1.
The Watcher's Motivation: The game does a poor job of conveying why chasing down Thaos matters so much. While Maerwald alludes to madness stemming from past awakenings, and companions refer to the PC's fitful sleep and worry about descent into madness, the game does a piss-poor job of giving this the sort of urgency it requires. The ending slides mention that the visions of the past life stop after dealing with Thaos at the end -- something to be grateful for, but during the course of the game, I never saw the visions as a problem that needed solving; on the contrary, I was actually looking forward to each vision since it helped me understand what was going on. The visions themselves should have been written to emphasize the Watcher's apparently fragile mental state to address this dissonance.
2.
The Ham-fisted Past Life: The game channels elements of PS:T and MoTB so clumsily that the whole past life nonsense in the game could have been removed entirely and the narrative would have been better for it. I initially thought it was neat allowing me to define my relationship with Deionarra#2, but I now feel it was a mistake. The Watcher's past life should have been set in stone without player input to build a sense of mystery that is eventually uncovered. Instead, by allowing me to influence the past life, the Watcher comes off as a dumb religious sheep, utterly blinded by the charisma of a man, and one who needs to be told the same thing over and over again before believing it.
This was especially apparent in the Watcher's motivation in Act 4. Apparently he wanted to hear the answer (regarding the gods' nature) from Thaos himself at all costs. The final interactions and its underlying motivation didn't come off to me as what the writer probably intended. The whole past life and relationship with Thaos had to be handled and written far more elegantly for me to share the PC's reason of "I want to hear the answer from Thaos himself." The game gives the player the choice of making the Watcher's motivation in Act 4 a personal one, a heroic one (save the souls), an evil one (aid Woedica), and so on. Of all these motivations, the personal motivation of wanting to hear from Thaos was the one that resonated least with me, which only highlighted that the writing was not up to par to do justice to the attempted personal aspect of the story. The PC's sense of betrayal was something I had no personal investment in since I was merely told about his relationship with Thaos, aided by visions that provided snippets of the past.
3.
The Damaging Impact of the Ancient Civilizations Trope on the Setting: For 1.5 acts, I was enthralled by the game and the various questions that the lore posed:
- There was the mystery behind the Hollowborn. The game at that point provided no answer as to whether the affliction was caused by animancy, the Gods themselves or through other means.
- Speaking of Gods, the game invited debate on whether Waidwen was truly Eothas, and Magran's involvement in the conflict made me chomp at the bits to figure out the underlying mysteries.
- At that point, through Eder and Durance, the game also invited one to think on questions of faith to these Gods.
- And finally, animancy itself posed a great moral conundrum. Did it cause the legacy? If it did, should it be allowed to fix it? If so, how much leeway should it be given before drawing a line in its quest for a cure?
Unfortunately, revelations in Act 2 and beyond provided these answers:
- There is an ancient civilization that was capable of great feats.
- One of these include the construction of a machine that is conveniently responsible for the Hollowborn epidemic.
- Gods themselves were the result of the civilization's great and numerous feats.
- What other rabbit out of a hat did this civilization pull? Find out in the expansions and sequel! (I'm being deliberately facetious here to convey my disappointment at the setting creators resorting to an ancient civilizations trope to explain away a lot of the mysteries and moral ambiguities that were present in the initial acts of the game's setting.)
Even worse is that one can complete Durance's side quest, leading to Durance finally realizing that Magran might have been intentionally scheming with Woedica to stop Eothas, and that Magran wanted Durance dead -- the whole conversation was wonderfully handled, only to hear 10 minutes later from Deionarra#2 that the gods are not real with no foreshadowing that even alluded to this in all the hours before. It truly was a wonderful bit of deus ex machina stemming from the ancient civilizations trope that effectively undermined what was, at that time, a wonderful conclusion to a companion's side quest.
4.
The Reveal Behind the Gods Happened Too Soon: The main quest placed more emphasis on following a wild goose chase rather than organically introducing the player to the lore and setting of Eora. As such, the lore books (both within and outside the game) and infodump NPCs and companions were my main sources of understanding the world of PoE. Thus, most of my understanding of how the Gods operated was based on second-hand information (barring Wael) and there was no glorious interaction such as Myrkul's from MoTB.
Hence, when the big reveal about the Gods happens towards the end, what should have been a "pull the rug out from under the feet" moment ended up being a flat one since I've had precious little encounter with the Gods up until that point. In my mind the reveal should have been saved for a future entry, but the game could still have had arcane clues foreshadowing questions regarding the Gods' nature. In turn, this could have raised doubts in the player's mind regarding the nature of the Gods while playing through PoE, and this would have fit in nicely with questions of faith in the Gods that was heavily discussed during Eder's and Durance's side quests. In any case, one cannot even use this revealed information to make any choices. The game drops this huge reveal on you and then the concluding choices roll along without providing you with actions that specifically make use of this potentially devastating bit of knowledge which make me question why that reveal even took place in the first game.
Moreover, despite name-dropping numerous other nations, there's precious little information on their religious beliefs (barring theocratic Raedceras) to predict how they might react to discovering the truth. The reveal should have taken place after exposing us to other parts of Eternity's setting through future games to have a far bigger impact. The scope of the setting introduced in PoE was far too small for the potentially gargantuan nature of the reveal.
5.
The Side Quests Suffer from a Detached Narrative: From a mechanics perspective, the quest design is fantastic: I was able to slaughter many quest-related NPCs and the game reacted as expected, and I think nearly every quest in the game offered numerous solutions. The issue I have with the quests is how they are written, and how they connect to the main quest or engage with the setting.
Barring some of the animancy and hollowborn-related quests, a lot of the side quests come off as very boilerplate. It feels as if the writers drew from a repository of side quest templates and then forgot to tailor the template to the setting. Even the ones that are unique in their setup -- such as the deadlock between a lioness and a bear in Act 3 -- are written in such a dull and detached manner that the whole experience comes off as passive despite giving me the option to make active choices in how the quest concludes.
Another issue was that the factions seem shoehorned-in since the Main Quest does not interface with them in any meaningful manner except in Act 2. In fact, a broader complaint would be that the quests themselves (both main and side quests) rarely display the interconnectedness that made New Vegas' quest design so special. The conflict between the 3 factions in Act 2 seemed a pale imitation of the inter-faction conflicts of New Vegas.
