Pillars of Eternity
Worth it · RPG · 2015
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $29.99.
- Length
- 36.3h
- Value
- $0.83/hr
- Reviews
- 88% positive
Watch this gameOne email when it is worth buying. Your call on what that means.
Get one email when Pillars of Eternity is worth buying.
One email per game. Unsubscribe in a click.
Minimum on the Steam store: 4 GB of memory, ATI Radeon HD 4850 or NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT, 14 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
Prepare to be enchanted by a world where the choices you make and the paths you choose shape your destiny. Obsidian Entertainment, the developer of Fallout: New Vegas™ and South Park: The Stick of Truth™, together with Paradox Interactive is proud to present Pillars of Eternity.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
The lowest price on record is $9.99, set in October 2020. It has been discounted 98 times in the 12 years tracked here, typically at 60 percent off, with about 5 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 6 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 5 weeks.
Value puts it in the top 2 percent of the games it competes with. It is pricier than 95 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 92 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire ($19.99, scores 79) beats it on value, while it beats Tyranny ($29.99, scores 62).
Steam's global achievement data says about 15 percent of players ever finish it. On a 36.3-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. This site sampled 800 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 1 was written by a buyer who refunded it, sampled from reviews written April 2022 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 60 percent of the 400 reviews written there were positive, against 88 percent overall, and those are 2 percent of everything written about it.
The main story runs 36.3 hours. Doing everything runs 111, 3.1 times as long.
The drop-off
47% start to 15% finishA normal fall-off for a game this long. Steam global achievements
Players
204 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
This is an amazing game, but you need to be very careful about it. On one hand, it is an exemplary isometric RPG, one of the best of its kind. It has a deep tactical combat system, engaging storyline built on top of extensive world building, lots of opportunities for role playing, various quests, long branching dialogs, lots of NPCs including your brave companions with their own quests, loot, crafting, your own...
A modern Baldur's Gate. Writing, gameplay mechanics, everything is simply excellent. Finished on the very hardest difficulty, which is not recommended for most players. The last boss is a damage sponge like nothing you've ever seen. Another point is the excellent customization, while they do take their freedoms in intrepreting and making their own "DnD rulesets", especially for health and encumbrance, you'll get to...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
Pillars of Eternity scores 78/100 on the BANG Score (worth it). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/291650/pillars-of-eternityThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 13, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.