For once, a game where every NPC deserves talking to. Beggars and noblemen, tribal chieftains and merchant princes, pirates and refugees – the Deadfire is teeming with colourful characters, whose lives are crashing into one another’s and your own. Every part of the map, from island ruins to thriving port cities, is packed with bold, inventive storytelling delivered through interaction with a vast array of uniquely designed characters. I say “easily” because more powerful than the somewhat flat main quest are the myriad of tales being told in sub-plots and side quests that breathe life, personality and history into the islands of the Deadfire Archipelago. In the rush to level up your characters and explore the innumerable pathways laid before you, the main quest easily falls by the wayside. The game even goes so far as to gatekeep main plot points behind exceedingly difficult combat challenges that require you to have completed significant amounts of side content. POE2’s main quest is its weakest, mostly due to the dissonance between the urgency communicated by the narrative and the complete lack of it being demanded by gameplay. It’s as dramatic as you’d expect from a fantasy title, and serves to set the story in motion and justify the change of setting, but falls a little flat in the motivation department.
I’ll leave a few critical details for you to discover, but PoE2 kicks off in a suitably intense fashion by awakening a murderous God and sending your now soulless character halfway across the world in pursuit of the giant, stomping deity. This is, of course, in lieu of simply importing an existing PoE1 save, which is the most thorough way to carry on your character’s story, down to the very granular details lives you saved, towns you sacrificed, souls you condemned to an eternity of suffering, the usual stuff.
One fantastic addition is a “save generator,” that helps you piece together a history for your character, explaining some of the moral consequences of your broad choices and the impacts you can expect them to have on the world and characters of PoE2.
PoE2 carries on directly from the story of the first game, although in an entirely new setting and detached enough from the events of PoE1 that it won’t alienate newcomers. Now, in the midst of all the hype, RPG veterans and crowdfunding pioneers Obsidian Entertainment have come to the table with Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire a game that not only carries on the traditions of the CRPG genre but pushes some of its core elements to unprecedented heights. Then, all of a sudden, a flurry of activity saw the enormously successful releases of Divinity: Original Sin (2014) and Pillars of Eternity (2015), both of which offered a degree of tactical depth and lore-obsession that the modern RPG gamer had all but forgotten. After a decade-long dry spell, during which the word “isometric” was replaced by “action” at the front of “RPG,” tabletop nerds had resigned themselves to endlessly replaying the classics and getting into internet arguments every time a “Top 10 Role-Playing Games” list didn’t include Baldur’s Gate. It’s been a busy few years for CRPG fans.