Densely packed open world without much empty space, dialogue trees that will frustrate people with ADHD (seriously, random non-quest npcs have 10 minutes of voiced lines sometimes), fluid mix and match skill trees with easy access respec in the menu, no micromanagement mechanics like ammunition or town NPC line of sight causing every guard in a town to turn hostile, better optimization to run on less powerful machines than recent comparable titles, ability to upgrade gear you like throughout the entire game, magic system held on to some of the CRPG elements (you need to find grimoires with a spell to learn it, but putting points into a spell lets you cast them without the grimoire and upgrades them an extra rank if you still use the book anyway). Does an excellent job of bringing new players into the setting if they didn’t play Pillars or Pillars 2.

My current complaints are that the melee combat tree is a bit less exciting than the others, and a few visual issues have presented themselves like enemies with multiple elemental effects applied to them having some visual flickering and distant shallow water looks wrong. There’s some player character options that are missing from Pillars of Eternity, but if you haven’t played them you’d never know.

I think it’s a pretty strong GotY contender to kick off the year, personally. I made this post because people are mentioning user reviews, but steam user reviews have been pretty worthless lately. Way too many people expecting games to behave like another game or genre entirely and basing their entire review on that, or complaining about things that have no relation to gameplay (on that note, the game has XBL login but it is not required).