Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire

At the time I bought this game, I read several ratings that the Mac port doesn't work. I can tell you it DOES work! I have a iMac 2017, 5K with the Radeon Pro 580. It runs smooth and after playing 4 hours and 16 minutes no crashes or what so ever. I can imagine that running something like this on a Mac Book, could give problems. The game: For me it' has been a very long time since I played games like this. I guess the first Baldurs gate and Neverwinter nights. I haven't played the first part of this game. It took me a few hours to get into the game, but once in it I hardly can stop playing. It's a lot of reading, but the story line so fat is very cool. Graphics look great and the sound and music fits perfectly. I guess I have something again to fill up my evenings again.

The first Pillars of Eternity took me by surprise with how good it was! I had such high hopes for the sequel - but the sequel suffers from what a lot of movies do! With one big success, they wanted to make something that was bigger and more over the top than the first - and that's just what they did! However, the story of the second one (I won't spoil it for anyone) - is by far, far, far, far more "Earth Shaking" to the point where if you think about it - all the other quests SHOULD NOT MATTER to our heroes, as they should be just fixated on the bigger picture. But the game forces you to put that aside to do a number of other quests. It would have been better if the Earth Shaking Matter (as I will call it - the main quest) slowly happened, rather than happening right at the start. This makes the idea of doing the other stuff... trivial. I did like the exploration on the ships (that was a fun element) and fighting other ships, naming islands, and such - and the sea shanties were great to listen to. But it does, for me, fall short of the first one.

I'm more than happy about the 2nd installation of the series. It's one of the best recent CRPGs out there. Definitely kicks butt of anything WOTC churned out in a decade. It's rough around the edges, but it's bordering on being a gem. I still think that Obsidian's setting is ridiculous, but the game is more than decent and screw WoTC/Hasbro for killing D&D and making a greasy 5ed sexdoll out of its once marvellous/illustrous skin. P.S. It suxx that when Obsidian does a better game (NWN2 DLC No.3/Pillars 2) they get shunned by the general public... P.P.S. Remove the damn review character limit!

...which seems to have its priorities a little muddled. Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire is a very solid title, but its flaws are holding it back from being something truly great. Probably my biggest gripe with it is the relation of the main plot to everything else that goes on in the Deadifre. It's short and, compared to PoE I, rather weak. From the get-go, you're told how urgent it is to stop Eothas. After leaving Port Maje, however, the game opened up completely - the whole Deadfire was waiting to be explored at my leisure. So I found myself doing pretty much anything else, rather than following the main plot - because that was so much more interesting and compelling. This discrepancy between the sense of urgency the main plot is evoking and the open and explorartory nature of the gameplay was incredibly jarring. This is further compounded by the fact that pretty much everything else was so well-done: The city of Neketaka was a joy to explore, the vastly different cultures and factions around the Deadfire, as well as their corresponding quests, were varied, rich and well-written. At times, it felt like the developers were so busy fleshing out the lore that they forgot to write a good main plot to go along with it. The same goes for the companions: In PoE I, while not having many interactions, they felt nuanced and real. In PoE II, I felt some of that nuance was stripped away in favour of playing it for laughs (Edér and Aloth being the biggest victims). Speaking of companions: The reputation system associated with them was bugged in my run. Nothing game-breaking, but still... meh. The changes that were made to the rest of the gameplay were a bit of a mixed bag for me, too: Multi-classing was cool, but not really for me. The skill trees that replaced the skills and feats lists annoyed me, so did the Resource and Empower system. It felt much like an Action RPG in places, though whether that is a good or a bad thing is for the individual player to decide.

There's way too much distraction from fun parts like exploring dungeons or other environments: Much of the time is spent on a world map where you slowly travel around on foot or by ship. And make sure to enable level scaling because otherwise you might sail to the wrong place (with zero indication) and get chased and then smashed to bits by a high level pirate ship. Most places that you can travel to basically turn out to be either tiny random encounter zones or just loot drops where you repeatedly say "keep looting" and get some more water or find some coin until it runs out anyway. Who would even stop looting halfway? More time is spent on character level ups; selecting all the skills of everyone in the party is a slog in itself because ability descriptions are doubly nested before you can actually see what an ability does. So when you first hover your cursor over an ability, it provides a very short description that is worthless. Then you rightclick on the ability to get more info. Then that info says something like "grants the Insightful inspiration" and then you need to hover over Insightful to finally get an explanation of what actually happens. Rinse and repeat for the 10 different abilities that your fighter unlocked for this power level (there are 9 power levels). Repeat for all 5 members of your party. Conversations are also tooltip-heavy, where NPCs use newly invented words in every other sentence. So dialogs cannot be really handled with the keyboard because you constantly need to hover over these words. (Or just do not bother.) Combat is quite chaotic but the default AI works pretty well and wins your average fight without any input at all. Characters can also have up to 4 weapon sets, but it's not possible to define a hotkey to cycle between them. More clicking. So combat is streamlined out of the game and dungeon exploration is replaced but an utterly annoying world map. And the rest is boring.