Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire

I am enjoying this game immensely. If you liked Pillars of Eternity I, then you should like this game even more. If you're looking for another action RPG, or loot-driven RPG, this probably isn't it. Pillars II is complicated. You must put some time and thought into choices in character development and conversations and branches in the plot. Feels old-school, in a good way. While combat is an integral (and sometimes challenging - I've had my backside handed to me a couple of times when I didn't manage battles well) part of Pillars II, it implements non-violent options extremely well. In one encounter, I found at least 4 ways to get at and kill my enemy, ways to blackmail him, humiliate and blackmail him, join him, double-cross him... I'm sure there are more. None of these paths led to "worse" outcomes, but rather, different outcomes. I do hate games where I get rewarded more for killing an opponent (e.g. through unique loot) than for using an alternate and more difficult method. The graphics and music are great. I've encountered no major bugs (PC). The story is excellent. I have not gotten lost in the plot at all, but this is a huge and well packed game world to explore. Plan on spending some time there. I find Pillars to have that magic "just need to do one more thing before I stop" quality.

Games like this show that RPGs will never die. While going full on 3D has its own merrits, staying top-down isometric is just a style that works on its own. Pillars 1 provided a fresh world and a nice new "Baldurs Gate" like feeling. This extends all of it , pretty much like Baldurs Gate 2 did in the past. Good game, just gets better and probably gets a bunch of extra DLC content to extend the game further.

I watched my friend play this for about two hours. I wasn't disappointed with what I saw, but I saw room for improvement. I would personally like to build my character psychological profile at start of the game, and I woud like not to see dialogue options, but instead I want my character to always answer depending on what kind of character I have created. This is, IMHO, obsolete, and I walways keep balancing between roleplay and being scared if I will pick the wrong answer and something bad happens because of it. Voice acting and perhaps a small baloon over characters heads would be preferable over dialogoue options, which also slow down the game a lot. Second improvement would be questing, as I noticed game still uses old quests and sidequests system, which is simply unrealistic and 90-ies. This must be done more intelligently in 2018. Frend ran the game at hd 610 with extra video options off and it ran relatively smooth, so no objections there. Music is awesome, and with AI on, combat can be fun to watch, and not a pain. In story mode, this is almost an interactive movie, with a great story, but a tad too much talking. Warriors usally aren't very talktative, they chop off your head if you try to say an extended sentence, and these characters are like all scholars or something. A hard world with hard people isn't filled with much flapping of gums. Other then what I wrote, it seems like a more then decent game, it is perhaps unfortunate it doesn't aspire to lead the industry, but instead uses a well tested recipe, but it can easily be improved.

It was ok with some intresting points tho i feel the naval combat was under cooked and mostly tedius and charactor development of partymembers and some intresting NPC's was underwelming.

I was really looking forward to play PoE2 Deadfire after finishing PoE1. A lot of things is better and I like it more, eg. the combat style, no 2 healthbears, graphics was better and navy combats were awesome. I also thought that 5 chars party would be strange ... but it was OK (but still I miss one char :)). It was something new with the big world, ships and pirates. It was fun ... until I found that the main story is ... I am not sure about the story. It was short, the end was weird (something I really didn't expected, but I didn't enjoy it). Also there is so many subquests and tasks which make the game good and longer, but also boring as you do the same again and again. It was a good game with many great improvements, but also were weak in terms of story.