After more than one multi-year break, I finally finished Pillars of Eternity. Yes, the first one. While the lore was dense and hard to get into, especially jumping into the middle of it each time I came back to the game, I think ultimately the game really benefited from not being stuck with D&D cosmology. The writers did an excellent job of exploring the ideas posed by their cosmology via characters and quests. My main problems were with the sheer amount of content and the wacky difficulty scaling.
I characterize PoE1 as about fifty hours of going forward because that's what you do in RPGs, with a bunch of coworkers, not friends, along for the ride.
But then the last two or three hours are
awesome. The plot in the final area is just amazing. If they had pulled that story back and made it the backbone of the whole adventure, I would have been really interested in seeing what came next. As it was, I made all custom characters because the high difficulty really needed minmaxing, and the default characters were built badly. I treated it like a tactical game instead of a roleplaying one, and had a pretty good time. If they'd pulled that final story back into the main game, I would have been super hooked, treating it like an RPG instead of strategy.
PoE2 is much better. My strongest recommendation there: don't try to clear the city all at once. There is a mountain of stuff in it, and it gets pretty samey. Instead, when you have an excuse to go adventuring in the broader world, take it. It's somewhat less time-efficient, but a lot more fun that way.
If you want something short, Tyranny is good for that: each run is relatively quick, but the state space is very, very wide. You can replay it several times and see quite different things, although some areas are pretty repetitive on subsequent playthroughs, like exploring inside the walls.
It's a shame there will never be a sequel. It stopped in a pretty good spot, I thought, but the overall plot is not resolved. But it didn't sell well, so further development was canned. It's also pretty buggy in spots, especially the DLC. That's in very poor shape and never got the maintenance and bugfixing it needed.
It's also hard to find good walkthroughs explaining paths through the game, because there are just so
many.
