There’s full voice acting, faster loading times, more AI customisation and an improved camera. The whole game looks great, even in 4K, though it is surprisingly taxing on the GPU hardware. There have been a number of other key enhancements to Pillars of Eternity II. For players new to the genre it can feel like the tyranny of choice, but I know that its catnip to the core audience for these cRPG revivals. Want to choose your specific playing style that caters to exactly how you want to shape your character? (before you’ve played any of the game and know how this may affect your playthrough? Want to choose from half a dozen dramatically different HUD options, all yours. Want to customise your avatar? No problem. There’s also customisation at every single turn in this game. The real time with pause combat can be extensively tweaked through a huge myriad of customisation options, which is great for those who know exactly what they like. There are a range of difficulty options to cater to how you want to play, that allow you to dial down the role that combat plays in the experience of your many tens of hours in this world. Beyond the (in my opinion) mediocre combat I found it was the writing that kept me interested in this game. This is a game for hardcore fantasy fans, and the excellent writing will do much to endear itself to this audience. Fortunately most things you need to know about are helpfully highlighted in the text box, letting you click through for an explanation on what that battle might have been or why the person you’re talking to is important. It can at times get in its own way, with sentences full of places, people and events meaningless without remembering every small interaction in both the previous and this game. This is world-building in the best sense, and feels like it has its own backstory and history much larger than the two games in this universe so far. And Pillars of Eternity II delivers in a hugely deep world where every consequence of every conversation has been carefully thought through. Good writing not in just terms of technical accomplishment but also in the game’s ability to build a realistic, believable, and perhaps most important a consistent lore that makes the world you find yourself in like a place that’s existed for thousands of years. Good writing is essential to games like this. You are given a ship to pursue Eothas and there your journey starts, with you waking from your near death experience. But a mysterious power has offered you your life back, in return for a covenant that you hunt down the god as he walks among the Deadfire Archipelago, leaving only destruction in his wake and in search of only what he know what. The god Eothas has awoken below your castle, destroying it and almost killing you. Pillars of Eternity II is a true sequel, taking place soon after the end of the first game. In almost every direction this game is expansive, from its thousands of lines of voice over dialogue, to combat options, to HUD tweaks, to fantastically deep lore, Pillars of Eternity II is a lot of game. Like all games in this genre, Pillars of Eternity II is a massive game. So Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire has the difficult task in standing out from the now busy crowd, and making its own mark on this venerable genre, while still maintaining everything that made it great in the first place. But there’s competition, with Divinity: Original Sin 1 and 2, Torment: Tides of Numenera, Wasteland 2, let alone developer Obsidian’s own Tyranny. The first Pillars of Eternity was a key part of this revival, and still stands, along with its significant expansions, as one of the best. If it wasn’t clear already, cRPGs are back.ĭriven partly by crowdfunding, nostalgia for classics such as Baldur’s Gate II and a market that for many years left cRPG fans wanting, there has been a drive to resurrect the genre.
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