It's fair to say that among the neglected and destitute genres that have benefited from the recent rise and popularity of crowdfunding, the classical CRPG is near the top of the list. Between Wasteland 2 and Divinity: Original Sin (along with non-crowdfunded efforts like Might and Magic X), 2014 was an excellent year for a style of game that had long been sidelined by more mainstream, mass-market RPGs. And now this year we have Pillars of Eternity, Obsidian's entry into the foray and in my personal opinion the best of these sorts of games to have come out of Kickstarter. I think Divinity has some fantastic combat and mechanical complexity, but I found its writing to be lacking. On the other hand, I think Wasteland 2 makes the mistake of bringing along a lot of the unwanted baggage from those old RPGs in addition to the things people loved about them. PoE sidesteps both of those issues rather gracefully; creating a well-written, well-made RPG that adheres to a classical style without many of the problems and anachronisms its forebears were saddled with.
Not coincidentally, Pillars of Eternity is also the crowdfunded RPG that acts as a spiritual successor to some of my personal favorites from the genre: namely the games made on Bioware's Infinity Engine. I count Baldur's Gate (1 and 2), Icewind Dale (1, maybe 2) and Planescape Torment among my favorite games of all time. It definitely takes most of its cues from the Baldur's Gate side of the equation, inasmuch as you create a single character, recruit NPC companions and engage in a balanced mix of combat and dialogue, but the Obsidian touch is definitely seen in the game's writing, reactivity and mechanics. However, Pillars is also no mere "spiritual successor". It goes out of its way in every facet of its aesthetic to evoke those games without directly cribbing from those games. Is it the pre-rendered backgrounds, the isometric camera? What about the character portraits, loading screens, the way the UI is designed? Or the soundtrack which sounds suspiciously similar to the soundtrack of Baldur's Gate 1 while still sounding like its own thing? Much like The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, it skirts the line between "blatant clone" and "loving homage" perhaps a little too close before sliding into the second camp before the end of its play time. It's not something I was personally going to complain about, but I also have zero idea what anyone without that Infinity Engine background might think about the game in general.
Still, to compare Pillars of Eternity entirely to Baldur's Gate (despite those comparisons being warranted and invited by the game itself) would be a disservice to the ways it differentiates itself from the games it seeks to evoke. It's not using the Dungeons and Dragons License or ruleset and I'd say Obsidian's style of writing is significantly different from Bioware's writing circa 1998/2000. The world of Eora isn't especially different from the stock fantasy world of the Forgotten Realms (which deserves more credit than it gets, I think), but the main conceit revolves around the importance of souls and the cycle of life, death and reincarnation that is indisputable in that world. Obsidian has a lot of fun playing around with the ideas and implications that would be brought on by those concepts and the story uses them to a great degree with great success. However, Pillars also falls into the trap of thinking the minutiae of its lore is something that would be just as interesting to the player as it was to the person who thought of it in the first place; thus a torrent of proper nouns, hard-to-pronounce names and outside cultures that don't really have any direct impact on your situation, ready to be filed away in the same compartment of your brain that skimmed through all of those codex pages in Mass Effect. The characters too are an eclectic bunch, especially your NPC companions, all of whom are far more grounded and less quirky than they may initially appear. It took me a while to warm up to some of them, but they're all likeable, if not all necessarily loveable (and not just because the game doesn't have any romances) folk who have their share of problems that you inevitably will help them solve (or not. In a weird twist, a lot of your companions' questlines end on deliberately anticlimactic notes) while they make sure to comment on whatever situations you manage to find yourself in. Durance is a shabby priest of the fire goddess who is going to teach you some shit about life. Grieving Mother projects a psychic shield that hides her appearance from the rest of your crew. To them, she's an unremarkable peasant woman who they forget about almost the second you bring her up in conversation. Aloth is a very polite, high strung Elven wizard with some split personality issues, etc etc. I will say that there aren't any stinkers in the bunch, but I also sort of doubt that any of them will get the sort of following that the best party members of Mass Effect and company have attracted, maybe as a result of them all being as well-rounded as they are.
The game also departs from its D&D roots in a mechanical sense, for whatever similarities it may have in the "real-time with pause" combat that defined the Infinity Engine. Being built from the ground-up, it makes much more sense from a computer game perspective than the tabletop adaptions of its forebears. There is far less focusing on pre-buffing your party before battle, there is a layer of temporary HP that regenerates between every battle called Endurance (your actual health still goes down and cannot be replenished easily without rest), a lot of abilities have "per-encounter" rather than "per-rest" requirements and the stats are structured in such a way that every class or build of character could find some use out of them. An intelligent Barbarian could rage longer and have a wider area of effect with his passive splash attack bonus, for example. It's all intelligently designed if not extremely flashy or dynamic in the way that something like Divinity's character progression is, but it works well for letting you make whatever sort of team you want to make and make it work out okay. There's also no "Charisma" equivalent, instead your stats and skills determine what sorts of dialogue options might appear. The end result of all of this are mechanics that are complex enough to be interesting without being especially obtuse or archaic the same way 2nd Edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons could be. There's even a "Fast Speed" button that seems specifically designed to minimize the amount of time it takes for your party to move from one end of a map screen to the other. That's the kind of streamlining I like, even if the subsequent load times between screens was occasionally a little much for my poor computer. Also, in opposition to Obsidian's usual reputation as a developer of buggy games, I never ran into anything super janky or game-breaking in Pillars of Eternity, though the game has been patched several times since I started playing.
I guess what really sells Pillars of Eternity to me is its solid, quiet excellence at evoking games of the past without being entirely overshadowed by them. I think Obsidian has written better stories before (See: Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer), I think Baldur's Gate 2 still might be a better RPG on its own terms, but those two examples are some of the best in the genre. It's like complaining that any given Mario game isn't as good as Super Mario World. Among the giants of the late 90s, Pillars of Eternity stands tall and proud, and I am very interested in seeing what comes from that world next.