I'm not Washac, but...
I'll buy it after they release a couple of updates…. maybe version 1.02
Probably a wise idea, considering the bug I mentioned above. The good news is 1.03 comes out next week, so you won't have to wait long.
Does it play like Baldur's Gate?
It does and doesn't. On the surface, it looks and plays exactly like the old Infinity Engine games, up to the cursor and the little green and red circles surrounding everyone. If you were to watch a video, you'd think they straight up lifted everything from the old games.
But when you play it, you realize that the underlying rules are completely different, and they make for a much smoother game without as much downtime.
The biggest difference is how health works. You now have two sets of health bars. Your endurance, which kinda works the way HP did in the old games when you're in a fight, and your overall health, which is show as a bar along the left side of your character portraits that changes from green, to yellow, to red the lower it gets.
Your endurance represents your stamina in a fight. It's your lasting power, how many times you can take a punch before getting dazed or knocked out. Getting your endurance drained doesn't kill you, just merely takes you out of the fight until its over. Once everything is dead, everyone pops back up, and their endurance bars refill after a few seconds.
There are plenty of ways to restore endurance, from potions to spells to techniques. Some classes can restore endurance just by fighting, or get a "second wind", where you have a random chance of getting a few points back after hitting zero. It's not nearly enough to make some characters unstoppable if you screw around with their stats and buffs just right, but they work as nice random ass-savers for your front line guys.
Health is an entirely different story. When you take a hit, you're taking damage both to your endurance, and your health. The good news is you have considerably more health than you do endurance. Like my fighters might have 180 endurance, but almost 800 health. You don't have to heal up after every battle. The bad news is there are very, very few ways to heal health besides sleeping, and the things you do have come in rather limited quantities, and only restores a minuscule amount. Once your HP drops below a certain threshold, it starts effecting your maximum endurance, so it's something you always have to keep in mind. A character who's got a few bruised ribs and has taken a few too many cracks to the head throughout the day won't have as much staying power in a fight as he did starting out fresh.
If your HP hits zero, two things happen. One, your character get maimed, and suffer permanent stat penalties. As far as I know, there's no way to fix this. Or two (and this one is the most obvious): your character dies. If this happens, the only thing that'll save them is a reload, because there are no resurrect spells in the game. You can bring someone back in the middle of a fight after being knocked out, but dead is dead in Pillars of Eternity.
There's a lot more to it than the new health system, but that's the biggest and most obvious change. It makes it so you can bounce from one fight to the next, and keep your spells handy for when you really need them without making the game any easier.
And for my closing paragraph, here's a cool nonspoilery picture I took.
