I'm now pretty far into Pillars Of Eternity, and the results have been mixed. For a while there I was definitely thinking "This is it, this is Baldur's Gate III. It's the game we've been waiting for", and I mostly still feel that way, but in the last couple of sessions the flaws have been shining through pretty hard.
It's obviously an ambitious attempt to re-create a tabletop roleplaying experience, but it still has so far to go that it makes me question whether any game will ever actually pull a true simulation off, and whether it's even worth bothering to try. I just went back and did a side quest that I missed from earlier in the game involving infiltrating a corrupt lord's stronghold and overthrowing him. The game gives you like a dozen different possible routes to get into the keep, which is great, but once I actually got into his throne room and talked to him, the number of conversation options I had were shockingly low. After all of that nuance in physically reaching him, the only options I was given were basically "Die, evil guy!" or "Yes, I am evil too, let's team up and kill the guy who hired me". Maybe that wouldn't have been that surprising under normal circumstances, but after all of the effort that was put into his castle, the conversation felt almost insultingly simple.
Part of that has to do with the fact that I did this quest out of sequence, I recognize that. Most of the evil stuff this guy did could be attributed to a disease that's wiping out his people, and he's getting desperate and crazy trying to stop it. But at the point in the game that I am right now, I know what the real cause of the disease is. If I had my way I would tell him what I know and try to redirect his efforts to the actual cause. By all logic I should be able to make him my ally, but the game won't let me try, and that's sad. But even if I didn't sequence break this quest, I should still have more options. I should be able to brainwash him with magic or take him out in secret and replace him with one of my people in disguise, or something. If the game is going to give me ten different ways to get into his throne room, I want ten different things to do once I'm there. It feels like they took a ton of care for the first 95% of the quest, then just gave up.
Aside from that, which I feel like is a fundamental flaw with the way the game is built, I've been having a handful of smaller, more one-time problems. Like in the dungeon I'm doing right now I saved before a big fight (because the game almost invariably forces you to start story-relevant fights completely surrounded-although that's a different problem), died on a completely unrelated fight that I didn't see coming a little later, and reloaded. But once I reloaded everything had gone crazy. Upon loading I found that the game had somehow teleported my priest into a room on the opposite end of the map that I hadn't even explored yet, which was full of monsters that shredded him in like a second. That would be bad enough, but apparently encounters are written such that if you enter an encounter while you're also near hostile NPCs who aren't actually fighting you, like I was right before I saved, they'll immediately enter combat without any prompts or options. So not only is my priest gone, but I have to do an extremely difficult encounter without him, and I start that encounter surrounded. I can probably win with a few tries, but it's going to be a serious grind. This is the biggest bug (I'm assuming it's a bug?) that I've encountered so far, but it seems like a big one.
Also, I finally figured out what wizards are supposed to do in this game since nearly every single one of their spells is either nerfed into uselessness or level shifted upward. Turns out that the only spell that isn't nerfed, and is in fact massively buffed by the game's mechanics, is Grease (called Slicken in this game). This means that if I'm playing my wizard right he's just a crowd control machine who constantly knocks down big groups of enemies. No attacking, no summoning, no enhancements, just constant, dedicated crowd control. It's powerful, but it feels kind of lame. Maybe there's a DPS wizard build out there somewhere, I assume there is, but I have no idea how I would go about making one. So instead I'll just cast Grease five times an encounter with occasional Confusion and Sleeps thrown in for variety. Not incredibly happy with that, but it's better than just sucking like I was doing before.
So yeah, I like the game a lot, but the ambition of it is a slightly mixed bag. Is it the true heir to the isometric RPG throne? Probably. I'm not 100% convinced, but there's a lot of good stuff going on here, and relatively little bad. It's just that because most of it is so solid the bad stuff tends to stand out pretty hard, and much of it seems like it's a result of design decisions rather than just technology limitations or oversight, and that's not great.