Five minutes into Pillars of Eternity: The White March Part I, a snowball thrown by an ogre smacks Durance the fire priest dead. "Looks like we lost the angry one," my tank calls out. Not thirty seconds later, Sagani the ranger goes down to a cannon blast. It was all tough, frantic, and a little absurd, but it led me to believe that this little patch of content would live up to the greatness of the base Pillars of Eternity experience. The hours ahead, though enjoyable enough, proved otherwise though. Despite the fun of tougher encounters and a new setting, The White March often feels like a step down from the greatness of the vanilla release.

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The high point here is the setting of the White March mountains themselves, whose icy expanses provide a welcome counterpoint to the forests that characterized the base release. It's a land that's more crowded with loot and little tidbits of mouseover lore than the leafy expanses we've seen up until now, and it mercifully features more NPCs with their own quests and conversation options instead of the original's Kickstarter NPCs with bite-sized fan fiction. It's a shame, though, that the vaguely Nordic shacks and pitiful puddles of its hub town end up being used for little more than bleached backdrops for battles and conversations with the gloomy populace.This thread of inadequately wielded wonder runs throughout the whole expansion. It manifests itself in the disappointingly straightforward story of entrepreneurs attempting to reclaim an ancient dwarven forge, in predictable encounters with dwarven workers long dead, and it even shows up in the two new battle companions. One, a monk who's found hiding in a fish barrel, boasts a dual-wielding proficiency that's usually more interesting than the humor-laced platitudes that come out of his scarred mouth. Then there's the Devil of Caroc, a robotic-looking golem rogue whose main quirk is that she's unapologetically inclined to evil. Both possess strong foundations for memorable storylines and their general personalities exhibit Obsidian's usually stellar writing, but they quickly slip into predictable conversations that lack the memorable nuances of the old cast.Further caveats arise from the expansion's requirement of a save from before the main game's "point of no return" and after the first handful of events of Act II. It's a good thing that I recently started replaying Pillars of Eternity as a Barbarian, as my original playthrough had no elligible saves, which means I would have had to replay the entire game before I reached the relevant segment. I suspect it will be the same for other players, or at least those who aren't so fastidious about deleting old saves as I am.That's one of the most awkward things about expansions like this: they force you to step back to times when you had poorer gear and before you picked up a full loadout of skills. Especially when you've carefully made all the "right" decisions, replaying old saves feels a little like questing after Stephen King's Dark Tower. As a bonus, though, if you're one of the lucky bastards with a save point at, say, the Burial Isle before Pillars of Eternity's last chapters, you can choose to upscale the monsters to your level. If you're fine with jumping into combat with gear that far exceeds the content, that's fine, too — especially considering the often plodding nature of Pillars of Eternity's "pause and bark orders" combat.If that retro-centric design soured you on the original release, you'll be happy to know that The White March showcases Pillars of Eternity's recently improved AI, which grants enemies smarter moves and allows companions like Edér and Durance to use some of their abilities of their own accord. It's simple stuff — certainly not anything in the league of the multiple options you get in a game like Dragon Age: Inquisition — but it's usually enough to speed up the pace of combat so orchestrating each character's actions doesn't drag out the game's running time by hours. Greater combat challenges also reveal themselves, chiefly in the form of a high-level dungeon called Cragholdt Bluffs that will thwomp most parties below level 10 into the the ground faster than you can say "Icewind Dale."Much as in that beloved dungeon romp from 2000, combat is king here, and The White March does a good job of delivering it even if it lacks some of the inspiration of Black Isle's game. As the ogres in Stalwart demonstrated all too painfully, it occasionally manages to be harder than the core game and it tosses in extra variables such as enemies who are completely immune to certain types of damage. Enemies are usually positioned better too, thus prompting more thoughtful strategies to combat them. The level cap boost from 12 to 14 even provided handful of new abilities to meet these new challenges with. For instance, the Barbarian's newfound ability to leap into a throng of foes and wreak havok was particularly giddy fun.I enjoyed these changes, and despite my reservations, I generally enjoyed my roughly 20 hours with this first part of The White March. I loved Pillars of Eternity, and this at least does a decent job of scratching the itch for a bit more. Even so, I could never shake my disappointment that it lacks the storytelling finesse that made the original one of the great RPGs of our time. As much as I'm a sucker for these kinds of snow-tossed settings, the whole affair left me wondering why the Watcher was even bothering with this far-flung escapade in the first place. Time is of the essence and all that.