![]() ![]() Every newcomer will play the base game and expansion at the same time. I meant what I said at the top of the article: One day, The White March will be to Pillars of Eternity what Tales of the Sword Coast is to Baldur’s Gate. It seems to make casters a bit unbalanced and overpowered, but I like it. The biggest effect? Wizards, druids, and priests can now cast Level 3 spells as “Per Encounter” instead of “Per Rest,” meaning your wizard can throw seven fireballs per battle. Again, this seems more useful if you haven’t finished the game, as you’d have more opportunities to complete these challenges.Īnd finally there’s the level cap, which has been raised from 12 to 14. The upgrade path then relies on performing specific feats instead of generic enchantments-for instance, requiring you do 200 damage to beetles for the weapon damage to increase. These weapons are “bound” to a single character, and are then unusable by all others in your party. Soulbound weapons are also an interesting addition to your arsenal. Most important of all is the fact you can now see spell ranges, so you can tell whether a character needs to move into harm’s way to attack. It’s an interesting, entertaining side venture that’s (I imagine) markedly better if taken as just another in a long list of sidequests than played on its own as an expansion.Īll that being said, I do want to commend Obsidian on some of the mechanical tweaks, some of which were rolled back into the base game in the recent 2.0 patch. Playing The White March Part One won’t cast Pillars of Eternity into a new light, or illuminate some truth about the main story you hadn’t thought of before. There’s a lot of potential, but it’s for the most part so small in scope and self-contained and worried about disrupting the main storyline that there’s no real oomph to it. It’s an effective comparison because it illuminates much of how I generally feel about The White March after playing Part One. Durance is one of the earliest characters you’re liable to meet in Pillars of Eternity, but only by continually resting with him and talking to him over the course of the game will you untangle his background and motivations-and even then, you can’t finish his personal story until near the very end, after the Council of Stars. Durgan’s Battery has lain dormant for two-hundred years though, and the decrepit mining town of Stalwart calls on you to figure out what happened-and whether there’s any help to be found within.Ĭontrast that with “The Trials of Durance,” for instance. The Battery produced weapons made of Durgan steel, stronger and lighter than any normal armaments. The White March centers around Durgan’s Battery, a fortress formerly home to a band of dwarves renowned for their skill as blacksmiths. But if that’s the case, I wish Obsidian would’ve released it as one package instead of two separate halves, because what we have in The White March Part One is a low-stakes, low-reward dungeon crawl padded with some filler quests. Events in the second half may retroactively make Part One a lot more interesting. Now, I should be clear in case you didn’t ascertain this from the title, but Obsidian’s only released the first half of The White March so far. And taken on its own, The White March Part One isn’t incredibly compelling. To me it’s a bit like reading a book to completion, and then a few months later the author comes back and says, “I added a new chapter-now there’s a 12A and a 12B before it goes on to Chapter 13.” Except you’re never going to read Chapters 1-11 or 13 again. ![]() ![]() Those who’ve already completed Pillars of Eternity though will (like myself) load up their pre-endgame save and mainline everything The White March has to offer. You would organically (seamlessly) stumble upon the expansion content while playing through the campaign, once your character hit level 5. In a perfect world, The White March would be the Tales of the Sword Coast to Pillars of Eternity. ![]()
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