4/29/2023 0 Comments Pillars of eternity races![]() Those races that you will recognise have been dragged out of their generic fantasy lives and thrust into new ones. There are strange places and distant lands that you’ll learn more about as you play. And when you build these characters, you’re not just putting them together from a list of races and stats – you’re choosing their backgrounds and exactly where in the world they hail from, too. The familiar sits beside the alien, Tolkien and Gygax mixing with creatures spawned from the minds of Obsidian. ![]() Your typical fantasy races, your Dwarves, your Elves, they are all there, in the world of Eora, but they are joined by people mutated by the gods, with elemental and magical properties and strange protrusions jutting out of their skulls colourful giants that sail the oceans as pirates, mercenaries and explorers and furry, halfling-like folk who are sometimes feral, sometimes “civilised”. It starts right at the beginning, in character creation. The improvements that Pillars heaps onto the tried and tested formula that dominated the genre in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s are many, though they are made with a gentle touch. You’ll recognise a lot, but there are surprises and novelties and moments where you’ll go, “Oh crap, why wasn’t it like this in 1998?” But everything’s just a little bit different. It might not rely on nostalgia, but that doesn’t mean Obsidian hasn’t made it extremely familiar. That’s when Pillars’ claws sunk into my flesh. “You must gather your party before venturing forth.” I heard it again. That one line, often repeated, seems to me to capture that. D&D and tabletop roleplaying are games to be played with friends, where companionship and adventure go hand in hand. These games are so much more than one character’s journey – they’re about parties, travelling, fighting and even falling in love. It just means that you have to wait for your whole party to get together before you can transition to a new area. It’s strange how such an innocuous phrase can have meaning and memories piled onto it. The first time I heard that phrase was in 1999, a month after Baldur’s Gate came out.
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