Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire

I've absolutely loved Pillars of Eternity, so I'm surprised how little there is to like about Deadfire, while there is so much more DLC content for it. The artwork and graphics have taken a huge step backward in quality. The soundscape has become less cinematic and more VR, meaning you miss important lines, while being forced to listen to dull exposition. The voice acting has become very patchy, and the worst candidate is sadly the new narrator, who reads the text painfully slowly, and with slightly less emotional inflection than most contemporary text-to-speech algorithms. The PC voicing gives a number of choices, most of which seem inappropriately named, and none of which are significantly different from one another in any way other than the sex of the actor. The UI has had a similar detail drop, while the UX has been made considerably more complex, and less intuitive. Impressive, when the original UI was largely tables of figures and stats! I found the combat mechanics in the original a little too complex for my taste, and mostly let the AI complete the fights for me, just making sure I don't start a fight till my party will win ... Now encounters level with you, and the AI needs micro-managing, so I always come close to a wipe, but the combat mechanics have gotten a lot more tedious, along with random encounters being forced on you out of nowhere. A whole resource management system is added. (not fun) The main quest is less engaging than Skyrims' Dragonborn quest. (which I rarely peruse) The already tedious loading times have lengthened, and become more frequent, being inserted between the many UI switches, most of which require a couple of clicks before switching to the next UI and incurring another long loading screen. So far, I haven't found companions I want for more than cannon-fodder, and don't care to side with any faction. If you just want to micro-manage combat, and run off NVME, this is probably an upgrade? Vanity pets have stats boosts now! Yay!?

POE2's story was lacking so it made reaching the end a tiring slog. I liked Tyranny which brought me to give POE2 a try even though I did not like POE1. If you concur with me so far, here is my personal list of similar RPG's of the genre you can try. #1 Pathfinder: WOTR (wish it had FULL voice acting) #2 Expeditions: Rome (Terrible army management/battles) #3 Wasteland 3 #4 Tyranny (I enjoyed the story, but gameplay is lacking, lots of reading) #5 POE2: (Terrible naval/ship battles) I could not get into Divinity so no comment.

The good things: it's gorgeous, sounds good, the setting of Eora is interesting and you actually get to see an interesting area of the world rather than Dyrwood's "diet Forgotten Realms." There are more scripted "pick an option" events throughout the world and they're always fun. Exploring the world map feels almost like FTL in a lot of ways, but this is also a downside - see below. The bad things: Dude, where to begin? Combat is trash. It's improved from the first game, but a shiny turd is still a turd. There's no complexity or depth or any kind of thought that goes into combat because terrain is irrelevant and just for show. There's no high ground/low ground mechanics, no system of taking cover or using cover, and every battlefield is just a plain open field. All of the battles are just "hit them harder than they hit you" and forms of hard CC are largely removed from the game so it's mostly just a bland slugging match. There's no strategy, no tactics. And you're made to fight through 90% of the game, with only specific encounters giving you the option of talking your way through. Gameplay balance is terrible, even worse than Pillars was. Obsidian cut corners and it shows. Paladins and Rogues break the game and Paladin/Rogues can quite easily solo the entire game without even trying. Exploration is awesome, but also extremely shallow. There's no sense of cost or threat to exploring and literally everything involving the ship and its mechanics feels half-assed - expected of a stretch goal. It's frustrating because it's not hard to see how amazing it COULD be if Obsidian bothered to give a crap - or was competent enough to pull it off. I backed this game on Fig and I probably should've learned my lesson the first time, when Pillars turned out to be garbage. I've learned my lesson this time, though, and will be avoiding Obsidian products in the future. They clearly don't know how to make decent RPGs anymore.

Not a fan of the real time with pause combat. Sure, you have the choice of turn based combat, but it doesn't feel natural as the game was designed for the former. These Infinity-style games that copy Baldur's Gate 1 & 2 are very overrated. The ship combat is atrocious - it's bacially dialogue-based. Thankfully they added in an option to skip straight to boarding. I also did not care for the pirates setting, so if you're into that you can bump up the rating a bit. At least the dialogues are fully voice acted this time around (no more reading hours of text with only every other sentence being read). Overall I would prefer this type of RPG die out in favor of strictly turn based RPGs like Baldur's Gate 3, which is far superior to this.

I had fun bruh