Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire Review

We're all going on; Huana Holiday!

When it first launched, Pillars of Eternity was a true triumph of the Kickstarter sphere, showcasing a game (admittedly one that was being proposed by an accomplished studio) which not only sought to appeal to a genre that many thought was perma-dead, but which would go on to pretty much revive that genre for the public and give it a second coming. I'm not saying that we wouldn't have any CRPGs if it weren't for Obsidian; but I bet we wouldn't be swimming in them like we are now. Thus is should come as no surprise that the creative teams over at Obsidian would decide to pounce on the trend they themselves started and get right onto a sequel for their new fantasy darling. Thus spawned the sequel, Deadfire, and the question of how it fares up against the beloved original. With lessons learned and cobwebs shaken, were Obsidian successfully able to throw together a game that reinforced the newly reborn CRPG market, or did they spell-out, in game form, way this type of game became antiquated in the first place, and how this resurgence is doomed to be short lived? 

Pillars of Eternity II : Deadfire, firstly, is a game specifically made with the intention to solve every single qualm that I personally had with the first game. The near oppressively prototypical fantasy setting? Gone in favour of a rich and sweeping archipelago full of unique culture that does a fantastic job in fleshing out one of the few original races that this fantasy setting has going for it. The repetitive exploration segments which would have you jumping from map to map searching desperately for something to do? Replaced with a system much more akin to Baldur's Gate 2, where you travel specifically to locations that have a purpose. Having to haul butt back several weeks of travel-worth in order to sleep at Caed Nua- um, well let's just say that no need to travel back there anymore. Whatsmore, this game came with bounties I didn't even know I wanted; like a piracy simulator!

The first POE game was no bad-looker by any stretch of the imagination. It was very rich with it's colours and lively with it's environments, and it really did manage to show the way that Infinity Engine RPGs might have looked had they been born in the HD age. Yet despite my praise, Pillars of Eternity II puts that original to shame. POE 2 is gorgeous in it's every bone,  to the degree that I have no doubt that the design team were driven by a desire to envision what a modern AAA CRPG would look and sound like. From the second after your finished with the introduction, you're treated to this glorious cinematic intro sequence that showcases every ounce of creativity and talent on the artistic team. 3D models are far more detailed than they have any right to be, magical effects are eye-poppingly flashy, light is dynamic and beautiful, animations are numerous and pitch-perfect. There is simply no other CRPG on the market right now, that is also fully released, to match this pedigree of presentation. (Baldur's Gate III is still early access) Obsidian left no doubt who were the heralds of this genre's return.

And alongside that step up in presentation effort, the writing team also did a spectacular job bringing this world to life in their contextual descriptions. I, as an amateur writer, practically wept when the game first introduced The Usher, with a masterfully crafted passage so visceral and evocative that I could hear the chimes of the beyond in the back of my mind. And it is a level of quality that persists throughout the entire game, describing places so fully that you might grab at them, it all just feels so real! It's a side of the game that becomes especially important during the narrative as concepts and events slip into the metaphysical quite often. Being able to phase into a world unshackled by visuals and bought life through powerful words and descriptions really pays off for the story in some of it's most introspective moments. And it's all held together with a great sound job from the good background music to the occasional well-placed audio descriptor-aide. 

Speaking of improvements, a very big change I wasn't expecting was the fundamentals of combat and how Pillars of Eternity handles Spellslots. For those who are woefully unexperienced with this dilemma, CRPGs who adapt (or are simply inspired by) tabletobs are forever struggling with managing the concept of 'Spellslots', a mechanic which limits the amount of spells that can be used every 8 hours. It makes sense as a balancing concept for a tabletop, where you'll probably be fighting about 2 to 3 groups of enemies every four-hour session, but export that wholesale to the video game space and things can get a little tedious. It isn't so hard to fall into a pattern where, as with POE 1, you have to retreat from a dungeon to go back home because your endurance pool has been drained from ambient battling so that your character is a single hit from permadeath. (I wrote a lot about how annoying I found this system in a the last review)

POE 2 fixes this system by pretty much rewriting it entirely. Instead of having a certain number of spells you can cast every 8 hours, you have a number of spells that you can cast every fight, which gets regenerated the second you end that fight. This makes dungeon crawling a lot more appealing and means you can be a lot more gungho with abilities during fights. At first I did fear that a side-effect of this system would be simplification to the point of combat trivialisation (and it some ways that is accurate, I miss the feeling of battling attrition in prolonged bouts) but overall I found the pace of the game really picked up and was consequently more accessible. And you know what else I love? The new health system. Rather than juggling so mysterious endurance system of hitpoints that drains under it's own unknowable rules, instead you have a 'three strikes and your out' system. Each time a character is knocked unconscious, (or, annoyingly, sets off the game's obnoxious traps) you gain a wound. After getting three wounds, the next time you go unconscious you will be perma-dead. (Wounds are reset upon resting, which is still a mechanic.)

Classes have shifted drastically too, and this is a change that I admit I do not like so much. Previously I complimented the way that classes could and would play drastically different to one another, with certain classes having entirely unique resource pool mechanics to manage. Well now Obsidian have changed it so that every class has a resource pool, and after playing a fair bit I feel like every single class which has been given this system has come off feeling worse for it. Explaining why will lead me to get a little bit technical, so try and bare with me as I go into excruciating detail about something that only a tiny amount of people actually care about.

Every class with a new resource system hasn't received a resource accumulating gameplay mechanic in order to back it up, (Like Monk's 'Wounds', Chanter's 'Verses', and Cipher's 'Soul Siphon') meaning that these classes all start a fight with a limited pool of resource. The problem is that this starting pool only scales very slightly as you level and seems to have built mostly to be supplemented through buffs that aren't exactly spelled concisely out to new players, (you probably won't know how to improve your resource count unless you look it up) and yet with that small pool of resource you'll be adding new abilities and feats onto your repertoire as you level up, skills you'll acquire then become increasingly spread thin as that list grows. And when your pool is used up? What do you do then? Well, you can use an 'empower' point, which can be done once a battle and can be recovered from resting, or, what you'll be doing more often, the character just becomes an ability-less hitting machine for the rest of that encounter. Some classes, like the Paladin, are given such little base resource that they've essentially been neutered compared to how they were in the first game, where they were Valkyries of the battlefield. Honestly, I can't reconcile why this change had to happen, they could have just stuck with the limited casts like wizards have.

On the topics of Wizards, a change of theirs that I really like had been the way that this game handles spells books, yet again challenging a held pet peeve of mine from the first title. Instead of having a thousand spells dropped on you every time you unlock a new level of spell, you get given the choice to unlock each spell that you use, just like other classes. This is supplemented by the new roles of grimoires; rather than act as your 'spell prep book', this time grimoires hold two spells from all levels that the wielder can cast without having learned the spell themselves, making it actually sensible now to carry around and switch up Grimoires for particularly demanding fights. All in all, combat has been made a lot more modern and accessible in Pillars of Eternity 2, and I feel like it's been Obsidian's most successful aspect of the Deadfire experience.

Heralding this bold new direction for the combat and rebalancing is a level reset, a concpet I've recently come to be annoyed by, but I understand why. Baldur's Gate showed me how much more tactile it was when your level carried with you into the new titles, but instead Obsidian go the easy route and put you right back to Level 1 with a little bit of explanation effort thrown in there. (Although there's not quite as much explanation put into why the returning characters, of which there are a few, get reset as well). I personally would have preferred it if this game had grown from the last and the challenge had grown greater, (I wanted to be a big fish in a bigger pond) but I suppose with so many fundamental switches to the very fabric of combat, that was never going to be a feasible choice.

 

Navigation has changed significantly, with minimal screentime being spent in the game exploring on foot, and that being replaced by menu travelling across a map shrouded in a fog of war. Whilst this may seem like a downgrade and a I've seen a lot of fans who grumble about this, Pillars of Eternity 2 does set it's world across a giant sprawling archipelago of uncharted islands and reefs, making the traditional method of 'in game' navigation just a little moot. (can you imagine how many dead screens you'd have to go for in order to explore one island with a single dungeon? Nah, this new way makes more sense) The change affects cities too, which break themselves up into the key most district you need to explore which is even more narrow than the districts of the cities in POE 1, but in trade-up they're typically a lot more packed with content and reasons to revisit. It really is a case of what do you prefer more, a sprawling journey that can cover an continent's worth of adventure, or a more direct personal adventure where you're there for practically every step.

With this new focus on spoken narratives and map-represented exploration comes a heavier leaning on 'Journal adventures', something which the team experimented with in POE's DLC. Essentially these are moments where the next step of your journey is written out before you in words with pictures and you're given choices of how to proceed. Typically these are the moments when skill checks come mostly into play, mimicking those moments in tabletop play that the DM takes over heavily for the next few actions. Again, personally I did like this as it allowed for a wider range of experiences in the adventure of exploring new islands, (beyond just killing the inhabitants) and gave purpose to a lot of your more esoteric skills choices outside of straight combat. This is also how the game handles ship to ship combat, if you were wondering how that played out in this Piracy-adjacent setting.

Which neatly brings us onto the world of Deadfire, one of my favourite parts of this game. The Deadfire Archipelago is hope to the ancestral Huana, who clearly have some inspiration for Mayan culture (and/or Aztec. My ancient history always get shaky with those two.) Their capital of Neketaka is one of the most visually arresting and memorable cities I've seen in any of these CRPGs that I've ever played, dripping with unique visuals and cultural history, as it represents a bustling glorious Aztec-like (I use them interchangeably) city of a huge pyramid-like design plan slayed up the side of a mountain. It completely clears up the lingering sour taste left over from the inescapably drab and cookie-cutter home of the Dyrwood in Pillars of Eternity 1 and finally shows off some of the those wonders that filled those game's 'extra history' annals.

Colonialism is a big theme of the Deadfire, and not the pond-deep prosaic version of it as it exists within Mass Effect Andromeda, but a very real sense of colonialism born from nuance and an actual understanding of the subject. The various bounties of the Deadfire and constantly being wrestled over between the two warring trading companies and the organised pirates who rule the waves, creating a nexus of conflict and pulling convictions that can be a little overwhelming if aren't willing to devote some attention to understanding things around you. Differentiating between the locals, the Royal Deadfire company, the Valian Republics and the Principe is quite the task unless you buy into the incredibly pragmatic lore which fuels this conflict. Although things aren't as simple as outright fighting, the attack on the land is keenly realised in many ways true to living history. I've rarely seen a complex matter handled so well in a videogame, and it's a testament to the writing team for going that extra effort to pour some real verisimilitude into this world. Usually I would be put off by so much lore, as when you drown a game with too much one can start to lose the forest for the trees, but when this amount of care and effort went into its creation, the least the player can do to try and engage with it.

Growing alongside this richer and deeper world space are the various Gods of the Pillars of Eternity world, who are now given faces to put to those abstract virtues that kept me having to scan the lore guide  in the first game to remember which deity was which. Given the natural progression of the narrative, you have a much more hands-on relationship with all the gods this time around, and it allows for their characterisations to really come to life as you see, meet, hear and truly learn these gods in a way that the first POE didn't even come near to. With the incredible description-journal sections utilised to their prime for these dialogues, you really feel the enormity of these forces of nature, whilst picking up on their pronounced oddities and quirks which has them feel like breathing entities. Berath's stiff-jawed stoicism, Rymrgand's near-lust for fatalism, Woedica's imperious authoritarianism; all come together cleanly and digestibly for the audience with their appearances over this game. However, some gods certainly got a lot more screentime than others to the point where I almost forgot the ignored existed. (Hylea hardly even shows up in most of the communions.)

Bringing the gods to the forefront was inevitable given when POE left the narrative at the end of the first game, and even more so with the direction it would take in this game. Following the wake of a deathless god, Deadfire take you on another 'chase' narrative across the land, only this time with a much better job establishing the player's personal stakes in the situation. And yet... a lot of the intrigue from the first game isn't really attempted with this new narrative, and it's replaced with several annoying moments where the person with all the answers just withholds them from you for no good reason. They're amiable, willing to help, open, but they just lead you on this chase for ostensibly no other purpose than to take you sightseeing around the Deadfire. (It's a beautiful land, granted, but I don't need a tour guide) And the resolution of the narrative is definitely different, leaning into something closer to Deus Ex finales, but (incredibly strangely given the subject matters bought up) there's no real sense of stakes or conflict for the finale moments. Essentially, the climax of this game is a conversation, which I love the idea of, but this back-and-forth plays off less like a true debate to decide the world (like Adam Jensen versus Hugh Darrow) and more just a fire-side chat where your opinion is readily accepted without challenge. I appreciate the different direction for a finale, but it could have benefitted from a little more peril, in my view. (Also, the final boss sucked) As it so happened, I honestly got bored with the main path in the second half of my playthrough and had to drag myself into caring about this game again. (And even then, I lost the drive to pursue the Megabosses, so I didn't fight them.)

Once again this disappointment was totally made up for me in the several DLC's bought out for this game, of which I played them all. Each tale focused on a different god from the pantheon, from Galawain, Wael and Rymrgand, and each do an incredible job in making their focused deity seem endlessly intriguing and worthy of further exploration. Each are straightforward DnD-style stories with a dungeon delve to solve a problem which ultimately ends in a death battle, and each culminate in much more satisfying ends than the main narrative. (Actually, 'Seeker, Slayer, Survivor' was more fun in it's body, the end was almost laughably easy) Although nothing matched quite the eclipsing scale that 'The White Marches' had against the original Pillars of Eternity, they each proved to be memorable romps with simply fantastic final bosses. (The Forgotten Sanctum's final boss is widely considered to be the true final boss of the this game)

Which leaves us with the companions of this title, and I have to be honest; I think the guys from 1 had a stronger effect on me. Which isn't to say that I didn't like Deadfire's cast much more, of course I did, but I didn't love anyone nearly as strongly as I deeply despised Durance from Pillars 1. (Seriously, I've never felt that level of hated towards a fictional character before, Obsidian did a majestic job there) But even then I do think the new cast were by and large very fun additions who were all great to get to know. Xoti and Maia were particular favourites of mine, just for having fun personalities that I loved to see play off the rest of cast. Personality is something that really comes to forefront with Deadfire's companions, to the point where you're given a chart to link which emotions are likely to appeal to which character's if you want to min-max your relationship like that. Which also counts towards the way that companions interact with each other, fuelling that believable team coexistence that I'm always asking for in my companion based games.

What's more, it was a very bold choice to stick two characters, Pallegina and Maia, at distinct odds from one another, as they hail from competing trading companies vying for the Deadfire. It's a traditional, but effective method for making the player in tune with the wants of major factions without devolving into making these character's walking embodiments of their respective companies. As with all the companions, this pays off with character resolutions that do exactly what I want from my companions, takes them to a place they wouldn't have been if not for the intervention of the protagonist. Obsidian know well the formula to making worthwhile companion stories, all I would want from now would be a bit of pacing revision, because as it was I ended up completing each companion quest tens of hours before the finale, thus they all just sort of stopped evolving midway through the narrative. (You can stretch it out a bit more than that, I won't complain.)

Summary

As a sequel, Pillars of Eternity steps things up decidedly in the presentation factor, whilst changing so many fundamentals that I think you'd be hard pressed to label this game a replacement for it's predecessor. Much of the trials that Obsidian have strived for in the CRPG world, they have effortlessly surpassed and each entry really sets a gold standard for the best that this genre can be in an all round fashion. That being said, I don't think the main story of this game reached a satisfying conclusion in any of it's vanilla resolutions, which contrasts to the first game that meandered for a lot of it's narrative only to really blow everyone out of the water with that ending. Deciding the final grade is difficult for me, and I'm sure there are many with their own ideas and preferences out there who will fight me bitterly on many of my points, but when we're dealing with games both of this soaring quality, it's inevitable to be splitting hairs.

Ultimately I feel like my time with Pillars of Eternity 1 was more concise and I enjoyed myself more consistently the whole way through, but Pillars of Eternity 2 really did know how to get my blood pumping to those thrilling heights of Baldur's Gate 2 and Throne of Bhaal at times. Deadfire did drag in the second half, but Pillars felt aimless for the breadth of it's story. Both had fun combat, but 2's felt more accessible. It's give and take the whole way through and I think it's hard to reconcile one as truly superior to the other. But when we come to games that I personally feel a desire to playthrough again, POE 2 does win out for me above POE 1, and I think the improvements to gameplay, and spectacle, go towards that desire. Thus I land on giving Pillars of Eternity 2 a B+ Grade, with an automatic recommend stuck on there for good measure. That extra mark comes from my enthusiasm to the game, as well as the brilliant world building effort that Obsidian managed which made me more excited for Avowed than any measly teaser trailer could. Both still stand as specular RPGs that demand to be played, and the fact that POE 2 has a free Critical Role character voice pack is just the cherry on the cake. CRPGs keep achieving excellence and I'm loving watching the craft slowly polish itself to a glean. So now I have but one question; Pillars of Eternity 3, when?