I missed the early heyday of BioWare and Black Isle/Obsidian’s licensed Dungeons and Dragons computer role-playing games; when Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, and Planescape: Torment  were published (early 2000s), I was pretty focused on the id Software family of Quake or Quake-derived first-person shooters. The first BioWare RPG I ever played was Neverwinter Nights, which was incredible, especially in multiplayer with a good Dungeon Master, but due to its “replicate pen & paper D&D” mandate, didn’t have the same dynamic as its predecessors. In NWN, the player controls only one character, and others in your party were either NPCs with hopefully-intelligent-but-maybe-not combat AI, or controlled by other actual players.

Anyway, it’s taken until now, about 10 hours in, for the combat mode of Pillars of Eternity to start feeling natural to me; at first I was seeing the endless stream of rolls, stats, and actions go by as you character and their comrades wail on monsters (or vice versa), and guessing frequently as to what would be effective or just avoid death at all. Another thing I missed as a young nerd was a long pen & paper campaign (Stephen - I remember the Rifts sessions at summer camp!), so maybe that’s why trying to resolving CPU-determined results back to my own character’s stats, much less min/max optimization of my character’s build or those of the companions seemed too tedious to bother with.

I think it’s a testament to Obsidian’s meticulous stated focus on making most player class/race/skill/talent variations viable and the combat system making intuitive sense while still having both the old CRPG and pen&paper foundations that after enough experience (I haven’t cleared Act I yet), managing more than just “my own” character (e.g., the character I feel most invested in because I chose the background, class, etc.) began to click: “Ok, my wizard needs to go here, my priest has some staff range, fighter needs to activate Defender to hold back at least three enemies” - I mean, every new game with unique elements has this cycle, but it’s still very gratifying to finally GET a system with a legacy/history like this one.

Other thoughts:
-It is kinda doofy that the tactical element this game introduces, engagement, is ignored by many of the earliest enemies you fight; I think the intent of engagement is to have value/cost associated with shifting targets to weaker party members or enemies, but you end up fighting shadows and phantoms fairly early on that can teleport behind your fighter(s) to wail on your softer wizards, priests, and/or chanters. Those fights just turned into furball melees that were winnable, but didn’t really reinforce the value of character placement when battle kicks off.
-This post focused on combat mechanics, but dialogue, mythology, and individual character backgrounds are of equal weight in CRPGs to me, and forgoing the D&D license here seems to have given Obsidian the creative freedom to come up with a story simultaneously in the vein of other fantasy settings but still very new.
-The backer-created (Pillars of Eternity only exists because of a Kickstarter campaign) NPC bios are mostly meh though.
-I don’t know of (out of ignorance) a setting with firearms and fantasy elements outside of Shadowrun, so a chanting fishman blowing away dragons with a shotgun is kinda funny to me.