Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire

Just hearing the music gets me emotional. What a ride. Beautiful settings, memorable characters, earthshaking stakes... storytelling at its best. <3

One of the best RPGs I've ever played. And I've been playing games sincen the early 80s...

The game has a very good story and very rich dialogue options. You need to read a FULL recap on the first game's major events to even understand what is going on in this game. If you have never played or read the story of Pillars Of Eternity 1, DON'T buy this game before you do. My Critiques as of today 12/05/2018 are: 1) The game is far too easy even on the maximum difficulty - You will rarely die in this game and most of the fights are over in 20-30 seconds. The game has no "real" combat challenge on the highest difficulty and if you play on normal or easy, you better spare your money and just buy a nice book. 2) Resting in the game is the one of the main gameplay mechanics in which you are supposed to give "precious" scarce food to your party when they are injured so they can remove negative buffs. Well, this future is kinda pointless because every time someone in your party gets a negative buff, you will have at least 200-300+ food in your inventory and it ONLY TAKES 2 FOOD per person to remove all negative buffs. 3) The game is not optimized at all - dropping below 30 fps in some areas with a GTX 1070 is "normal" in the current state of the game, loading times takes around 15-20 seconds between changing areas (you click on a door of the inn to go outside or inside) - this is on a high grade SSD 4) The game have some MAJOR bugs - characters missing after they are supposed to join your party when their scripted event occurs in the game. The game also ignores some choices that you made in the previous game.

I want to love this game and at times I have, but overall it seems as though the ship travel and island exploring is in place to hide tha fact that there is really very little story actually going on. The party members are varied and many, but few of their quests seems to have anything like the dramatic impact of those in BG 2. and most of them have pallid endings that just sort of drop off. Because the game is set in an island world, none of the locations have anything to offer other than a quick "do this, go there, done and dusted." You get off your ship, resupply, explore the one or two locations on the island, many of which are merely scripted and involve skill checks, and then you'reoff again. And by "explore," I mean you see a little cursor beetling around the island -- you don't actually travel through the scenery. Because of this I get no sense of discovery, no interest in my surrondings. There are no wonderful big dungeons to explore, either. All in all the game skims the surface instead of delving deeply, and for this I cannot rate it higher than I have. It could have been so much more...

good: cool new ideas/environments, content bad: buggy AF at this point, especially later stages, but most quests can be completed np