Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire

Both Pillars of Eternity games are overtly postmodern: their stories mix metempsyschosis and post-colonial thought. The bread and butter of both games is still the old-school role-playing atmosphere, however: you bash things with swords and shoot spells after speaking some words.

The underlying purpose behind this series isn't entirely to "enjoy a narrative", but to reflect on the modern condition of life, I guess. You start the game with several quotes about whether the in-game Gods are fallible and whether society should accept them as fallible.

Questioning the gods as you reincarnate into a new character (or your old one) is the perfect way to get the player in the groove of pondering about the nature of authority, dogma and religion. It's un-skippable everytime you start a new game for a reason!...

Until the player-base decides it should be changed, anyway.

The diverse emotions you can respond to NPCs with (stoic, arrogant, jokingly, etc) create a nice pastiche of personality for your main character, but they don't do much in-terms of gameplay effects (you don't get a bonus to your affliction defenses for being "Stoic", for example). Basically, you have to understand that the development company known for making games with moral and metaphysical quandries isn't interested in helping you beat the baddies with the biggest explosions (though to be fair, the explosions in this game are really fucking pretty for an isometric RPG) and the best stats.

They are more interested in your emotional experience going through the game; you should be as well.

The most polished isometric CRPG of all time, and given the direction of the gaming industry, probably never to be superseded as such. Like in any CRPG, the gameplay occurs within the dialogue box, and combat is a minigame on the side. What sets Deadfire apart is that it understands this, and its attention to the details of information delivery smooths away any of the traditional flaws of the format. You never miss important information because you got lazy and skimmed a dialogue box-- in fact, you never skim dialogue boxes, because of their meticulously economical language and the well-delivered voices accompanying them. You never forget a jargon term, because you can mouse over them for a reminder. The story has a subtlety of theme that allows the player to choose between endings in a way that reflects a believable worldview, rather than the classic CRPG foible of presenting the same save-the-world story in a few themed colorways. The game breathes with life without needing to use simulation as a party-trick; its characters live on the strength of the game's writing. All of the skeletal elements of the CRPG art form are done better here than in any other game before or since*.

The rest of the gameplay, while not especially crucial to the experience, holds its weight well enough. The RPG character creation has enough variety to encourage multiple playthroughs, and the combat does its job in creating high moments for each character archetype. Travel and ship combat are weak, but don't detract from the game where it matters.

*If there is one other game which displays an equal understanding of the mechanics of a CRPG text box, it has to be Disco Elysium. And it's a matter of taste, but Deadfire includes the player in its world far more thoroughly, while Disco Elysium treats them as a voyeur to a character study. Like Deadfire, it will never be replicated.

Well damn, I expected grand things out of of Pillars of Eternity II but it actually blew away my expectations. I thought the first game was great (even if I didn't finish it) but it's easy to see how the developers have learned a lot from the first game and managed to improve just about every aspect of it. It's too bad that the game was not a huge success, perhaps it was just bad timing being released shortly after Divinity Original Sin 2 and Pathfinder: Kingmaker which are also both huge RPGs that people were a little burned out on those by the time this came out and perhaps also a reason it took me nearly 3 years to finally get to it.

So the game picks off after the end of the 1st one, and it even allows you to upload your save file to continue with the moral choices you had done before. I don't think it's mandatory to have played the first one, but it does help understand the concept of the Watcher who speaks to dead souls. If you don't have a save file, the game does offer you some of the basic PoE endings to choose to start with. Throughout your new journey, you will explore a big open world with your boat, speak to gods, fight all sorts of monsters and humans, gain reputations with different factions and decide the faith of the rest of humanity. Pretty big RPG stuff, but this is also accompanied by great writing and a fully voiced cast this time around.

With Patch 5.0 the game introduced Turn Based Battle Mode which is the way I played the game. While I don't have anything against Real Time With Pause (it's a system with its ups and downs), I'm just a much bigger fan of turn based battles since it allows you for much more precise actions and decisions. I think this is one of the things that greatly improves the game. The game has a big skill tree for each character class, so no matter you who choose to play with, you'll have to make some key decisions on how to build your team. You'll meet up with up to 9 other companions, but you can only form a group of 5 at a time. Aside from your companions, you'll also have to enlist sailors which all have different specialties in order to make your ship run (navigator, deckhand, cook, surgeon and so on). You can also upgrade your ship, or just buy other ones too... there's definitely many things to do in the game.

The game has tons and tons of quests. At the game gets going and you get to main city of Neketaka, you'll average around 25 active quests at the same time. The game gives you a lot of freedom on where you want to go next, but it will also warn you if a certain quest is too difficult. As you sail the seas you'll also have naval battles with pirates and certain factions... like is there something this game doesn't do? The exploration is great as the map starts it will be all fogged up and it's for you to discover everything. The cities are pretty big to explore, each split into different areas with tons of people to talk with. The quests are rich in dialogues and aren't meaningless, and gaining reputation is important while trying to not piss off too much opposing factions. Of course no RPG would be complete without a rich set of equipment and treasures to discover. Sailing costs money (well food and drinks), so you have to plan your voyages correctly in order to hopefully turn a profit or gain some reputation.

The graphics are pretty good, the art style is great and the game definitely expands on its lore of the 1st game. This is a nice set up for Avowed as they have a great base to work with, there's lot of history built on in this franchise now and it could lead to more great things. It feels weird to me that The Outer Worlds was such a big success and this one was a minor flop, when Outer Worlds while fun is kinda simple, shallow and limited with Pillars of Eternity 2 is rich, complex and innovative. Like this is really pure RPG stuff all around, there's that strong Baldur's Gate influence still lurking around but it builds on it and pushes the genre further. Certainly one of the best ones I've ever played. So yeah I would recommend this game to RPG fans, but be warned you will have to be deeply invested in it because it's really damn long (68.5 hours for me without touching the expansion content) and requires lots of mental energy from all the lore to soak up and all the decision making.

Finished this at around 52 hours, including 2/3rds the DLC and hitting most of the side-content. This is a fantastic sequel, one of the best iterations in games I have seen since We Love Katamari. Mechanically and narratively the first Pilalrs of Eternity was like a preparatory building of energy before a great leap that is Deadfire.

The central conflict in the world of Pillars is, unlike the first game, not tied to a singular mystery, so in Deadfire we can witness the pantheon of fake-Gods shit themselves all across the Deadfire archipelago, suffused in local dramas, unbound and much more free. This is because the game actually has a very short main-quest chain, six steps or so, and the breadth and depth of the game exists in the sandbox middle-section that takes place on the ocean map, across all the islands and dungeons that the main villain, Eothas in his gigantic crystal body, has chosen to ignore and walk past. You are allowed to pursue the story at whatever pace, sail the seas if you'd like, colonize, assist indigenous groups to obtain sovereignty, or try not to interfere.

Deadfire has cleaned up a lot of the mechanics which existed in PoE, streamlining combat and combat encounters (no trash!), making things more legible, introducing multi-class. Reputations and inter-party relationships exist and factor in to your questing in some impressive, and sometimes underwhelming ways. The ambition is there, which is what I appreciate. You lose your castle from the first game and gain a ship with a crew in this one, which is, like it always was, sort of inconsequential but a novel game system nonetheless. You will travel the islands and sea with your ship, but you may not actually encounter ship combat, because it is both unnecessary and kind of not fun. Ship combat is actually a sad thing in this game, I learned that it was the most expensive and exhausting thing to develop and no one seemed to like it or play it. But over all, the changes and new inclusions are very welcome and make Deadfire a richer story and combat experience, these are improvements which affect many parts of the overall game and do so successfully for the most part.

I bought and played through two DLCs, The Beast of Winter and The Forgotten Sanctum. I chose to skip out on the arena-themed, combat DLC called Seeker, Slayer, Survivor because it just didn't sound worth it. But Beasts and Sanctum were magnificent pieces of extra content with exciting settings, really engaging stories, great production values as reflected in the art and how their stories connect to the main plot. I wholeheartedly recommend those two, with The Forgotten Sanctum being my favorite piece of DLC for this game, my favorite part of PoE2 Deafire, and perhaps my favorite piece of DLC in general. They are both extremely satisfying, I think.

This is a great game! I am not sure if we will get a sequel, despite it reviewing well. This post-mortem by Deadfire's director, Josh Sawyer, suggests that there isn't as much room for real-time-with-pause CRPGs anymore and that the standards set by DivOS2 and other games when it comes to voice acting seemed to have put a strain on Obsidian that was really overwhelming. Regardless, they made an excellent game, one of the best RPGs of the decade that tried to develop the genre, through moves separate from markets and industry trend intuition, trying to do more than respond in the ways that everyone already knew to ask for. Obsidian is always ambitious, individual, sometimes successful, and here, I think, they really did succeed in some wonderful ways!