Eternity Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pre-DLC Thread [GO TO NEW THREAD]

[Infinitron]

NEW THREAD: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...deadfire-beast-of-winter-dlc-released.123213/

Spoiler

https://eternity.obsidian.net




https://af.gog.com/game/pillars_of_eternity_ii_deadfire_wasteland_2?as=1649904300

 

[Parabalus]

 

[conan_edw]

let the drama begin

 

[Quillon]

let the drama begin

This game is shit! Its released but ain't opening, preparing files and shit. YOU SHOULD HAVE DONE THAT ALREADY YOU DUMBFUCK!

PS: Infinitron I heard that Arby's will pay good money ıf the new thread started with their tweet, just sayin...

 

[moleman]

ACG's review is up:

 

[Prime Junta]

My preload is still listed as "Unreleased." FEEEAAARGUUUUSSSS

Says "Scheduled for 20:10 20:11" WTF?

Okay, unpacking. Time remaining 10 12 15 19 21 23 26 29 32 36 41 45 51 53 11 10 9 8 minutes. Their estimation algo needs work.

 

[Infinitron]

PCGamesN: https://www.pcgamesn.com/pillars-of-eternity-2-deadfire/pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire-pc-review 9/10

Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire PC review

Captain’s log: the crew are getting sick of hardtack. They think I don’t know, but I can see their morale stat slipping away with every day we’re at sea, dining on flavourless biscuits and water. But I really did need that Ring of Boundless Stars that Una was selling back at Serpent’s Crown, and at his prices I could hardly afford 50 servings of Mariner’s Porridge (+5 morale) on top. I’m sure they understand - I’m a tank. Tanks need that constitution bonus.

Suspect Maia’s keeping something from me. Call me paranoid, but it’s the way she keeps saying, “I haven’t been entirely honest with you…” And the fact she’s a Vailian Trading Company spy, who I recruited as part of a deal with the suits at Neketaka so that they could keep tabs on me. But it just… it just doesn’t quite seem on the level. Ah well - it’ll probably come to nothing. Tomorrow, we arrive at Fort Deadlight, and I exact my revenge on Captain Benweth. Tonight we sleep.

Pillars of Eternity II plays the way you remember Infinity Engine RPGs playing. That is to say, not the obtuse nature you’d discover if you were to revisit them today. With its blend of merciless AD&D combat, isometric environments, and reams of descriptive text, Pillars II creates a portal back to a bygone age of PC gaming circa 2000ish, when Robbie Williams was the most bankable star in music and people who publicly admitted to playing games were a niche group. We read the manuals, back in those days, because if we didn’t we’d never figure out how to play the damn game. Perhaps that’s the most relevant point of reference if we’re going to talk about how much things have changed from Baldur’s Gate to Pillars II.

Yes, it feels nostalgic in all the ways you’d want. Yes, it offers a mind-bending learning curve on higher difficulty levels for the 17 people who actually play these RPGs in that way. But Obsidian’s ambitions for this sequel extend far beyond recapturing the time and place in game design they strove for with the first Pillars of Eternity.

One of several directions that ambition takes is in the game’s piratical theme. There’s a surprising amount of Sid Meier’s Pirates! here - from the way you navigate between the islands of the Deadfire Archipelago by ship, to the naval battles that crop up when you sail near hostile vessels, conducted via a text-adventure-style interface. Reprising your role as the Watcher of Caed Nua from the first game, you’re brought back to the realm of mortals by Berath, the god of death and rebirth, because she’s a bit worried about Eothas, the god of renewal and light. He’s just not himself lately; stomping around in physical form and wreaking chaos as he goes. She’d like you to keep an eye on him. It’s not like you have a say in the matter: it’s that, or return to the wheel with all the other lost souls.

Captain’s log: I killed a lot - a LOT - of Naga today, and I feel pretty bad about it, to be honest. Most of them attacked on sight - I can handle that. They made a good excuse for the gang and I to try out our new party formation, and a couple of sweet abilities we’ve gained since we last levelled up. Eder’s getting really good at knocking people over and leaving them dazed, incidentally.

But it was the Naga in the lighthouse who plays on my conscience. He conversed with me, and in that moment I understood that he saw Eothas’s path of destruction as a warning from the gods, not to be interfered with. He wasn’t just a meatbag with a HP number. I think I could have got through to him, if I’d just found a Naga soul to bring to him and show him I really am a Watcher. Except there were none around, so…

So Eder got a bit more practise at knocking folk over and dazing them. And I have to live with it.

Depending on your disposition, combat was either the best asset of Pillars of Eternity or an absolutely baffling mess that killed you just for looking at a level 1 Sporeling the wrong way. Pillars II remains absolutely brutal on anything but the lowest difficulty level, which is presumably a great strength for some, but it’s also changed a few systems around in the name of clarity. Ditching the separate health and endurance stats is the most significant: now characters have just one number keeping them alive, and when it’s depleted in combat they’re knocked down. If they’re knocked down four times in a row without resting, that’s them dead. It’s much more forgiving than the first game’s system, but we are talking about the permanent removal of voiced party members and their associated questlines from the game, after all. It’s good to have a little room for manoeuvre there.

Party banter is also governed by a transparent system that tells you when particular companions align or disagree with your decisions and comments, and those of other companions. They might form romantic relationships or grow to hate each other. Along the way, their conversations are impressive for their contextual awareness.

But, look, I could write 50,000 words about the systems and mechanics underpinning everything in Pillars of Eternity II and still not get to the heart of the matter. What makes this worth playing, if you have the slightest fondness for Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, or Planescape: Torment, is the worldbuilding.

The Principi, Vailian Trading Company, Huana, and Royal Deadfire Company are locked in a kind of cold war over luminous adra. The native Huana are sick of being raided by Principi, so they made a deal with the Vailians giving them license to mine adra on their land. It hasn’t eased their struggle.

For their part, the Vailians are getting deep into dangerous experiments. Their animancers are wielding the adra without any real knowledge of its true power, and their research is attracting the ire of the gods. Not to mention landing you in numerous tight spots. The Royal Deadfire Company want to lure you away from their Vailian rivals, promising limitless coin if you align with them. The Principi are happy as long as the grog’s flowing.

But that’s not really the plot of the game. It’s a political backdrop, one of several that you find yourself getting embroiled in now and then, while you’re trying to pursue your real objective: spying on Eothas for Berath. Backdrop or not, this facet of Pillars II’s story alone is more enjoyable to immerse yourself in than most RPG’s main questlines.

It must come with experience, I suppose, that ability to weave quest and narrative together so closely that the ‘go there, pick up the thing, come back here’ artifice is all but invisible. It hasn’t always been true of Obsidian games, but quests of all shapes and sizes here feel part of the world, full of weighty consequence. I’ve completed bounties on desolate islands not because I needed the coin, but because I felt sorry for poor Abocco back in Neketaka. He was having no luck issuing bounties, and I suspected he was being voiced by Jim Cummings (aka Minsc from Baldur’s Gate) so I threw him a bone. So it goes with nearly every quest - there’s usually a sense of meaning to what you’re doing beyond monetary reward or XP.

It’s an extraordinary game. One that you’ll feel faintly lost in at first, while its many systems permeate your grey matter. But all the while its story unfolds and reveals new wrinkles, the sense of place growing deeper. The mechanics underpinning everything in Pillars II have shifted marginally towards accessibility, but that still leaves a huge amount of room for brutal challenge levels to its combat - and, crucially, it’s scalable enough that you can whack down the challenge, ignore your party composition, leave the pause key unpressed, and enjoy the adventure. That’s what this is, in a very real sense: an adventure.

Captain’s log: spent the afternoon playing dice with a very nice chap by the dock of Fort Deadlight. He didn’t take too kindly to me winning all that money, though, so after a while I thought it best to depart in case he blew my cover. It took a lot of hassle, and the lives of two good sailors, to get that Principi flag we hoisted up the mast and sail here undetected. All very cloak and dagger. Now I’d best see that Cookie Maina’s special spiced stew makes it up to the tavern, so that my devilish assassination plan might be put to action.

Verdict: 9/10

 

[AwesomeButton]

let the drama begin

Ofc those who bought on GoG will have to wait for the admin to sober up from the potatovodka and manually enable the game for every account...

 

[Infinitron]

RPS - review still in progress. Some whining from John Walker: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/05/08/pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire-review-in-progress/

Review In Progress: Pillars Of Eternity II: Deadfire

Pillars Of Eternity II is seemingly infinity hours long. Despite a week of playing, I’m still going, so here’s my in-depth thoughts about the game excluding the impact of its ending. I will update later.

What a lot Pillars Of Eternity II feels like it has to do. It needs to be a completely new dozens-of-hours-long RPG, while it also needs to be a sequel to 2015’s stunning first outing, while it needs to feel like it’s evolved from then, while it needs to feel like it’s faithful, while it… In many ways, it succeeds despite being tugged in all these directions. And in others, it feels wearily stretched from the process.

Such is the nature of this sequel that to explain its opening plot is to impose upon the ending of the last. There’s no real way around that. You’ll perhaps remember that PoE1 was about, amongst other things, a blight of soulless children on a region shortly after a god, who took on human form, had been killed. That god, Eothas, is back, and bigger. In a giant form, he erupts from the ground under your castle in Dyrwood, destroying it, and then strides off toward the archipelago of Deadfire, stamping on all sorts on his way.

The destruction of Caed Nua also destroys you, The Watcher, whoever you might have been in the first game, and sees you in the In-Between, confronted by Berath, the god of death. (Now, if you finished PoE1 you’ll be thinking, “But hang on…” and yes, it does address that rather sticky issue of deities, while at the same time rather fudging around it.) She wants you reborn, to tackle Eothas, and in the process gives you the chance to import an end-game save from the last game to bring over all your decisions, re-decide everything again in meticulous detail, and most of all, reroll your character entirely afresh.

However, despite being able to import your choices, for some reason you can’t import your actual Watcher. Which makes it a giant pain for anyone wanting their previous avatar. I wanted Ambree, my paladin from before, and had to load up PoE1 and copy all the minutiae of who she was to get it all right. Either way, your stats are scrapped and you start from level 1 again.

You awaken on a ship, your ship, to find that most aged of Bioware-inherited traditions in place: the most bland whitebread character possible first to join you. And it’s Eder, Mr Meh from the first game. Quickly you gather up rogue wizard Aloth. Then you bump into Pallegina, and… well, it becomes a little concerning this is going to feel like a band reuniting long after they should have retired. Thankfully, while there are more familiar faces to come, you can pull together a new team of new characters reasonably quickly.

This opening feels incredibly rushed. You wake up from death in a hand-drawn cutscene that obliterates your castle, and then you’re fleeing by ship to another land, bam. The impact of this almost incidental establishing lasts for a really long time, in a game that’s already extraordinarily open and loose, meaning that you’re going to have to do a lot of work yourself to let the events feel like they’re of any particular import or impact.

The counter to this, of course, is you’ve got an extraordinarily open and loose RPG, with a vast network of islands to explore, at your own pace, while introducing a whole new set of mechanics around owning and operating a ship, a crew, and indeed, the matter of ship combat.

I think at this point how you receive the game will very much be determined by what you love most about this old-school model of RPG. If you play for the tight stories, propelled down a main quest by an urge to save the day, torn away to side quests because of the personalities of your adored gang, then PoE1 met your needs splendidly. If, however, you prefer to amble, to get lost down a quest line completely separate to the main reason you’re there, to get embroiled in the politics and matters of new communities and peoples, to pick and choose and just occasionally get back to the main quest as and when, the PoE2 has this in spades.

I am, undeniably, in the former camp, and have struggled with Deadfire’s sprawling nature. I’m not sure, though, that this is entirely on me. I suspect rather strongly that the big issue with what is, unquestionably, an astoundingly vast and intricate and often pleasing role-playing game, is that it fails to get across to me why anything that’s happening really matters.

It all appears to be a look at colonialism, at the spread of various trading companies around the 17th century, along with the piracy and seafare that accompanied this. As such, you can start to align yourself with one company over another, become a menace to the lot of them, or just try to keep out of it entirely.

Alongside this, there are many new cultures to discover, whose lives are heavily impacted by this colonialism. For example, there’s an exploration of a caste system, interestingly applied to an allegedly socialist society of the Huana. Wealth is redistributed, but based on a notion of a meritocracy, that in reality is an outdated hierarchy of class. The lowest caste, the Roparu, are essentially Dalits, patronised by the two tiers above (a working-middle class, and a royal upper class, the Mataru) as needing to be looked after, and then supposedly having grown too numerous to be cared for. Which is of course to say, never given adequate opportunity, and then grown in number such that to redistribute wealth fairly would mean the higher castes would get less… You can see the level of detail that is going in to such things, and this applies absolutely everywhere.

And as a part of an archipelago so strongly under the thrall of finances, money is a much more important factor this time around. In PoE1, I think the aspect of employing staff at Caed Nua, and paying them regular wages, was a little undercooked. You never really needed to think about it at all. In PoE2 it’s much more crucial, especially early on when cash is tight.

You get between the many islands by boat, always, and on the way you could run into watery trouble. To be able to outrun, out-cannon, or out-fight another boat’s crew, you need people on board. You can hire workers at ports, and pick them up through side quests, each with a set of starting skills. Perhaps they know a bit of cooking, or their way around the rigging. Assign them to the appropriate space on your ship layout, and then they start to gain levels in their abilities through practice. Also, they may get injured, which means taking them off duty for a few days, and ideally in the care of your hired ship’s surgeon. So you may want back-up crew for such times. Oh, and they’re all going to not only need paying, but also food, drink, and medical supplies, which can be bought, scavenged and stolen on your journey. And all of these aspects, alongside victories and failures in naval battles, as well as little adventures, affect your crew’s morale. Let it get to low and they will be far less effective. Let it get very low and they may mutiny.

It sounds like a lot, but it’s all well implemented, and once you’ve gotten the hang of it it really doesn’t interrupt the flow. It’s just the getting the hang of it part that’s a problem, with the game woefully bad at explaining it all to you. I spent so long not understanding why crew weren’t getting healed by the surgeon, for instance, and really couldn’t get to grips with how to recover morale. This is not helped by a very peculiar decision, in a game that wears the rest of its stats ridiculously loudly, to hide all the numbers for your crew. Instead there’s a really very silly system of unexplained studs and stars on their pop-up tooltip, that fails to properly communicate at any point the standard of your ship and crew.

Ship combat is then a whole other learning experience, and you may be surprise/relieved to learn, isn’t about a little arcade game in the midst of RPGing. It is, in fact, entirely text based. It all plays out like a little Twine game. I’ll go into more detail about this in a separate piece tomorrow, but it’s a superbly implemented choose-your-own-ship-battle, where your crew’s experience and the equipment on board play out in a series of turn-based decisions of tactical positioning, cannon firing, and crew maintenance.

Ship fights can end either by sinking the enemy boat, or by boarding it and having a fight back in the main game engine. But rather tragically, the two don’t integrate at all meaningfully, meaning hopes that deliberate using cannon shot that takes out crew members to thin down for an eventual fisticuffs battle isn’t even a thing. It’s such an obvious thing to have included, and really hugely disappointing to discover isn’t there. Instead if you board they magically have a full crew again to fight you. Sigh.

More ridiculously, by the time your own team is of a decent level, it’s far quicker to eschew the splendid Twine-like section, and just whomp them in a 30 second fight, and that way you get more loot for your efforts. A real mess of balancing, and a really sad way to mess up one of the best new features.

On dry land, things play out much as you might expect from an Obsidian RPG, a collection of enormous towns packed with NPCs, mini-quests, taverns and plot-critical estates and temples, alongside single-use dungeons and infiltrated strongholds. Although to get to them, there’s a larger map view for each island, your team moved around as an icon, with time passing as you travel long distances.

As for combat, in many ways it’s similar to PoE1, and indeed the current vogue for pausable real-time RPG combat – each of your characters’ turns is on a timer dependent upon ability and equipment, and you can meticulously manage every action of all five in your present team, or let it play itself out with its AI if you’ve the difficulty low enough/the encounter is simple enough. Most of the time it’s a combination of the two.

However, there have been some attempts to streamline aspects of it, and complicate others. Wizards can restore spells without resting now, while there’s a new ability called Empower that allows you to either restore half of any character’s spent resources, or soup up a specific spell or ability for the duration of that battle, once per encounter. I played on “Classic”, which is the game’s version of Normal, and there’s a Relaxed below that for battles where you can mostly leave them to it, and a Story even lower than that for making fights immaterial.

Then of course there’s Veteran for those looking for a challenge, and beyond that the madness that is Path of the Damned. I suspect for those who enjoy the minutiae of such combat, it’s here that the min-maxing complexity that’s available will shine. And there’s the Expert mode for masochists who want all the useful on-screen information obfuscated. For those of us who prefer to just choose when to lob a fireball, and when to heal a chum, Classic makes this just a bit too simplistic this time out, while higher than that becomes too much of a fiddle.

Saying this, they’ve made the very odd choice to let you change difficulty at any point, but it only affects areas you’ve yet to visit. So if you meet an encounter you can’t get through, er, tough.

More strange, lowering the difficulty to Relaxed also strips the game down entirely of its level gating, and levels every part of the game to your team. This perhaps seems like it’s helping the player not get into scrapes that are too difficult, but it also has the effect of making the entire world simultaneously accessible, in a way that muddles the storytelling.

And wow is the storytelling muddled. The game has so, so many quests open at once, and makes so little effort to make clear what’s happening where and why, that I more often accidentally completed them than deliberately. You can sort quests by the order you received them, or by location, but neither is helpful. The latter especially because sometimes it sorts them by the location where you received them, not where they actually take place, other times only one of multiple locations, and often fails to include key information about where to report them back when completed. With nineteen or twenty open quests at any time, this is dreadful. And even more so when there’s no way to track missions on the map, nor even assign one as your primary focus.

But more important is the lack of weight to most things happenings. When a game’s main plot is that a vast god is stamping entire cities into the ground with each step, you’d imagine there’d be a notion of urgency about this. Yet the Eothas story feels so, so far in the background for so much of the game. It is at once too big and too incidental. The game is for so long far more interested in the astoundingly dull political machinations of a collection of rival trading companies, and the pirates that frustrate them. Petty personal rivalries seem to be the centre of all disagreements, so you do the usual of taking sides, negotiating, or just killing everyone involved.

There’s such a vast amount to do here, and doing much of it is absorbing and entertaining, but ultimately it feels so loose and wayward. Far too much is about being pulled back and forth by the gods, which was last time’s story, and here takes place far too often in long-winded conversation cards that offer you little real choice.

I’ve really enjoyed playing through some of the vignettes, multi-layered dungeons with secrets and multi-part quests, ending with a decent fight. But when they’re done, it’s hard to remember what it was about, and harder to fathom how it connects to anything else that’s happening.

A world where children are being born without souls, scarring generations, while warring factions of a terrifying god attempt to take control: great story, lots of impact. That was PoE1. A world where some giant is stamping somewhere else you can’t see, and there’s a trade war going on that endlessly suggests the complicity of the natives? Yeah, it’s not exactly gripping.

Perhaps more damningly, I just didn’t care about any of the companions. Aloth and Eder didn’t do much for me last time, and just the bare minimum effort has gone into advancing either as people – they feel like a band lazily relying on their old hits. Of the new crowd, I quite liked Maia, and her pet parrot Ishi. But mostly because she didn’t complain as much as the others. They’re a dreary group.

Exploring the nautical map, finding all the undiscovered islands, taking on pirates, or indulging in some piracy, looting shipwrecks, it all sounds like it should be so much more fun. But in execution it’s mostly an elaborate menu. Find a battle on an island and you’ll be in a single location, and when the fight’s over, there’s nowhere to explore, no hidden treats, no dungeons to deep dive. There’s really nothing to be gained, beyond easily bought resources, from exploration, which is such a miss.

I think that describes a lot of what I’ve seen so far: swings and misses. The naval battles are beautifully delivered, but almost immediately redundant, and don’t meaningfully impact a boarding raid. The story is enormous and intricate, but doesn’t feel weighty or important. The combat is astonishingly detailed, but played at the standard setting rarely requires you to use its many mechanisms.

And yet the depth and wealth of effort that’s gone into its world building does have an impact on me. The sense of a place is unquestionably wonderful, and goodness me, there’s so much writing and voice acting in here (gone are PoE1’s awkward half-voiced conversations, with every NPC line spoken aloud). There is a vast amount to do, and it’s undeniably absorbing to busily bustle about the waters, ticking off quest after quest.

I’ve yet to finish it, in a large part because a colleague warned me that by following the main quest too early, he inadvertently locked himself out of a lot of the side quests, with the game offering no warning. My feelings may change as I see the story to its end, and I will write again to say.

There’s no doubt that a new player could play PoE2 without having played the original. But they’d be a person not really understanding an awful lot of what was going on. And, frankly, if you’re interested in playing this game, then you’re interested in playing the original, and should. It’s the better game. And this is very much a sequel that, despite a new setting, many new characters, and a new overarching plot, relies heavily on the enormous volumes of lore and history that the original taught. Often with the most peculiar assumption that you’ll have remembered every detail of a sixty hour, three year old game, or be as in the dark as to who this character that recognises you might be as anyone approaching this game first. Wirtan? No clue. Chatted to me like an old friend.

I wish PoE2 had had more to say, more it wanted to express. I think that would have covered over a multitude of its other sins. Half-ideas about colonialism mixed with exploitation of natural resources by trading companies don’t really deliver the goods here. (That is the best joke.) As it is, despite having spent dozens of hours playing this, I’ve always felt at arm’s length.

 

[Daedalos]

My preload is still listed as "Unreleased." FEEEAAARGUUUUSSSS

Says "Scheduled for 20:10." WTF?

REstart steam.

 

[moleman]

I'm on GoG. Already downloading...

 

[Valtiel]

what's this Decompression thing now??? 7 minutes in i'm already disappointed without SSD is a pain

 

[Anthedon]

Or not, we'll see.

 

[pomenitul]

Yeah, restarting worked. It's currently unpacking.

 

[AwesomeButton]

I'm on GoG. Already downloading...

I tried to equip the ring but it's still not showing. I logged out and back in.

Are you using Galaxy?

 

[Infinitron]

PC Gamer: https://www.pcgamer.com/pillars-of-eternity-2-deadfire-review/ 88/100

PILLARS OF ETERNITY 2: DEADFIRE REVIEW

Back in 2015, with the help of about 70,000 Kickstarter backers, Obsidian took the best parts of beloved CRPGs such as Baldur’s Gate and Planescape: Torment—deep combat, rich dialogue, reactive stories—and built one of the best modern RPGs on PC. Pillars of Eternity plundered the best of the genre, but also made its own mark with a setting so well-realised and dense with lore it felt like it could have been based on some forgotten series of grand fantasy novels. And now Obsidian is taking us to another corner of that fantastic world: the dangerous and exotic Deadfire Archipelago, a chain of islands far to the east of the relatively green and pleasant Dyrwood.

You are the Watcher, a hero who is either, depending on who you ask, cursed or blessed with the ability to peer into the souls of the dead and talk to them. After the events of the first game you’ve decided to hang your sword and shield up and settle down in the fortress of Caed Nua. But then a giant crystal colossus buried under the castle is possessed by the god Eothas, bursts out of the ground, destroys your home, and leaves you for dead. You survive, of course, thanks to the intervention of a sinister benefactor, and learn that the giant has been spotted stomping across the Deadfire Archipelago. And so you give chase aboard your ship, the Defiant, which dramatically sets the wheels of the plot in motion.

If you didn’t play the first Pillars of Eternity, that’s totally fine. Deadfire not only neatly and succinctly summarises the events of the original game in the intro, but gives you the chance to create a history for your character, essentially simulating an imported save. The sheer number of choices and decisions you can make is daunting, however, which is where Obsidian’s selection of pre-made histories might come in handy. These let you quickly decide whether your character was benevolent, tyrannical, or something inbetween. There’s even one history that supposes you got every companion killed and the worst outcome of every quest. And you’ll know when your history, whether it was created or imported from an old save, affects something in the new game by a symbol that appears next to certain lines of dialogue.

If you’ve played a CRPG before, the fundamentals will be immediately familiar. You move around by pointing and clicking around an isometric map, talking to folk, fighting monsters, and looting dungeons. There are towns and cities and temples and jungles, all stuffed with long, twisting quests, interesting characters, and tough moral quandaries to wrestle with. You’ll be swept up in the lives of the people you meet around the Deadfire, from pirates and priests to smugglers and queens. You’ll level up, unlock new abilities and spells, recruit new party members, and find magical items with evocative descriptions. It’s the stuff of dreams for anyone who loves those old Infinity Engine RPGs, although the number of similar games released since Pillars made its debut, be it Divinity 2, Tyranny, or Tides of Numenera, does blunt the nostalgic edge somewhat.

But what makes this sequel different from other CRPGs that have come before it is the focus on seafaring. Travelling between islands in the Deadfire, which is impossibly big, requires a ship. And to run a ship you need a crew, which is where the nautical management aspect of the game comes in. As you sail around the world map, your crew—who can be hired from taverns or met while adventuring—will drain your food and water resources. And the quality of what you provide them will affect their morale and performance in battle. Give them water and hardtack, a miserable long-lasting biscuit notorious in the Age of Sail, and you might have a mutiny on your hands. But ply them with rum and fresh fruit (which is much more expensive, naturally) and they’ll love you.

There are other issues to deal with, including injuries, pirates, and drama such as fights and arguments breaking out among the crew. This adds a nice layer of interaction and role-playing to journeying between locations, which is normally quite uneventful in these games bar a few bandit ambushes. The problem is that the actual act of sailing isn’t very compelling. You move around the disappointingly static world map simply by clicking, and I never really bought into the illusion that I was at the helm of a ship battling the elements. Keeping the galley stocked and the crew happy soon becomes a routine, and leaves the nautical portions of the game feeling a bit gimmicky.

Ship combat is more successful. It’s turn-based and takes place on a separate screen with a dedicated interface. A circle shows you which way your ship is facing relative to the enemy, and you command your crew by selecting actions from a menu. You can use a turn to reposition your ship, speed up to get closer to the enemy, slow down to create some distance, or fire your weapons. Your cannons are only effective at specific ranges, which makes positioning vitally important. An illustration showing the enemy ship, its distance, and its current level of damage is an at-a-glance way to see how the battle is going. Your crew can get injured during ship combat, and losing someone important like a helmsman or surgeon to cannon fire can limit your effectiveness in battle.

The Defiant can be heavily customised to make surviving these encounters more likely, with faster sails, a stronger hull, and more powerful cannons among the upgrades you can buy. Or you can buy a whole new ship altogether if you have a few thousand coppers to spare, but a bigger ship means more crew, more food, more booze, and more wages, so it’s a purchase you should save until you have more money to invest. If trading cannon balls from afar isn’t your thing, however, you can always charge the enemy at full speed and board their ship. Here the game switches to the familiar isometric view and you fight the crew using regular combat, leaping across to their deck like a classic Hollywood swashbuckler. When you defeat a ship your crew gets a big morale boost, and you can salvage supplies from the wreckage, choosing whether to share the money with the crew or keep it all to yourself.

Dock the Defiant at one of the many islands littering the archipelago and the wind really hits Deadfire’s sails. When the game slips back into its comfy old role-playing boots it’s among Obsidian’s finest work as RPG developers. The Dyrwood was a wonderfully drawn setting, dripping with culture and history, but the Deadfire Archipelago is even more fascinating and alien. There’s a whole world to discover out there: of strange rites and rituals, water-shaping priests, ancient sea dragons, and centuries of conquest and division. And I loved drinking it all in through long conversations, books, and inscriptions, eager to learn as much as I could about the history of this absurdly rich setting. Although, admittedly, the vast quantities of lore being constantly hurled at you can be a little overwhelming at times, especially if this is your first trip to Eora.

The Deadfire is a wilder, more lawless place than the leafy Dyrwood, scattered with uncharted islands untouched by civilisation and pirates stalking the waterways. But you arrive there in a period of change, with foreign factions encroaching on the archipelago, looking to exploit it. Like some of the best fantasy, Pillars mirrors our own history, and it’s clear the turmoil in the Deadfire is an analogue of the colonisation of the Pacific. Factions include the native Huana, whose way of life and culture is being threatened by the arrival of groups like the Vailian Trading Company. And as the Watcher, you can decide whose side you’re on—if you want to pick a side at all.

The Deadfire isn’t all remote villages and trading outposts. Neketaka, its largest city, is the game’s equivalent of Athkatla from Baldur’s Gate II or Torment’s Sigil: a massive, varied urban sprawl split into unique districts and brimming with quests, conversations, and distractions. It’s also the finest showcase of Obsidian’s beautiful, lavish background art, with intricate architecture reflecting the culture and customs of the region. Incidentally, Deadfire is a much prettier game that the original, with vastly improved 3D character models and real-time lighting that makes its environments feel much more dynamic and alive. It still has that distinctive Infinity Engine aesthetic, but everything just feels more solid and refined.

While your main goal is hunting Eothas, Deadfire isn’t afraid to set you free and let you carve your own path through the archipelago. When the prologue is over you can sail pretty much anywhere, and there’s a lot to find out there, including a seemingly never-ending parade of quests. Tens of hours in, my quest log was overflowing with tasks. It’s a game where you’ll talk to some random NPC loitering in the corner of a tavern, and the next thing you know you’re fighting a sinister cult in the belly of an ancient, sunken pyramid on a remote desert island. There are plenty of quests with lower stakes too, including helping a theatre director cast a play and finding a way to make a suffering pirate puke up a gemstone he swallowed in a moment of panic. The variety is impressive and you’re never, ever short of things to do, both grand and menial.

And with questing, inevitably, comes fighting. Deadfire uses a classic real-time-with-pause combat system, and how involved you are is up to you. You can turn party AI on and let the computer decide which spells and skills your party members use. Or you can take control of them individually, with granular control over everything they do. On harder difficulty settings the latter tactic is essential. This is a tough game and you’ll need to make use of your party’s huge array of buffs, debuffs, spells, and attacks to survive encounters with powerful enemies. But if you’re only here for the story, you can knock the difficulty down and breeze through most battles with a single click. This freedom to customise your experience is very much in the spirit of the CRPG, and you can even change the difficulty on the fly if you need a break or want more of a challenge.

The customisation options don’t end there. You can fine-tune how the auto-pause works, selecting which events will trigger it—from the start of a fight to encountering a trap, which is handy for avoiding accidental stumbles into tripwires and mines. You can increase the loot radius so you spend less time plundering dead enemies and choose from six different interface layouts. Obsidian’s dedication to making sure you have exactly the experience you want is an admirable quality, and Deadfire is perhaps the most effective realisation of that goal to date. And masochists will be glad to hear that Path of the Damned returns, an extreme difficulty mode with smarter, more aggressive enemies thrown at you in great swathes.

As well as returning characters including easygoing soldier-turned-farmer Edér, dutiful elven wizard Aloth, and godlike paladin Pallegina, there are some new faces to adventure with in Deadfire. Maia Rua is an aumaua ranger accompanied by a red-streaked bird of prey named Ishiza, and she’s a mean shot with a rifle. Xoti is a priest who worships Gaun, an aspect of Eothas, and uses a strange, magical lantern to capture aimless souls. Tekēhu is a marine godlike chanter. And Serafen is a wry, wise orlan sailor loyal to a pirate faction called the Príncipi Sen Patrena, and my favourite of the lot. They’re an interesting bunch, and watching their relationships develop over time, both with the Watcher and each other, is entertaining. And yes, you can now romance certain party members if that floats your galleon.

You also have to consider the personalities of your companions, who will react positively or negatively to certain actions. Xoti, for example, might not look kindly upon you showing any anti-religious sentiment. And if you do something that harms the Príncipi Sen Patrena, Serafen won’t be pleased. You can keep track of what each person thinks of you on your character sheet, as well as your disposition, which is shaped through the way you talk to people and handle situations. Shady, rational, passionate, aggressive, and diplomatic are just a few of the personality traits you can pick up, and people will react accordingly. This makes for some exceptionally deep role-playing, allowing you to create a character with a nuanced personality that has a direct effect on dialogue and how people perceive you, opening up, and closing off, opportunities.

When Serafen joins your crew, he reveals the location of a pirate leader who you have a special interest in killing. He's holed up in a place called Fort Deadlight, and it’s here where one of Deadfire’s best quests takes place. If you’re brave you can fight your way through the fort, but it’s more fun to slip in undetected and blend in with the other pirates. Talking to them reveals clues about your target’s routine, his weaknesses, and suddenly you’re playing a Hitman level. There are numerous ways to kill him, and the sprawling fort is filled with alternate routes, hidden paths, and NPCs. It’s a brilliantly designed quest, but not quite as reactive as I’d have liked. When guards see through your ruse they blow a horn and alert the target, so I thought I’d pickpocket the horn to stop them. But even when I did, they produced one out of nowhere and blew it anyway. That aside, it’s a superb piece of design.

Pillars of Eternity II is another fine RPG from Obsidian, brilliantly showcasing the studio's knack for strong world-building, intelligent, expressive writing, and varied quest design. It’s a big, deep, wordy CRPG in the classic mould, but with enough new ideas to feel like more than just a throwback. The sailing is the only thing I didn’t really engage with, feeling somewhat half-baked compared to the rest of the game. But if it’s a fantasy RPG filled with pages of brilliant, descriptive dialogue you’re after, and a huge, open world to explore, the Deadfire Archipelago delivers all that and then some. We’re more spoiled for choice when it comes to RPGs like this than we were in 2015, which makes Deadfire feel a little less special than the first Pillars. But that’s a minor gripe in light of the fact that this is another great game from one of the best studios in the business, offering many hours of quality roleplaying.

THE VERDICT
88

PILLARS OF ETERNITY 2: DEADFIRE
A massive, bountiful RPG with richly descriptive writing, a well-realised setting, and deep tactical combat.

 

[moleman]

I'm on GoG. Already downloading...

I tried to equip the ring but it's still not showing. I logged out and back in.

Are you using Galaxy?

Yepp, Galaxy user here.

 

[Iskramor]

So no more excuses for this game. Now it is 100% going to be compared with BG2 and if it is not better than a 20 year old game, Obsidian can shut down their studio.

Do you want a based stickman to teach you a lesson?

 

[Prime Junta]

Man this is just like Christmas in a year where you're not sure if you've been a good boy.

 

[J_C]

RPS - review still in progress. Some whining from John Walker: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/05/08/pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire-review-in-progress/

Spoiler

Review In Progress: Pillars Of Eternity II: Deadfire

Pillars Of Eternity II is seemingly infinity hours long. Despite a week of playing, I’m still going, so here’s my in-depth thoughts about the game excluding the impact of its ending. I will update later.

What a lot Pillars Of Eternity II feels like it has to do. It needs to be a completely new dozens-of-hours-long RPG, while it also needs to be a sequel to 2015’s stunning first outing, while it needs to feel like it’s evolved from then, while it needs to feel like it’s faithful, while it… In many ways, it succeeds despite being tugged in all these directions. And in others, it feels wearily stretched from the process.

Such is the nature of this sequel that to explain its opening plot is to impose upon the ending of the last. There’s no real way around that. You’ll perhaps remember that PoE1 was about, amongst other things, a blight of soulless children on a region shortly after a god, who took on human form, had been killed. That god, Eothas, is back, and bigger. In a giant form, he erupts from the ground under your castle in Dyrwood, destroying it, and then strides off toward the archipelago of Deadfire, stamping on all sorts on his way.

The destruction of Caed Nua also destroys you, The Watcher, whoever you might have been in the first game, and sees you in the In-Between, confronted by Berath, the god of death. (Now, if you finished PoE1 you’ll be thinking, “But hang on…” and yes, it does address that rather sticky issue of deities, while at the same time rather fudging around it.) She wants you reborn, to tackle Eothas, and in the process gives you the chance to import an end-game save from the last game to bring over all your decisions, re-decide everything again in meticulous detail, and most of all, reroll your character entirely afresh.

However, despite being able to import your choices, for some reason you can’t import your actual Watcher. Which makes it a giant pain for anyone wanting their previous avatar. I wanted Ambree, my paladin from before, and had to load up PoE1 and copy all the minutiae of who she was to get it all right. Either way, your stats are scrapped and you start from level 1 again.

You awaken on a ship, your ship, to find that most aged of Bioware-inherited traditions in place: the most bland whitebread character possible first to join you. And it’s Eder, Mr Meh from the first game. Quickly you gather up rogue wizard Aloth. Then you bump into Pallegina, and… well, it becomes a little concerning this is going to feel like a band reuniting long after they should have retired. Thankfully, while there are more familiar faces to come, you can pull together a new team of new characters reasonably quickly.

This opening feels incredibly rushed. You wake up from death in a hand-drawn cutscene that obliterates your castle, and then you’re fleeing by ship to another land, bam. The impact of this almost incidental establishing lasts for a really long time, in a game that’s already extraordinarily open and loose, meaning that you’re going to have to do a lot of work yourself to let the events feel like they’re of any particular import or impact.

The counter to this, of course, is you’ve got an extraordinarily open and loose RPG, with a vast network of islands to explore, at your own pace, while introducing a whole new set of mechanics around owning and operating a ship, a crew, and indeed, the matter of ship combat.

I think at this point how you receive the game will very much be determined by what you love most about this old-school model of RPG. If you play for the tight stories, propelled down a main quest by an urge to save the day, torn away to side quests because of the personalities of your adored gang, then PoE1 met your needs splendidly. If, however, you prefer to amble, to get lost down a quest line completely separate to the main reason you’re there, to get embroiled in the politics and matters of new communities and peoples, to pick and choose and just occasionally get back to the main quest as and when, the PoE2 has this in spades.

I am, undeniably, in the former camp, and have struggled with Deadfire’s sprawling nature. I’m not sure, though, that this is entirely on me. I suspect rather strongly that the big issue with what is, unquestionably, an astoundingly vast and intricate and often pleasing role-playing game, is that it fails to get across to me why anything that’s happening really matters.

It all appears to be a look at colonialism, at the spread of various trading companies around the 17th century, along with the piracy and seafare that accompanied this. As such, you can start to align yourself with one company over another, become a menace to the lot of them, or just try to keep out of it entirely.

Alongside this, there are many new cultures to discover, whose lives are heavily impacted by this colonialism. For example, there’s an exploration of a caste system, interestingly applied to an allegedly socialist society of the Huana. Wealth is redistributed, but based on a notion of a meritocracy, that in reality is an outdated hierarchy of class. The lowest caste, the Roparu, are essentially Dalits, patronised by the two tiers above (a working-middle class, and a royal upper class, the Mataru) as needing to be looked after, and then supposedly having grown too numerous to be cared for. Which is of course to say, never given adequate opportunity, and then grown in number such that to redistribute wealth fairly would mean the higher castes would get less… You can see the level of detail that is going in to such things, and this applies absolutely everywhere.

And as a part of an archipelago so strongly under the thrall of finances, money is a much more important factor this time around. In PoE1, I think the aspect of employing staff at Caed Nua, and paying them regular wages, was a little undercooked. You never really needed to think about it at all. In PoE2 it’s much more crucial, especially early on when cash is tight.

You get between the many islands by boat, always, and on the way you could run into watery trouble. To be able to outrun, out-cannon, or out-fight another boat’s crew, you need people on board. You can hire workers at ports, and pick them up through side quests, each with a set of starting skills. Perhaps they know a bit of cooking, or their way around the rigging. Assign them to the appropriate space on your ship layout, and then they start to gain levels in their abilities through practice. Also, they may get injured, which means taking them off duty for a few days, and ideally in the care of your hired ship’s surgeon. So you may want back-up crew for such times. Oh, and they’re all going to not only need paying, but also food, drink, and medical supplies, which can be bought, scavenged and stolen on your journey. And all of these aspects, alongside victories and failures in naval battles, as well as little adventures, affect your crew’s morale. Let it get to low and they will be far less effective. Let it get very low and they may mutiny.

It sounds like a lot, but it’s all well implemented, and once you’ve gotten the hang of it it really doesn’t interrupt the flow. It’s just the getting the hang of it part that’s a problem, with the game woefully bad at explaining it all to you. I spent so long not understanding why crew weren’t getting healed by the surgeon, for instance, and really couldn’t get to grips with how to recover morale. This is not helped by a very peculiar decision, in a game that wears the rest of its stats ridiculously loudly, to hide all the numbers for your crew. Instead there’s a really very silly system of unexplained studs and stars on their pop-up tooltip, that fails to properly communicate at any point the standard of your ship and crew.

Ship combat is then a whole other learning experience, and you may be surprise/relieved to learn, isn’t about a little arcade game in the midst of RPGing. It is, in fact, entirely text based. It all plays out like a little Twine game. I’ll go into more detail about this in a separate piece tomorrow, but it’s a superbly implemented choose-your-own-ship-battle, where your crew’s experience and the equipment on board play out in a series of turn-based decisions of tactical positioning, cannon firing, and crew maintenance.

Ship fights can end either by sinking the enemy boat, or by boarding it and having a fight back in the main game engine. But rather tragically, the two don’t integrate at all meaningfully, meaning hopes that deliberate using cannon shot that takes out crew members to thin down for an eventual fisticuffs battle isn’t even a thing. It’s such an obvious thing to have included, and really hugely disappointing to discover isn’t there. Instead if you board they magically have a full crew again to fight you. Sigh.

More ridiculously, by the time your own team is of a decent level, it’s far quicker to eschew the splendid Twine-like section, and just whomp them in a 30 second fight, and that way you get more loot for your efforts. A real mess of balancing, and a really sad way to mess up one of the best new features.

On dry land, things play out much as you might expect from an Obsidian RPG, a collection of enormous towns packed with NPCs, mini-quests, taverns and plot-critical estates and temples, alongside single-use dungeons and infiltrated strongholds. Although to get to them, there’s a larger map view for each island, your team moved around as an icon, with time passing as you travel long distances.

As for combat, in many ways it’s similar to PoE1, and indeed the current vogue for pausable real-time RPG combat – each of your characters’ turns is on a timer dependent upon ability and equipment, and you can meticulously manage every action of all five in your present team, or let it play itself out with its AI if you’ve the difficulty low enough/the encounter is simple enough. Most of the time it’s a combination of the two.

However, there have been some attempts to streamline aspects of it, and complicate others. Wizards can restore spells without resting now, while there’s a new ability called Empower that allows you to either restore half of any character’s spent resources, or soup up a specific spell or ability for the duration of that battle, once per encounter. I played on “Classic”, which is the game’s version of Normal, and there’s a Relaxed below that for battles where you can mostly leave them to it, and a Story even lower than that for making fights immaterial.

Then of course there’s Veteran for those looking for a challenge, and beyond that the madness that is Path of the Damned. I suspect for those who enjoy the minutiae of such combat, it’s here that the min-maxing complexity that’s available will shine. And there’s the Expert mode for masochists who want all the useful on-screen information obfuscated. For those of us who prefer to just choose when to lob a fireball, and when to heal a chum, Classic makes this just a bit too simplistic this time out, while higher than that becomes too much of a fiddle.

Saying this, they’ve made the very odd choice to let you change difficulty at any point, but it only affects areas you’ve yet to visit. So if you meet an encounter you can’t get through, er, tough.

More strange, lowering the difficulty to Relaxed also strips the game down entirely of its level gating, and levels every part of the game to your team. This perhaps seems like it’s helping the player not get into scrapes that are too difficult, but it also has the effect of making the entire world simultaneously accessible, in a way that muddles the storytelling.

And wow is the storytelling muddled. The game has so, so many quests open at once, and makes so little effort to make clear what’s happening where and why, that I more often accidentally completed them than deliberately. You can sort quests by the order you received them, or by location, but neither is helpful. The latter especially because sometimes it sorts them by the location where you received them, not where they actually take place, other times only one of multiple locations, and often fails to include key information about where to report them back when completed. With nineteen or twenty open quests at any time, this is dreadful. And even more so when there’s no way to track missions on the map, nor even assign one as your primary focus.

But more important is the lack of weight to most things happenings. When a game’s main plot is that a vast god is stamping entire cities into the ground with each step, you’d imagine there’d be a notion of urgency about this. Yet the Eothas story feels so, so far in the background for so much of the game. It is at once too big and too incidental. The game is for so long far more interested in the astoundingly dull political machinations of a collection of rival trading companies, and the pirates that frustrate them. Petty personal rivalries seem to be the centre of all disagreements, so you do the usual of taking sides, negotiating, or just killing everyone involved.

There’s such a vast amount to do here, and doing much of it is absorbing and entertaining, but ultimately it feels so loose and wayward. Far too much is about being pulled back and forth by the gods, which was last time’s story, and here takes place far too often in long-winded conversation cards that offer you little real choice.

I’ve really enjoyed playing through some of the vignettes, multi-layered dungeons with secrets and multi-part quests, ending with a decent fight. But when they’re done, it’s hard to remember what it was about, and harder to fathom how it connects to anything else that’s happening.

A world where children are being born without souls, scarring generations, while warring factions of a terrifying god attempt to take control: great story, lots of impact. That was PoE1. A world where some giant is stamping somewhere else you can’t see, and there’s a trade war going on that endlessly suggests the complicity of the natives? Yeah, it’s not exactly gripping.

Perhaps more damningly, I just didn’t care about any of the companions. Aloth and Eder didn’t do much for me last time, and just the bare minimum effort has gone into advancing either as people – they feel like a band lazily relying on their old hits. Of the new crowd, I quite liked Maia, and her pet parrot Ishi. But mostly because she didn’t complain as much as the others. They’re a dreary group.

Exploring the nautical map, finding all the undiscovered islands, taking on pirates, or indulging in some piracy, looting shipwrecks, it all sounds like it should be so much more fun. But in execution it’s mostly an elaborate menu. Find a battle on an island and you’ll be in a single location, and when the fight’s over, there’s nowhere to explore, no hidden treats, no dungeons to deep dive. There’s really nothing to be gained, beyond easily bought resources, from exploration, which is such a miss.

I think that describes a lot of what I’ve seen so far: swings and misses. The naval battles are beautifully delivered, but almost immediately redundant, and don’t meaningfully impact a boarding raid. The story is enormous and intricate, but doesn’t feel weighty or important. The combat is astonishingly detailed, but played at the standard setting rarely requires you to use its many mechanisms.

And yet the depth and wealth of effort that’s gone into its world building does have an impact on me. The sense of a place is unquestionably wonderful, and goodness me, there’s so much writing and voice acting in here (gone are PoE1’s awkward half-voiced conversations, with every NPC line spoken aloud). There is a vast amount to do, and it’s undeniably absorbing to busily bustle about the waters, ticking off quest after quest.

I’ve yet to finish it, in a large part because a colleague warned me that by following the main quest too early, he inadvertently locked himself out of a lot of the side quests, with the game offering no warning. My feelings may change as I see the story to its end, and I will write again to say.

There’s no doubt that a new player could play PoE2 without having played the original. But they’d be a person not really understanding an awful lot of what was going on. And, frankly, if you’re interested in playing this game, then you’re interested in playing the original, and should. It’s the better game. And this is very much a sequel that, despite a new setting, many new characters, and a new overarching plot, relies heavily on the enormous volumes of lore and history that the original taught. Often with the most peculiar assumption that you’ll have remembered every detail of a sixty hour, three year old game, or be as in the dark as to who this character that recognises you might be as anyone approaching this game first. Wirtan? No clue. Chatted to me like an old friend.

I wish PoE2 had had more to say, more it wanted to express. I think that would have covered over a multitude of its other sins. Half-ideas about colonialism mixed with exploitation of natural resources by trading companies don’t really deliver the goods here. (That is the best joke.) As it is, despite having spent dozens of hours playing this, I’ve always felt at arm’s length.

I don't want to defend the game, but it's very interesting that these deep problems with a game never occur to John Walker when he is playing some mainstream shit.

 

[Infinitron]

Launch trailer:

 

[MajorMace]

Who's John Walker, can a good soul make a tl;dr of his whining ?

 

[AwesomeButton]

I'm on GoG. Already downloading...

I tried to equip the ring but it's still not showing. I logged out and back in.

Are you using Galaxy?

Yepp, Galaxy user here.

Nah, I'm old school download+install manually.

Aha, after another refresh, it just worked. :D

 

[Salvo]

Italian review is out. 83/100

https://multiplayer.it/recensioni/1...sione-di-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire.html



+ Bigger than PoE I
+ Combat system was refined
+ It's much better technically and graphically

- It struggles when compared to D:OS 2
- Some of the new mechanics get old/irrelevant quickly
- While narratively successful, it's inferior (in that regard) to PoE I


Reviewer also mentions how losing Avellone was a big blow for Obsidian.
Looks like a very fair review overall, they mention how they were expecting something more, and while it's not a bad game by a big stretch, it could have been better.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Who's John Walker, can a good soul make a tl;dr of his whining ?

A good sould can, but it will still be shit.