Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire

2025-02-17
At one point in Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire I was on Crookspur Island, a landmass controlled by slavers. Ostensibly I had come here for some quest objective and after finishing it it was time to go home. Except it wasn't time to go home because I wanted to kill all the slavers. Y'know 'cause, well, fuck slavers, yeah? After proceeding to massacre every soul on that island I went on my merry way. Several hours later, on a completely different island, I'm trying to convince a woman to lend her military support to the Huana. She says "Yes, but there's a condition. I want you to go to Crookspur Island and deal with the slavers there." I tell her "Oh those cunts? They're all dead." She goes "Oh that's dope. Yeah I'll help you." And the quest instantly resolves giving me a butt-load of experience. Moments like this, where the writing and quest structure embrace player agency and not only acknowledge but reward the proactivity of the player, are numerous in POE2 and remind me why Obsidian are really masters in the RPG space. Pillars of Eternity 2 is a land dense with lore and dense with factions, but most importantly its the interconnectedness of it all that is its crown jewel. Actions taken in one part of the Deadfire archipelago might not always affect actions taken elsewhere but they do just often enough that you're always wondering what'll happen if you open door A before door B and vice versa.

Fundamentally POE2 is POE1 but You're On A Boat. You're spending your time doing the same stuff for the most part: wandering the land with a party of colorful characters, chasing down a god, engaging in real-time-with-pause combat, parlaying with numerous factions, and questing, questing, questing. Sure the boat thing is cool enough. The Deadfire is an archipelago so your main means of transportation is the ol' wooden vessel. There's some sim-y bits fleshed out, you got slots for different parts of the ship, you hire crew to fill those slots who then level up, you equip gear to the boat--but fundamentally I didn't find it that engaging. What I did find engaging was chasing down innocent merchants and slaughtering their entire crew for loot and a slight raise in my crews morale. Yes, the best treatment for low morale is to board another ship and turn it into an abattoir. Thankfully you can mostly ignore the ship stuff and then it's mostly just flavor for the world-map traveling sections. All of this is to say is that if you played and liked POE1 you're in for more but better.

What's likely my favorite improvement is the factions on offer. You have the Vailian Trading Company, some faux-Italian merchant organization, the Royal Deadfire Company, the hard-ass, militaristic navy faction, the Principi, the faux-Italian pirates conglomerate, and the Huana, the natives of the Deadfire. And they're all a bunch of shits. There are no Chill Good Guys factions, only varying shades of shit-tinged gray. You'll spend a large portion of the game completing quests for these factions, trying to understand their motivations, and finally deciding who you'll ally with. The game's crescendo strongly pushes you to ally yourself with one over all the others and it's delightful then that I found the prospect of siding with even one of them to feel like a Faustian bargain. Even better, multiple of the factions have in-fighting within them so even if you like one faction you'll still have to figure out which of their members to ally with. It's a wonderful web of intrigue and the attention to detail and flavor infused into each one was a huge highlight for me.

That being said, there some things that fall flat and some that irritate me. Each party member and faction in the game keeps track of your actions towards them to give you some sort of reputation rating. Not only this but each party member has a rating for every other party member. Whoa cool! Only it doesn't really do anything. I had party members and factions both all the way positive and all the way negative and it didn't seem to do anything other than unlock a romance in one case and cause the faction to occasionally attack me in another. The biggest irritation was one party member Maia is a big Royal Deadfire Company stan and at a bunch of points it felt like she'd threaten to leave the party if I accidentally shook hands with someone from another faction. Even though we had maxed relations. Like, great, you guys wrote the character to be super patriotic and true to her roots but could you have also made it not make the game actively un-fun to play? Oh, and fuck the sea shanties. Maybe I'm not a sea shanty guy but fuck 'em.

I went into POE2 wanting to get it over quick because I just wanted to catch up on the L O R E in time for Avowed coming out. Lo and behold I found myself almost immediately sucked in by the complex interwoven cultures, factions, and plotting Obsidian crafted. There's so much I didn't even touch on like the fantastic musical score, the beautiful hand-drawn backdrops for story-beats, how they fleshed out the gods from POE1 and on and on. Check it out, even if it's just to kill an island of slavers.