a great character!--but not enough that the game ever spoke to me the way I thought it was going to, the way that I think it did most other people.  I don’t know why that is.  I’ll openly admit that Pathfinder: Kingmaker, though most certainly a great RPG, doesn’t have the same weight, intellectual power, or significance that Pillars of Eternity 1 possesses...but I love Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and I only dispassionately appreciate Pillars of Eternity 1.  I don’t know why that is, but I can’t pretend otherwise.

So basically what I’m saying is that you should probably disregard everything I’m about to say in today’s rant and just come back next time, when maybe I’ll have a subject that I actually know something about.



The White March, Part 1: This add-on’s got some definite charms.  You gotta appreciate the polish, for starters--it’s not the only game to do this, but any time a development team pays such attention to detail that characters breathe vapor in cold environments, you’ve got a work that you know the creators truly wanted to do everything in their power to get right.  That and the fact that NPCs trying to put out a burning house are pathed to run back and forth to the nearby water (to fetch it and throw it on the fire) and even exchange dialogue while filling their buckets were examples of the DLC’s high level of polish that struck me right from the get-go.

Beyond the polish, I also laud the extent that the soul-reading was incorporated into the quest to open Durgan’s Battery--it’s as interesting an experience as it was in the main game, and a lot of effort is put into some of the memory/previous life recollections, even when they aren’t relevant to the quest itself.  The mayor’s memory, for example, is not the one you’re looking for in that quest, but it’s an engaging snapshot of her history (as well as that of the town) that’s well-written and spared no effort.  There’s some decent sidequests--I rather liked the one involving the head of the foundry, and the ongoing and evolving history of the quest where you’re collecting relics and soul-reading them is nicely done--and both Zahua and the Devil of Caroc are decently written characters.

With all that said, I gotta say...The White March kinda feels like Obsidian’s team mostly was trying to recapture the glory days of Icewind Dale.*  As a result, a lot of this DLC--most of it, really--feels very Dungeons-and-Dragons-generic to me.  Like most of it could have been taken from any base pre-written adventure outline that a DM might use for a placeholder session between main campaigns.  Durgan’s Battery, for example, doesn’t really feel like it has any actual personality of its own--it just comes off to me like a timid mash-up of a Dragon Age 1 dwarven stronghold and Durlag’s Tower from Baldur’s Gate 1, while not as compelling as either.  The abandoned dwarven fortress trope that Tolkien started is wearing thin these days, and little of Durgan’s Battery stands out enough to refresh the cliche.

Also, what’s even the point of the side story with Concelhaut?  It’s pointless and dull.  If the majority of The White March, Part 1 feels like an experienced DM just buying himself time with a generic premade outline while he works on the next part of his real campaign, then the little sidequest of infiltrating Concelhaut’s pad feels like a first time DM reading lines from a tabletop starter pack.

Lastly, while Zahua’s a good character, he absolutely should have been in the main game, not an add-on character.  Zahua’s quirk of reveling in suffering and discomfort as a way of Keeping It Real Bro is the kind of personality basis that best cements itself over time and quantity of examples.  If he’d been with me for the entire PoE1 adventure, then he’d be a much more singular, stand-out personality to me, because his character would have had the time to fully impress itself upon me.  Like...imagine if instead of being a major character in the show, Ed from Cowboy Bebop was only present in its movie.  She’d still be fun and engaging, but she wouldn’t be memorable, wouldn’t be iconic, as the personality and character she is, not for any lack of skill on the writers’ part, but simply for lack of time to really capitalize on who and what she is.  That’s how Zahua feels to me--a couple DLCs just don’t cut it for a singularly quirky character.

So yeah, in the end, The White March, Part 1 is not a bad add-on, but nothing about it rises high enough that I’d call it a good one, either.  And at an unreasonable $15 (I don’t see most players getting 15 hours out of it), “neither bad nor good” does not cut it.


The White March, Part 2: I guess I’d say this is a step up from the first add-on.  The main story of Part 2 has some significance and actually goes somewhere, for starters, even though that substance only shows up toward the end of the DLC’s overall quest.  Likewise, the side bit about who legally owns Caed Nua is a hell of a lot more interesting than competing with some mercenaries for the right to indulge in some breaking and entering of Concelhaut’s stupid tower.

With that said, it still doesn’t really seem like the whole thing amounts to all that much, as an adventure.  While the choice that the new enemies wind up posing regarding the restoration of the god Abydon, and how one views the past, is compelling material, it takes a while to get there, and until that point, this whole venture just feels like some more generic RPG mush with contrived enemies.  Meanwhile, the new character, Maneha, has 1 of the most thematically appropriate personal quests in the game, in theory, but in practice, it feels rushed and impersonal...and frankly, while she’s pleasant, affable, and outgoing, Maneha herself never really quite feels like she’s engaging with her companions as 1 of the party.  Something about her personality just feels like she took a wrong turn and wound up in a different game than she’d intended.

Ultimately?  While it feels like there’s more purpose and art tying this DLC to Pillars of Eternity 1 as a whole, it still seems, to me, not really worth the trouble to play through The White March, Part 2.  Particularly not when you’re expected to pay a whopping $15 for this one, too--you’re almost definitely not getting that many hours out of it!



And the verdict on PoE1’s DLC scene is: a big, fat, dreary Meh.  Your results may vary, of course.  As I said going into this, for whatever reason, the game as a whole didn’t resonate with me the way it should have, so there’s every chance I just lack the ability to properly appreciate The White March, through no fault of the add-ons themselves.

Still...still, I do think I stand by my feeling that they’re not worth it, at least to a degree.  Maybe I never did feel Pillars of Eternity 1 the way I should have, but I’ve never had a problem seeing why it’s lauded and in recognizing the merits of its story, cast, setting, and lore.  Yet I haven’t been struck by this professional respect for the game at any point through my White March experience...hell, there’ve been more than a few occasions during the course of these DLCs when I just sort of wanted it to be done with, already.  The White March may not be outright stupid, negative, or damaging the way most RPGs’ add-on collections seem to be, and certainly it’s a step up from the last DLC I experienced (that being Final Fantasy 7 Remake’s)...but it’s still just not good, at least not to me.  If Pillars of Eternity 1 is a gourmet meal that my palette just can’t quite adapt itself to, then The White March is the microwaved TV dinner of Fantasy: serviceable, but not much more than that.  It’d be hard to recommend even at a rational price point, but the fact that it comes to a total of $30--which is as much as the game itself is being sold for at this time--I advise putting this on the ever-growing list of add-ons to steer clear of.












** Glory days which didn’t even exist to start with; Icewind Dale 1 and 2 were boring and meandering and can only thrive in an environment of pure rose-tinted nostalgia.