Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire

I haven’t felt this engaged in an RPG in several years. In fact, Pillars 2 is probably my favorite isometric RPG ever at this point. I thought some of the lore in Pillars 1 was cool (the souls, the wheel, the gods), but it did not grab me the way Pillars 2 has. I think it’s a combination of the characters being more compelling—even the returning ones—and the setting. Pillars 1 sort of wasted its more unique aspects (the soul/watcher stuff and being in a colonial land) on what was a generic fantasy setting. The archipelago is far more interesting, with its combination of Polynesia and the Colonial Caribbean. Plus, it’s nice to hear accents beyond generic English dialects (and Scottish for Dwarves) that are typical for a fantasy RPG.

Certainly, it has flaws, but I’m mostly loving it. I wish I could redo my starting attributes and companion class selections, but the game probably isn’t hard enough to justify worrying about that too much. To echo the sentiment above, that’s probably my major complaint: it’s easy. Adjusting the difficulty level seems to add more enemies and that’s not really what I’m looking for, so I’ll just take it as it is. Turn-based mode works well for the most part, but has some issues (characters pushing through others, some screwy pathfinding on maps with elevation changes). Also, you gain levels so quickly that I don’t often have much time to experiment with my abilities before I get a new slew of them. I play RPGs more for world immersion than the challenge, generally, so these aren’t huge issues for me.

Overall, I’m glad I finally started playing this.

Setting the difficulty level to a highest one rebalances encounters, replaces some enemies but most importantly adjusts stats in a sane way, not just double HP for everyone.

I’ll try that out then. The option screen made it sound like it mostly added extra enemies when what I’m really looking for more interesting combat rather than more drawn-out combat.

Yeah, the base game is pretty much a cakewalk. If you’re looking for combat challenges though, the DLC is more demanding. I did a replay recently, and the final fight in Forgotten Sanctum produced some pretty significant swears.

There’s some interesting story beats in there as well.

FYI for anyone interested at all … I am playing Pillars 2 on veteran level (turn based).

It is still a bit too easy … I say that with my opinion about objective easiness.

TB is slower on trash stuff. I recommend a good wizard. My tanks are NOT getting hit very hard. While I like turn based Pillars 2 I wonder if it ever got fully balanced.

I would love to hear from others that are /or have played TB.

I do encounter more trash mobs than I’d like in this game, but nowhere near as many as essentially every other RPG ever made. Turning up the difficulty as @alekseivolchok suggested does make combat against the mobs more engaging, though perhaps more than I’d like. I want to get through the trash mobs as quickly as possible and save the challenging encounters for the bosses and main story encounters. So, I’ve been moving the difficulty slider around a lot to achieve this. If you haven’t already, I recommend setting the story encounters to scale to your level as it’s very easy to out-level the content here.

After playing some Pathfinder Kingmaker I got crazy and replayed Chrono Trigger. After that I’ve tried some other RPGs and discovered that there is an eternal war between RPGs with and without trash fights. Chrono Trigger has almost no trash fights, Fallout 1 is a very different game but it has no trash fights too. Planescape Torment, Baldur’s Gate and Pathfinder Kingmaker are full of trash fights (and in case of PT the combat is not that bad, it’s just you get a lot of fighting against armies of clones), but similar games like Dragon Age Origins (and even 2) or Pillars of Eternity 2 had much more reasonable number of encounters. And Tyranny starts getting a lot of trash fights after Act 1 even though it’s very similar to PoE and you’d expect devs to understand the problem.

Anyway, PoE2 still has some relatively boring fights that you know you’ll win but you have to microcontrol your party, heal and so on. Still good, could have been better.

Aleks how was Chrono Trigger on the PC? Since you mention it. I am playing Pillars 2 turn based and yes, sometimes the trash fights are long and a bit arduous.

You ask about PC port specifically? It had a rough release but by the time I’ve played there only a couple of UI problems. I played with a gamepad and it felt more comfortable than original. It can be played with just a mouse but controls are from mobile version, I think, so you’d probably better use keyboard.

If you haven’t played the game itself - it is very much enjoyable. You may be bored a little in the beginning when the game is gentle with you and gives you a little too many fights (mostly in a first combat locations, mountains and castle forest) but even then it’s not much and you quickly get to locations where almost every fight has some sort of a quirk. The story is OK, modern translation makes it much better explained. It also has a bonus dungeon from Nintendo DS remaster but I didn’t bother with it. It’s tacked on as an additional challenge, I think.

Interesting comments from Josh Sawyer on the current likelihood of Pillars 3, as well as the disappointing commercial performance of Pillars 2 relative to the original and Pathfinder Kingmaker

Everyone has their opinion, he’s right, but since Deadfire is one of my favorite games (and most played of the Steam games since tracking began), I will say it’d be a shame if they have to revamp Pillars into something else if a PoE3 ever was to get made. Maybe it’s the old school gamer in me that just loves this style (and RTwP) and I wish there were more games that used it. RT on it’s own is too fast and TB gaming takes so damn long.

Every so often I get the urge to play Deadfire again but look at my backlog and rein myself in.

DOS2 is the true outlier here.

Basically nostalgia kick drove Pillars 1 and Kingmaker, both of which I consider weaker than Deadfire (especially Kingmaker).
I highly suspect a followup to Kingmaker will also have disappointing sales.

Uhhhhh. Wow. That handwringing and uncertainty about “what the people want” makes me EXTREMELY DUBIOUS about anything good coming out of that studio ever again.

I realize that if you make a product, it’s important to be able to sell the product.

But can you imagine a filmmaker or a novelist who was this preoccupied by public opinion – not to mention this confused about how to satisfy it – ever creating a good film or novel?

I don’t want my games designed by bean counters. I want them designed by artists.

Reading that post, it makes sense that the Pillars games feel designed by committee. Maybe that’s the reason the series failed and died. A lack of vision, replaced by a sweaty desperation to make the most people happy most of the time.

(Sorry the previous post’s formatting is weird in my quote. Blame Discourse)

I came away from it more along the lines of: “We screwed up, but we don’t know how, so we’re wary about trying anything when we don’t know what happened.”

And even as a person who played the game, it’s hard for me to explain what didn’t click for me. The game was alright, but it’s a game I can’t really get into. Meanwhile I’ve basically played through Pathfinder like 4 times.

Maybe the rule set? Not sure.

For me it’s both the lore and the ruleset. I find the concept of the Wheel to be fucking terrible. And stupid. And the rules? Slow weapon or Very Slow? What’s the dps? Heavy armor or medium? Where’s the sweet spot?

Give me Pathfinder 100 times out of 100.

I just found out they added a turn based combat mode like… A year ago? Why did no one tell me this! I find it quite interesting but the dynamics of class builds changes a lot based on turn based versus real time with pause. At any rate, I have fired the game up and am fiddling around in the early stages a bit. I like the turn-based but it strikes me that the game will take 50 years longer to finish since every encounter takes so much longer to resolve.

Honest, the turn-based mode is amazingly cool and makes it almost like a totally different game, the best of both worlds at last - it’s a huge bummer that the game hasn’t sold well, they did such a great job with it. I can understand complaints of mechanics (and in some cases, I share them) and I can understand complaints about the central story not having a lot of meat on the bones (I would guess 70% of the game’s “hours played” comes from exploration/side content), but those concerns shouldn’t have caused folks into RPG’s like this to not buy it? I wouldn’t have thought at any rate. I’m not sure what happened with sales but I don’t like it - this kind of RPG is my favorite, and having it fall to the side (again) would suck.

With the PS4 release Youtube was throwing new videos out, some cool ideas for character builds that I couldn’t resist. So I reinstalled the damn game again and going with a Transcendent moon godlike (helwalker monk and soul blade cipher).

Feel like Pacino in the kitchen from the Godfather 3 scene.

Just when I think I’m out. . .

Started yet another new game, this time RTwP with a dual pistol-wielding dwarf paladin/berserker who wears robes and is spec’d to just spam flames of devotion with those two guns over and over. The damage output is insane.

what? You can combo that? Nope, nope not playing it again…(resisting)…