Furthermore, so what if Thaos or our place in the events aren't actually random? We're not even given a hint that this is the case until much later, and even then we're just told "you knew Thaos in a past life, so please care about this." We're not given a reason to care, we just get random visions of random people stirring up trouble within a random organisation. Because of the nature of the ending's twist, the writers can't fill us in on any of this till the very, very end, but the game knows it can't just let us play through 60 hours with no story, so it gives vagueness instead. And it ends up being worse than nothing. I am at my most bored during PoE when I'm clicking through those Watcher Past Life(tm) dialogues, being told a story about how I did something in the past using placeholder expressions like "The Inquisition" or "The Woman." Because the game can't tell us even slight details about what's going on, it has to invent a new language to tell us the story, without actually telling us the story. And holy shit is it boring! I don't know why I'm supposed to care about any of it.
I appreciate ambition, but when you try complex things the chances that you fail are higher. And that's exactly what happened here. I don't give a rat's ass about PoE's main plot until someone bothers to give me a reason to care during the last 12th of the game. At which point it's too little too late.
If you really want to make comparisons, don't compare the story to BG1 or 2, compare it to Planescape. The two are similar in that they attempt to ask questions about humanity and use their settings to do so. Almost every single encounter in PS:T - even banal subquests - explores themes central to the main plot. We're not introduced to villains until the game is ready to make at least part of their purpose relevant to us. Even though Planescape's ending is filled with revelations and twists, there's never a moment where any of the characters we know or the secrets we hunt are just vaguely out of reach with no compelling reason to motivate us to progress. Planescape has all the revelationary goodness that PoE has, but it doesn't achieve it by hiding the reason for our immortality until the end. It doesn't hide the central questions it wants us to ponder, so when we're faced with the realization of our past, we know enough to grasp it. The game is a monster of complexity and ambition, so it has to weave its themes into every bit of dialogue it has and dole out revelations as breadcrumps each step you take - to make sure you have a reason to be intrigued and "keep asking questions", as it were. When you're at the very end of the game, the important questions have been asked multiple times. At this point, you know, and it's easy to understand the motives of your past selves and The Transcedent One, even though just the concept of these characters is stupefying at face value. That's why Planescape is so hard to explain to others, yet so easy to talk about with someone who has played it.
"You just had to be there, to experience it, man" *huge puff*
Pillars of Eternity has similar amibitions to Planescape but fails utterly at letting the player in on its thoughts and ideas. Most of those are rolled out during a hectic final act, and the questions that are supposedly the backbone of the story - and the villain who is supposed to represent the extreme answer to that question - aren't even slightly known to us until the last part of that last act. As much as the game acts like we should know the guy from our "past lives", the game fails completely at telling - much less "showing", in the story-telling sense of the word - us about him and about the dillemas he struggles with. As such, you go through 95% of the game knowing even less about Thaos than you do about Sarevok, yet he is an infinitely more complex character, and the game is trying to be about the very logic that drives him.
Planescape is like high class prostitute; it slowly undresses, shedding stockings and ear-rings and high heels bit by bit while we clench our cocks in agonizing expectation. PoE is a boring prude hidden beneath layers of wool and cotton. When it finally rips apart its clothes and reveals a pair of fairly nice tits, we're like "that's cool, but did you have to wear a snowsuit at the restaurant?" Our date is a silent, frigid companion until we get home - then she suddenly wants to give us a sloppy blowjob.
Honestly, I think the above is sort of obvious and you'd no doubt agree I have overexplained it with a sense of desperate, autistic fevor. The evident point is that during most of Pillars of Eternity, you're exploring a bog standard fantasy setting with a soul gimmick as its sole original concept. During the final half hour, the game unravels a political plot, a philosphical dillemma and a question about the religious nature of man and how to best consolidate that nature with a grim and careless world. As such, the game breaks every rule of story-telling by thinking it can "be about something" that it is really only about during the rushed events of its final minutes.
There's nothing wrong with the ambition - just the execution.
