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!