Even years after its release, the game is a buggy mess. The latest bug is that suddenly my wizard won't cast any spells. You can pick it, you can click it, the animation starts, and then it just sits there forever. And this is just the latest. Before it was launching issues; window issues; etc.; etc.
Cannot recommend this game. Given how much choice there is, there simply is no reason to play something that will not run properly. It's just not good enough to be worth the hassle. I'm currently also playing Sacred 2, which is an ancient game, and for which I've not had a single issue.
Not surprised POE2 didn't do very well.
I've never been a huge fan of these types of strategy RPGs - I sucked at Baldur's Gate, Planescape Torment, etc., even though I love DnD and RPGs. But never was I interested in the combination until the first Pillars of Eternity, which blew me out of the water with an amazing, original story, setting, and characters.
Deadfire? Ehn, let's just throw that all in the trash and go as -unoriginal- and -uninteresting- as we can get. So, 80$ the tube, it crashes about every 30 minutes, and besides that, I don't want to recruit any of these characters (which is the high point of any media for me - I can get behind any story, no matter how bad, if the characters are good). If they don't just start off annoying (Xoti), then their personal quests revolve around disappointing cliched storylines that don't even make sense for the character (Eder). Do you like the flirty, bi blue Orlan option? Great! Better not be a Godlike though, 'cause all that flirting he was doing with you previous? Oh, that was just... joking...? (???? Why? Why would you - that's just mean.)
Regular combat is okay, I guess, but in PoE I slogged through combat to get to talking and character bits. Which suck here.
Ship combat is horrible and so boring and so unintuitive. Text for ship combat? I know I like text, but it just doesn't work here.
And here I was, RAVING about how good Obsidian is, how I want to get Tyrant and all their other games and support them - guess I'll just stick with PoE1 and Fallout: New Vegas, because I'm outstandingly unhappy with Deadfire.
A year or so later, I opened my old save to see if they've improved the optimization since then. I'm at Neketaka, the first big quest hub. Initial load, two minutes? Fine.
Walk into a bar. 20 second load screen.
Walk downstairs to the discrete encounters area. 10 second black screen.
Walk back upstairs, 10 seconds black screen.
Exit to city map. Choose another area inside town. 30 second load screen, followed by 20 second black screen.
This is like wading through a swamp made out of molasses while one toddler clings to each of your ankles. Just like it was a year ago. The load times wouldn't be long if they weren't so frequent. But they are, and it's unplayable.
Supposedly you can fix this by dropping $1k on a SSD, or at least that's what the (paid?) trolls in the Steam forums always say. But yeah no, I'm not doing that. I can play Divinity: OS2 on this machine. I can play lots of things. Pillars of Eternity 2's loading management is uniquely horrible, and has been for a very long time. If you played Pillars 1, it's like that at first, but it gets worse over time. Much, much worse.
I've completely lost faith in the developer. +1 star because it's a pretty snazzy load screen I guess.
In POE, you need iemod to stop autosave, or your hard disk would cry. As for POE2, save/load is just disasterous. Even if you have SSD, you may still meet many problems, such as ctd, lag, etc.
