Comments on: Thoughts: Pillars Of Eternity 2 – Deadfire

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 06 May 2026 09:48:03 +0000

By: David Glover

David Glover — Thu, 24 May 2018 11:48:09 +0000

“There’s far meatier examples of sequence optimisation than this to be found in the game,”

Meatier than sack full of severed heads??

(Also, while I was enjoying PoE, I never finished it. Glad to know that it sounds like I could skip straight to this one for some pirate-y fun.)

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Thu, 24 May 2018 08:13:50 +0000

Nice, I’ll have a play with that this weekend to see if I can get it to work without blowing up the site.

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Thu, 24 May 2018 08:07:53 +0000

Josh Sawyer spent an awful lot of time on the combat system in the first game, which perhaps explains why the story structure was more than a little generic. Also Obsidian have always been at their best when taking an existing property and putting a new spin on it — I’m a bit surprised that this applies just as much to their own IP as it does to other people’s, but Alpha Protocol aside that rule seems to be holding up.

Man, Alpha Protocol was great. I might go and play that again.

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Wed, 23 May 2018 08:31:08 +0000

Played on Normal (or “Classic” which is the middle of the five difficulty levels and is, curiously, one higher than the default one) and deliberately turned upscaling off because I have my fun in these games breaking the levelling power curve, and that’s no fun if the enemies power level adjusts to compensate. I was impressed that they included the option, though.

The combat is *eventually* fine, although I find I’m becoming less and less a fan of its complexity after playing more elegant and easy to understand systems like BattleTech. Despite having a pretty good grasp of the PoE 1 system, and despite the Deadfire system being mostly the same — they’ve gotten rid of endurance and streamlined wounds and spells — I still found it very overwhelming to start with. Eight different damage types! Four different save types! An armour penetration system that, while mechanically interesting, is entirely hidden from the player! Fortunately they include party AI this time, so at the start of the game I could at least micromanage one party member while letting the rest of them do their own thing.

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Wed, 23 May 2018 08:22:38 +0000

I forget exactly who came up with it — either Kieron Gillen in the Diablo 2 CYOA preview or mad genius Jonathan Nash on one of the PC Gamer back pages — but 20 years later it’s still my go-to for an example Pointless Artifact Name. Plus it means I’ve gotten really really good at spelling the word “Nebuchadnezzar”.

By: Kellogg

Kellogg — Mon, 21 May 2018 20:14:33 +0000

The Arse of Nebuchadnezzar? That takes me back.

By: drinkwithskeletons

drinkwithskeletons — Mon, 21 May 2018 17:13:42 +0000

As someone who quite liked the first Pillars, I’m very pleased to see that everyone seems to agree that Deadfire is the superior game. I get the impression that Josh Sawyer, probably most famous for overseeing New Vegas, had a much greater presence in Deadfire than in the first game, which likely explains many of the dramatic changes. Tyranny, meanwhile, was clearly somebody’s pet project and not really on par with Obsidian’s usual output. It had some really good ideas, but the systems were a mess and the game felt padded.

Sadly, my motherboard died two days after it released, so I barely got to play Deadfire before having to seek out repairs.

By: ilitarist

ilitarist — Mon, 21 May 2018 11:59:13 +0000

Also I’ve looked into the comment problem. Making iframe bigger doesn’t work well because it would still make it possible to enter too much text to be visible and it creates a lot of empty space if you answer to somebody’s comment. Comment textarea size is constantly updated by some evil script, so the ugly and dirty solution is adding this to any available css:

#respond #comment-form-comment textarea, #comment-form-share-text-padder textarea {
overflow-y: scroll !important;
height: 200px !important;
}

Changes comment section to fixed height and adds a wonderful UI invention: vertical scroll. Seems to work without issues.

By: ilitarist

ilitarist — Mon, 21 May 2018 11:53:32 +0000

Happy that alt-text is conquered again. Now to the review itself.

Wow! I made a first day purchase anyway – really liked PoE1 with White March and Fallout New Vegas fame still forces me to consider everything Obsidian – but I’m glad you confirmed it is indeed even better. You didn’t say much about combat system but I understand it’s good. Still going to wait for some patches; just recently it payed off greatly with Mass Effect Andromeda: I would never guess it’s not considered the best Mass Effect game if I hadn’t seen reviews and circlejerk hate before I played it after the final patch. I’ve tested if PoE2 works and it suddenly finished intro battle with a pirate 1 second after it started and proceeded to the CYOA thing and it looked like a bug. So I’ll wait for a patch or five, or maybe those season path DLCs.

My playstyle is similar to yours, it seems, and usually it means that early game is hard but later everything is boring and straightforward so I just run to the end without proper thematically appropriate preparation (only Mass Effect and Dragon Age games seem to make endgame sound menacing so that I tie all loose ends before getting into a final fight – even Andromeda worked for me). Did you play on Path of the Damned, did you use upscale for enemies?

This looks like I have another RPG I’ll replay several times. First one since FNV, it seems.