Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, by Obsidian Entertainment

Remember Pillars of Eternity, Obsidian's first ever crowdfunded Infinity-engine style CRPG? After it's acclaim and incredible success, they've just announced a sequel: Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire.

Here's the official announcement.

edited 26th Jan '17 10:10:48 AM by higherbrainpattern

Sort of wish they'd finish Tyranny first.

Coz the game is clearly missing a 2nd half.

I wouldn't call Tyranny unfinished, exactly. There's obviously more to the story in that world that we'll get in future expansions or games, but Tyranny is a full game.

I'd call it blatantly unfinished.

I wouldn't.

Here's the PoE2 announcement trailer:

edited 26th Jan '17 10:22:50 AM by higherbrainpattern

I hope they can do the world building better. Pillars of Eternity's world building was awful. The game basically requires you to know everything about the setting BEFORE playing the game. Hope they include some of the stuff in Tyranny like the pop ups you could use to define specific terms.

Obligatory campaign link I guess

Well, the new location could offer an opportunity to improve on the lessons taken from the last 2 games. Another noticeable thing is that the character models seem to have gotten a pretty nice upgade. I wouldn't say you were required to know everything though, I went through the game just fine, but I kinda went about reading most in-game text as I played.

As for the Tyranny topic, the story is "unfinished", but not the game itself. While 2 further acts were planned and scrapped, the game was generally polished and stable. Then again, using the word "unfinished" with software can cause some confusion.

edited 26th Jan '17 11:18:39 AM by UltraWanker

I consider the story of a game, especially an RPG, as integral to the game as its stability and polish. So the story being unfinished makes the game unfinished. Release the rest of Tyranny before making a brand new game, don't leave me hanging.

Anyway, on POE 2. I'm hoping some gameplay improvement. I was... really not impressed with POE's combat. It's serviceable, but not really good. Especially compared to Divinity Original Sin and Tyranny. So many spells that are useless. So many mechanics the game doesn't explain (For example, attack speeds and recovery speed are basically a weird science). Some classes were also poorly balanced.

Should I make a seperate page for Pillars 2? Somebody added a folder for Pillars 2 on the main page of Pillars of Eternity and that seems unnecessary.

Once there are enough tropes (aka at least 3 with context) to make the page non-stub, go ahead.

edited 26th Jan '17 11:30:17 AM by UltraWanker

I hope they trim the fat. Pillars had a better premise than what we saw of the world and 95% of the game would have you believe. And don't get me started on the writing, was the editor drunk or just unable to override the bosses/writers?

edited 26th Jan '17 11:30:43 AM by Watashiwa

Yeah, Tyranny may have been too short but it seemed finished to me.

Kinda hilarious how the Eothas He's Just Hiding theory turned out to be a plot hook for this game.

Pillars 2 has already reached $329,449 of it's $1,100,000 goal. That's amazing.

edited 26th Jan '17 12:59:20 PM by higherbrainpattern

While that's impressive, FYI Fig started them off with ~$100,000. Large initial investments give projects day 1 momentum, and Fig exists to provide as large a bump as possible. Very clever, actually.

edited 26th Jan '17 12:56:25 PM by Watashiwa

Tyranny felt like a finished story to me, in the same sense that Fellowship of the Ring is a finished story. It might end on a sequel hook, but the central storyline, in this case the Fatebinder's war in the Tiers and the war between the Disfavored and Scarlet Chorus, that first book of saga, that's all come to a close. Retaking the entire world of Terratus from Kyros? That was never going to be just one game.

I mean, I still wish there was something more closely resembling a final dungeon, but I get why there wasn't.

I didn't read any of the encyclopedia entries for Pillars on my first playthrough, and I didn't have any trouble following the plot. You're supposed to be in the dark for most of it, and at its heart it's much more of character-driven personal story rather than an event-based epic. I could see some complaints about the structure, as is usual for Obsidian, but also as usual for Obsidian, I think the actual prose and dialogue are leaps and bounds better than most of their competition.

Anyway— excited for this. Good stuff. Looks like we can expect to see Eder, Pallegina, and Aloth back for this one.

edited 28th Jan '17 5:52:53 PM by Unsung

Now I need to restart and finish Pillars even more.

Wow. Pillars 2 has already raised almost half of it's intended crowdfunding goal.

In less than a day, holy shit.

It's an obsidian game. How is that surprising to any of you at this point after Numenaria, Do you not remember that POE was the most crowdfunded game of all time for a while?

Seeing as Fellowship was never meant to be released as a single book (The editors made Tolkien divide his book in three), that's particularly hilarious. Less you're agreeing that Tyranny feels like part 1 of a story that's unfinished and been forcefully divided.

The plot is fine, It's the world building that is awful. Without digging constantly in the encyclopedia, one has no idea where the hell things are. For most of the game I couldn't even name the country I am in. Does the game take part over the entire country or just apart of it? Dunno. You begin the game and each race gives you a series of description on their origins, and I have no idea what each of the places are in relation to each other. like, if I pick an elf, is that local to where the game takes place? Dunno.

The game plot itself is fine and even really good. I just hated how poorly the world was presented to me. That one needs to constantly go back to the encyclopedia to know anything about it.

edited 26th Jan '17 5:40:15 PM by Ghilz

Numenara isn't an Obsidian game though. They share some of the same devs as Obsidian, but it's by a different studio.

Diff'rent strokes. I don't think dividing up LOTR hurt it. In a lot of ways, I find that the sense of anticipation provided by those very definite cutoff points can make for a richer experience, a moment to force the reader to stop and process. Serialization is big right now, and it's big for a reason. I also don't think you need to know everything about a world to enjoy it or be immersed in it. And I don't agree that it's poor world-building or presentation— what I needed to know, I felt like I was told in time for it to matter. After all, you're a new homesteader in the New World in early colonial days, so it's not surprising that there's a lot you don't know about the Dyrwood. But YMMV.

edited 28th Jan '17 5:54:44 PM by Unsung

Is it a new world? Coz I never got that feeling. What with the several generation of fighting between the locals and the other guys.

One dude had the time to reincarnate three times.

edited 26th Jan '17 6:12:51 PM by Ghilz

The Dyrwood is basically a post-revolutionary fantasy America, with both the Dyrwood and Readceras as former Aedyran colonies. I think the Liberation is about 100-150 years before the start of the game? Something like that.

...So not that early colonial days, now that I think about it.

edited 26th Jan '17 7:17:23 PM by Unsung

Yeah, the Duchy you're a part of is a colony that broke free of a relatively recently-collapsed empire. The "war" where the Godbreaker bomb was used was basically just a brushfire conflict between a small kingdom on its border and the duchy itself.