Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire

The game is enjoyable - most people will have a relatively fun experience. The Good: 1) UI, Graphics and especially Sound are fantastic 2) Large world to explore, very little copy/paste feel 3) Character development is great, battles are fun The Bad: Uninspiring story, too much 'over the top' God involvement The Ugly: 1) I wish this game was released 2-3 years sooner before all the cultural 'innovations" in our society. It REALLY ruins the story and the game. Almost everyone is either black (dressed up in 18th century European attire) or gay (a suggestive chat with same sex party member is two dialog options away, with a few rare exceptions). The value of these 'inclusions' is debatable. 2) 'Strong Female Character' overload - your most useful party members will be female. All tough as nails. Same goes for most NPCs of power - military brass, royals etc. The taint of our modern insanity really kills the mood.

Not a lot of lessons learned from the first game. PoE 2 falls into the same trap of that the game doesn't really have a hook and well, it's kinda boring Combat is still way too micro heavy and you'll be pausing constantly For what it's worth, multiclassing does make things more interesting build wise

Compared to PoE/Tyranny, this game is no fun. It lacks two major things which made previous two games addictive: combat and story. (-) Combat encounters are so rare that it seems that combat is not part of the game at all. Besides, it is very simple even of hard difficulty. In previous games you had to use some tactics to win: planning sequence of spells, blocking enemies in narrow passages, hit&run. Here you won't need anything of those. Just pause the game once when encounter begins, make some random orders, unpause and watch. (-) The second problem is the lack of the story. Both PoE and Tyranny provided a truly interesting mystery to solve. In PoE2, the plot is virtually non-existent (as far as I can say after five hours of gameplay). Instead your are given long list of side quests. I mean every quest is a side quest. Absence of the story doesn't mean that dialogues became shorter, no. Excessively long dialogues were painful even in PoE1, but in PoE1 you at least had immersive story, and the dialogue was the key to uncover the mystery. Lacking meaningful story, PoE2 brings boredom of reading dialogues to a brand new level. Final problem with the plot is that PoE2 is advertised as a sequel to PoE. In practice, the connection to PoE is only through the names of gods and your companions. If you give them other names, then there nothing will left that will entitle this game to be called a sequel. Treat this game as a standalone title. (+) Major novelty is the ship-based HQ and the map exploration mechanics. The game takes place in vast sea with dozens of islands to explore. Both islands and sea are filled with large number of mini-encounters which require choices to be made. This may vary from simple "loot a ship (with consequences) or leave it alone" to more complicated encounters with many options available depending on your character skills. But no matter how exploration is good, it can't counterweight the lack of combat and story. (+) Graphics is of exceptionally high quality and detail. (-) One more thing that I would like to criticize is the audio. Music is a weird mix of original PoE tracks (they are awesome, but they don't fit PoE2 a single bit) with sea chants of utmost ugliness (luckily, you can disable the latter in settings). Voice acting is unsophisticated. Atop of that, all people are talking in Italian accent, which is annoying. One-two persons would be ok, but not everybody. To summarize, gameplay consists of exploring large map on a ship, encountering a lot of people, reading (actually, skipping) megabytes of dialogues and performing a variety of simple "go here, go there" quests. Lack of decent combat and story made playing this game an unrewarding experience. There is nothing that could hook me. It is just too boring.

Having been a fan and avid player of POE1 with all the subsequent add ons, I was waiting with bated breath for POE2 and it mainly doesn't disappoint. Loved the various dialogue 'trees' of whatever role playing leanings you have and the effect that it has on the game direction. Artwork in the main game is spectacular. Less so is the accessory naval game that involves seamanship and maritime maneuvers, which appears sadly cobbled together by a totally less than interested art department. One wonders if it was meant to be a part of the game originally as it looks amateurish by comparison the the main game. To make matters worse, that portion of the game seems riddled with errors involving the healing and morale of wounded crew. The naval battles are presented as word games, much like the puzzles cut scenes in POE1. You're confronted with a puzzle, you choose choice a, b, or c; which leads to another screen, when you choose again. Only this time, you're choosing course and heading to give an advantage so that you can bring your guns to bear. The POE1 game I loved is literally turned into a cheap puzzle battleship game. The main game however, is to the same pedigree as POE1. It has more of the dungeon crawl, creature battling and gear seeking as the first game. So it wasn't a loss. Bottom line? Worth the price of admission, but just that. The naval enterprise is a dragging anchor.

The game itself is decent. I like the features such as multi-classing and having to ensure that you don't act in a way that earns you disfavour with your god - if you are a priest or similar. Unfortunately, Linux support is woeful and several patches have been broken requiring a full download of the game (20+GB) again. GOG Support isn't helpful and I wonder whether those interested should buy the game on Steam instead.