Gotcha.

That's kinda sad. I really enjoyed Baldur's Gate 2 and then later Dragon Age: Origins. Played a lot of the oldschool isometric ones. Enjoyed Obsidian's Kotor 2. But if the story is similar to the first POE...its not that its bad writing per se...its just not interesting story to me.

Are there any other good RPGS that are out current that really develop a solid story similar to those sorts?

 

Torment Tides. Neverwinter Night 2 expansions. Deus Ex? Pathfinder:Kingmaker is something to look forward to maybe.

 

Hadn't heard of Kingmaker before...

Wait...Chris Avellone is on it? Heck yes.

 

Should be really good. Just got my fingers crossed it doesn't get pushed back to 2019.

 

Tyranny is also a pretty decent one. It's an isometric RPG from Obsidian in the same engine they used for Pillars, but an entirely different setting and story. Its big gimmick is that an Evil Overlord has conquered the world, and you play one of his Fatebinders, the role being a combination of Judge, Jury, and Executioner, dispatched to quell a rebellion that broke out in one of the last places to be conquered.

It's pretty interesting, especially if you like the whole morals vs practicality thing.

 

Tyranny is also quite short and has a very rushed ending. It was fun for one playthrough, but I didn't play it a second time, even though it was marketed for its replayability. It does have veery flexible character building, and combat experience goes to those who actually do shit - my main was level ~23, the rest of my party were like 15 and my support was 13 or something.

 

I have a bug in my PoE2 game. When I got to Sayuka the Druid encounter didn't start, so I went about the island, killed the druids, went and did a few more quests. Now I can't talk to the Fleet captain.

I saw a few other people online have the same issue. I kind of feel like not playing anymore now because I didn't want to go back and load from 3-4 hours before.

Does anybody know if there is a way to edit save files and manually add in the flags for having that quest done?

I'm worried it will fuck up my game further down the line.

 

Finished the game today. My impression is still somewhere 'acceptable' and 'meh'. It's not a bad game, but I'd expect more from Obsidian, especially in terms of story (and no, superfluous verbosity does not a story make).

The most glaring issue is that you spend a lot of your time on combat. It's an RPG, but a combat-based RPG. Go anywhere outside a city, and a few moments later you'll find yourself merrily genociding the local wildlife until nothing larger than a squirrel is alive within the next ten miles. Pretty standard fare, really. Except...

The difficulty fucking sucks. I'm not a pro and can barely remember what worked and what didn't in PoE I, but while it started out brutal (Caed Nua with those shadows? Fuck this place) and got easier over time, it still had challenging moments later on. White March was significantly harder than the base, too, and it helped with the mediocre challenge of the later half.

Deadfire, however, has much worse scaling. I've played for ~4h on Veteran, learned that Eder died, felt bad and restarted - and combat already felt easier on the second-highest difficulty than in PoE I so I decided to go all-in and turned on PotD + enemy lvl upscaling (WARNING: turning it on mid-game is bugged, has to be done from the very beginning). It was a good decision, and I felt reasonably challenged until ~lv10. After that, difficulty literally fell off a cliff, and with full party you could just left-click things to death - literally, you don'e have to use any skills on most trash battles on the highest difficulty in the game. About 90% encounters I could almost immediately nuke, and pure fighter Eder is borderline invincible outside select few battles. I had to reload a grand total of maybe ten times over the entire game, which is just absurd.

It's really difficult to overstate just how easy the combat is, but Obsidian fucked up - badly. If you're looking for any sort of challenge, go with PotD immediately. If you want to struggle, wait for balance patches. At the very least, you'd need a patch to do level scaling to $level+2 or something like that.


There are a number of bugs. I've avoided any that were downright gamebreaking, but I had three side-quests that I was unable to progress in. There were a number of missing strings, occasionally enemies would just stop attacking mid-combat and once my main character turned into a clone of Eder, complete with gear, statistics and the like. Others had more problems, occasionally unable to progress in the MQ at all. It will doubtlessly be patched in time, but it is something to be aware of.

There are a number of exploits I found, too, but those you can choose to take advantage of or not so that's all good. Sparkcrackers allow you to rob everyone blind, given that shopkeepers will investigate them. Stealth + sparkcracker to cluster enemies + grenades is fun, but feels somewhat cheesy. I've found one dialogue loop that allowed me to infinitely get a prize. Nothing bad, but the polish isn't there just yet.

As long as you don't steal everything, cash is rather tight, too. The majority of my booty chest came from selling stuff looted from dead enemies, which isn't quite what I'd imagine in this setting. Not sure why you couldn't attack a rich merchant ship positively overflowing with gold with a huge penalty with one of the factions (like, permanently hunted by them kind of penalty) - so either rob and murder some innocent folks for those phat lootz, or just barely scrape by from whatever gear you fund and quest rewards (which are usually very poor). Would be an interesting choice, I think.

I wish, as usual, that any attempts at romances would be skipped from the game entirely. I realize that fanservice is particularly difficult to avoid when you do a kickstarter, but come the fuck on. Everyone that can be 'romanced' is a bisexual, too, because of course they are. It's just pointless and bad.

Besides, talking sword is the best waifu anyway so I'm not sure why the rest are even there.

On the topic of talking swords, there are a few unique items this time around. There aren't many of them, not nearly as many as I would have liked, but some is better than none, so occasionally you do find interesting loot.

Companions... that's a mixed bag to write about. Obviously everyone has a different taste, but personally I find few of them to be notable in any way. The only character that could be truly interesting - Ydwin, a cipher/rogue and a skilled animancer - is available only as a sidekick and would've been included as the next stretch goal, but alas. There's nothing even approaching Durance, IMO (although I do agree that I was unreasonably fond of my mad bro, so ymmv). Plenty can be annoying, like Pallegina on anything Valian, and while it makes sense story-wise it's not executed well enough to be worth the pain. I've enjoyed the fact that companions can dislike and fight each other a lot, which kind of makes sense. They can also get into relationships with each other themselves, which is much better than the stunted attempts with the main character.

Fractions are similar. They're not bad, but neither are any of them particularly good. Obsidian went with the latest trend of 'everything is just shades of grey' and avoided the good or evil cliche, but also made literally everyone unlikable. I kinda wanted to go with the Queen which seemed rather reasonable, but of course we couldn't have that and she turned obnoxious before the end (and went absolutely full-retard in a moment of staggeringly bad/unbelievable writing). Fuck y'all, have fun warring with each other, I'll be sailing the seas in that there my ship instead of helping your stupid asses.

Since I mentioned bad writing... well. I'd hoped for better from Obsidian, to be honest. It's not bad, but there's just good moments instead of a good story. The ending had a gaping plothole that is significantly worse than PoE I, which also made little sense, and I'm unsure how such things went through QA. Like, did anyone play through the entire game and didn't notice anything strange about the story? Cmon.

Finally, there are more loading screens than there ought to be. It's not uncommon to have to go through three, four of them when going back from a quest. They're not long, but they're not instant either and it's not 2010 any longer. Optimize your shit, Obsidian.


Would I recommend picking it up? Yes, if you liked PoE I or really miss CRPGs. If not, I'd say it's worth about ~2/3rd of the asking price, and waiting for a few patches is a must. Personally, I'm not sure whether I'll be picking PoE III if it ever appears. Maybe on a sale if I have some free time, but there are better games out there. 6/10, mayyybe 7/10 if they fix all the issues and rebalance the combat.


tl;dr: expected better from Obsidian, but it's not bad - just average, just like the game's story. Combat badly unbalanced (start at least on Veteran + turn on level scaling at the beginning - bugged later on), companions and fractions are a mixed bag. Some technical problems to be found, probably best to wait until it's a bit more polished. A number of inconsistencies, plot holes and shit-what-are-you-doing moments to be found.

 

I'm on my third playthrough. The game's a 8/10 for me. Pretty much everything blob said is true. But I ended up liking the combat and the multiclass system, which is why I'm still playing.

The good thing is that the next patch (next week?) should make Veteran and PotD more difficult. But nothing you can do about the short and repetitive main story or unlikable factions. I had the exact same idea as blob, btw - I was tentatively going with the Huana queen, but then near the end, she just went full retard, so fuck everyone, solo ftw.