Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire [May 8 release]

[Great Rumbler]

https://www.fig.co/campaigns/deadfire

[Rufus]

Wheee~

Not gonna fund pre-order this time, but I'm glad Pillars saw enough success to warrant a sequel.

[Great Rumbler]

Tyranny didn't do super well, unfortunately, but probably at least was able to turn a profit for them given the shorter development time.

[Rufus]

Shame. I wonder if crowd funding it could have improved things. Not to actually fund it, but as a marketing vehicle.

[Great Rumbler]

Hard to say, really, could just be that the initial excitement of the return of isometric WRPGs has subsided a bit.

For reference, PoE has sold about 850k, while Tyranny has sold only about 130k so far.

[Rufus]

Yeesh

[Cerveza mas fina]

I still havent finished Pillars, think the pace is just too slow, I mean its really good and I put in 18 hours but its hard to imagine finishing it

[Rufus]

The last act is much shorter than the others, if that helps.

[Freyj]

I liked a lot of the ideas that Tyranny put forth, but the execution not so much. Being pigeonholed early on into the shit path didn't help.

Pillars OTOH I enjoyed the everliving fuck out of.

[Rufus]

Funded, with 28 days to spare.

[tiesto]

Damn, Tyranny is an ultra-bomb. Super shame as this was a new IP and a really great CRPG.

Bad timing... game came out like 2 days after an actual tyrant was elected president...

[Great Rumbler]

[Great Rumbler]

[Great Rumbler]

[Bebpo]

I am hype 

[Freyj]

Cannot fucking wait. I need to finish my POTD run.

[kingv]

Are they using the same rpg system as before?

I thought it could use some refinement, as the stats and loot all felt sort of bland, but I don’t frankly have any great ideas how to do that t.

[Great Rumbler]

They've said that the combat has been revamped [to be more deliberately-paced and easier to follow]. I dunno how much it's going to be like the combat in Tyranny, but I though it had better combat than PoE.

[Freyj]

They split the physical part of Might into Strength and the magic damage into Resolve.

[Great Rumbler]

One week to go, boys:

[tiesto]

Does Mr Shower Grabber make an appearance in this game, too?

[headwalk]

playing tyranny and as great as the world is (once you've muted the american V.O) going back to muddy bioware style combat after tasting the nectar of divinity is hard work.

[Human Snorenado]

I kind of want to get this at launch, but then again I was only able to slog through 1/3 of the first one, and have Tyranny and Divinity 2 sitting untouched in my Steam library, so.

[pilonv1]

I kind of want to get this at launch, but then again I was only able to slog through 1/3 of the first one, and have Tyranny and Divinity 2 sitting untouched in my Steam library, so.

I'm concerned with this too, the last 1/3 of the original wore me out. I enjoyed the giant city and the quests in there but once you left it just seemed to drag on.

[Joe Molotov]

Does Mr Shower Grabber make an appearance in this game, too?

Pretty sure you need money for that.

[Skullfuckers Anonymous]

Does Mr Shower Grabber make an appearance in this game, too?

Pretty sure you need money for that.

I'm curious what will happen to this...
https://www.neogaf.com/threads/pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire-gaf-island-under-volcanic-formation.1395660/

[Great Rumbler]

15 minutes to go.

[MMaRsu]

Ive not played the first game.. gonna have to play that first. I always like those old Baldurs Gate games tho

[Great Rumbler]

Deadfire's really good, like a step up from PoE in nearly every aspect. And it looks amazing, too. It's got lighting effects, weather, day/night cycle, 3D vegetation, and other visual tricks that really make it pop a lot more than PoE did. Then it throws a ton of classes and subclasses at you, with dual class options! There's almost too much customization there, and you can dual class every party member not just the PC.

One of the biggest changes is the emphasis on exploration. I haven't dug into that too much yet, but your personal ship looks to play a pretty big role in the game as you do a lot of island-hopping, and the islands look to offer a lot of chances to mess around and see what's going on. Plus, there's ship-to-ship combat, but I only just got my ship back [the opening area leaves you stranded for about 3-4 hours before your ship is ready to go again] so I haven't had a chance to check that out yet.

Really feels like Obsidian took what they learned from PoE, and from experimenting with Tyranny, and put it to good use here.

[Bebpo]

I like the multi-class stuff. I especially like how you can pick from 2 classes or a multi-class of the 2 for party members. Gives way more freedom if you like a character but don't need their class in your party. The graphics are a lot nicer too although I feel there's way too much bloom-ish blur sometimes. Also seems like a lot more abilities outside combat for usefulness. Also being able to have your teammates do dialogue choices for you (I feel like in Pillars 1 this was only in specific spots, whereas here it seems like any dialogue stat check can be handled by a teammate).

Some of the UI changes are a little janky/funky and probably for the better but gonna need some time to adjust.

I'm glad the game let you respec your MC. That was my main concern since in Pillars having my MC be a fighter tank was a total waste the whole game. Now got to respec MC into a Cipher which was OP af in Pillars 1 both in combat and in dialogue choices.

Voice acting seems a ton better. I had to turn it off in Pillars 1 right away because it just ruined the immersion with how bad the voices were. But while I'll still probably turn them off here, the VA hasn't annoyed me to turning it off yet early on.

Also had a crash even before starting the game when trying to go through PoE1 choices. GJ Obsidian. Will wait for a patch or two before I get really into Pillars 2.

[archie4208]

I want to get this game, but I also want to wait for all the DLC to come out so I can play it in one go. 

[MMaRsu]

So should I respect from a ranger to a cipher in POE1? Just started yesterday 

[Let's Cyber]

Do custom adventurers carry over?

[Bebpo]

So in terms of gameplay stuff, there's no new classes right? And I can't tell if there's new skills in lvl.1-16. Trying to figure out if classes will pretty much play the same until end game at the new levels. Still not sure what I want to do with my MC/team with so many multi-class choices.

So should I respect from a ranger to a cipher in POE1? Just started yesterday 

I personally would. In Pillars 2 there's a good chance Cipher is totally useless, but in Pillars 1 there's multiple quest dialogue stat checks where if you're a Cipher you get a special solution out of a quest because Cipher's are psychic and can read minds/do mind stuff.

Ciphers are also op as fuck in Pillars 1 once you read a Cipher guide and learn how to basically paralyze/confuse mass amounts of enemies constantly so no enemy can even attack your team.

But Pillars 2, who knows. Early on it seems Priest has the most extra dialogue options so far.

[Bebpo]

Ok, so Pillars 2 is really good. So many nice improvements from Pillars 1 besides the graphical face lift and a shitton more combat/dialogue abilities (more dialogue ones are cool). I really like small stuff too like being able to jump directly to a specific building when going to a ward you've been too.

Right now I've only got 2 complaints, otherwise everything else is better than Pillars 1.

-Can't respec class. This sucks. I respec'd the story characters a few times in Pillars 1 because I always wanted them in my team for story reasons, but I also built them wrong initially and fixed it later on for high difficulty combat. I can already tell I fucked up with Eder by making him dual-class tank/rogue since I'm expecting him to be my main tank. Most of the rogue skills are useless and it's going to take him a lot longer to progress through the useful tank skills and he'll be locked out of the end game tank stuff. It's annoying because they let you respec all the rest, so I don't see what the point of not letting you respec class is? Maybe there will be a mod for respec-ing teammates. I'm playing on hard and don't really want to redo the first 4 or so hours I've done, but I think I fucked up with Eder and I want him as my MT.

I'm actually kinda thinking about not going multi-class for anyone. I can see certain benefits where a few classes will fit really well together. But outside that, the detriments seem really sucky and it's like you end up with underleveled party members.

-Other minor complaint I have is that when you're in conversation with someone there's no way to look at the previous dialogue sentence. I swear you could do it in Pillars 1 and most games let you do it. I use that stuff all the time because I read really fast and sometimes I'll skim something and the next line references it and I need to look back at what the previous line actually said and I can't here in Pillars 2. A little annoying.

That's about it though, otherwise everything is really cool and besides the one crash I had at the very start, everything else has been incredibly polished. Very impressive.

[Freyj]

Little diamond at the top middle of the conversation box is a button to see history.

[Bebpo]

Enjoy! It's super good. And once you get the battle system down, play on hard with more auto-pause for even more satisfying combat.

Do the DLC1 after Ch.2 and DLC2 after Ch.3 for maximum pacing.
Optional dungeon, you can clear out as you go, but final few floors are basically endgame around when you do DLC2. The boss is a punk.

[Bebpo]

In Pillars 2, not sure what to think about making magic per encounter instead of per rest. It’s more fun that you get to constantly blow all your spells each fight, but gets rid of the playing more carefully saving the big spells for when needed. Game is very cool and it’ll be a fun dozens of hours learning to strategize combat with all the new options.

[Freyj]

5 v 6 I feel like strips you of one DPS no matter what and it feels like it’s probably a ranged DPS so that balances things a bit. Playing on Veteran and encounters either feel a little too easy or a little overwhelming.

[Bebpo]

Didn't even realize it was a 5 person party. Hmmm, well I guess they figure multi-class makes up for it since someone can handle 2 essential roles.

I'm still debating on restarting the game before I get too far in. About 5 hours in now with 5 party members and a ship. I haven't been multi-classing my party members and I feel iffy about it. But the multi-class options for the companions are downright fucking weird.

Like let's talk about Xolti. She is your priest companion and can be a ...monk? Now in Pillars 1, which I just played very recently, Durance never left my party because Priest was the essential healer on hard difficulty and they needed to be spitting up protective buffs & healing non-stop every second of the fight. They also generally were squishy and didn't want to be too close up front because if your Priest dies then fuck you're probably dead.

So taking that concept and then mixing it with a MONK who is all about staying right up front and taking lots of damage in high damage/high DPS...seems like the worst possible concept ever of two opposing classes. I loved my Monk in Pillars 1, Monk + Barbarian were my top 2 damage dishing physical DPS up front off-tanking and fucking shit up. But if Xolti is doing that...whose buffing and healing? And if you're buffing and healing while up front off-tanking, standing around taking damage sure sounds pretty crap.

I really really wish you could respec classes, so I didn't have to regret that I'm missing out on some fun gameplay version of a character because I didn't go multi-class and could mess around with both as I go along and see what version of the character fits my party the best.

[Bebpo]

Also, on a side note, what's the deal with camping supplies in this one? In the first game that was your dungeon crawling mechanic, you'd need to camp to refresh your HP/spells/rest-uses and you'd only be able to hold like 2-4 at a time so you'd progress and try to stretch out your camping as much as you could and then if you ran out of supplies you'd head out of the dungeon and refresh. It was sorta the dungeon crawling challenge mechanic.

Now, at least on first glance, it seems like all you have to do is buy 8 cent fruit or rice x 99 and you can camp 99 times whenever using them and get the same effect. Combined with spells being per-encounter instead of per-rest...doesn't that seem like it gets rid of all the dungeon crawling endurance challenge of the game? Like did they decide to focus on just making the individual battles challenging rather than having any endurance dungeon crawling challenge in this one? Seems like an odd choice.

I wonder if Pillars 2 is gonna be considerably easier than the original. Maybe I should restart on path of the damned.

[Freyj]

Sawyer said POTD is probably not tuned correctly just a fair warning.

Priest + Monk makes some sense as a front line healer / DPS or more interestingly as a tank. I did a Priest tank in Pillars 1 for POTD and it was pretty great. I’ve heard that Druid is the new healing king and Priests are much less required now making them slightly less “good” but I think that’s an improvement honestly.

Yeah I think resting is less of a big deal now and more of a “I want to keep my good buffs” thing. It’s a casualty of the per encounter changes. I think I’m okay with it honestly. I only ever really felt the stress of supplies was in POTD so we’ll see how that shakes out after a few tuning passes.

[Bebpo]

So I'm like lvl 5 or 6 and doing fine and veteran. Just stopped at an island and took out an optional young drake and some xaurip dudes.

Got into my first ship battle and wtf, am I not supposed to fight ships yet? When the combat actually started after the mini-game there were like a dozen enemies with guns and shit that swarmed my team of 5 and murdered everyone insanely fast. Pretty sure with my team/level there was no way to survive that fight.

[Bebpo]

Got to the first city. Was taking my time checking out the islands along the way. Did some fun & challenging dungeons.

Didn't realize how to use rations so my boat morale is 25%, hope I can fix that pretty quick.

[Bebpo]

Great. So my Windows 10 finally did the stupid creators update and I updated my geforce drivers with a fresh clean install to the latest ones and now I get a blue screen of death kernel error every minute or two in the first city. Fuck.

edit - seem to have fixed it

[Great Rumbler]

Dropped 45k on a junk today. 8 cannons and 18 crew members.

[Bebpo]

Dropped 45k on a junk today. 8 cannons and 18 crew members.

Does that kind of stuff make the ship battles easier? Like can you do damage to make the enemies weaker before you fight them in a normal party battle?
Also does Pillars 2 have an infinite money thing like the stronghold from the original? Because seems like there's even more stuff to buy here with all the ship parts.

Oh and is it just me or is the game really graphically intensive (or not optimized currently). On my 980GTX even without weather effects if I want good v-sync in parts I'm running closer to 30fps than 60fps. With weather in the city it feels like it's dipping below 30fps. I mean it definitely looks nicer than the original, but still doesn't seem like the kind of game that should be bringing modern cards to their knees at 1080p.

[Great Rumbler]

Does that kind of stuff make the ship battles easier? Like can you do damage to make the enemies weaker before you fight them in a normal party battle?

Cannons can fire 3 different kinds of shots: cannonballs, grapeshot, and chainshot. Grapeshot is more likely to injure enemy crew members up on deck, so you can thin them out in preparation of boarding. and having more crew members on your ship means more people to fight against the enemy crew.

[Freyj]

I’ve seen reports that boarding is super bugged and doesn’t match the crew numbers at all, but honestly with the level scaling fucked up everything is trending a little easy right now anyhow. Hoping that’s fixed with Tuesday’s patch.

And yeah Bebpo performance is dogshit on a 1060 for me. The “Miscellaneous” option turns off a lot of the fancy lighting stuff and can help but I’m still hitting 38 FPS running around Neketaka, Dunnage.

I would pay a premium for Obsidian to for once just take their time and release a relatively bug free, polished experience. It’s almost funny at this point. They needed the Beta to be more than it was without a doubt.

[kingv]

Dropped 45k on a junk today. 8 cannons and 18 crew members.

Does that kind of stuff make the ship battles easier? Like can you do damage to make the enemies weaker before you fight them in a normal party battle?
Also does Pillars 2 have an infinite money thing like the stronghold from the original? Because seems like there's even more stuff to buy here with all the ship parts.

Oh and is it just me or is the game really graphically intensive (or not optimized currently). On my 980GTX even without weather effects if I want good v-sync in parts I'm running closer to 30fps than 60fps. With weather in the city it feels like it's dipping below 30fps. I mean it definitely looks nicer than the original, but still doesn't seem like the kind of game that should be bringing modern cards to their knees at 1080p.

That’s a real bummer, since I’m rocking a 970.

Will... wait, I guess.

[Bebpo]

Speaking of Misc bugs, I ran into one where when you hold tab and it's supposed to show the names of important npcs you can talk to...it doesn't do that anymore for me. I have to scroll my mouse over them to see their names individually for every npc. Pretty annoying. Wasn't like that in the first island but been like that in the first city. Also some of the interaction points don't seem to work at the right spot. Like you see a magnifying glass or something but clicking there won't activate it.

Definitely a little glitchy still. Realistically I should have waited a couple patches in like I planned (or until the DLC is out which will be integrated into the middle if it's like Pillars 1 DLC), but despite the problems I still find the Pillars gameplay the most fun I've had in an rpg in years, so kinda hard to not play it and enjoy it currently.

I’ve seen reports that boarding is super bugged and doesn’t match the crew numbers at all, but honestly with the level scaling fucked up everything is trending a little easy right now anyhow. Hoping that’s fixed with Tuesday’s patch.

Oh you're using the level scaling? Interesting. I didn't bother with scaling because I kind of like the Saga-ish idea of an open world with islands and quests at different levels. Plus if I get really stuck on an optional quest battle I can level up and come back later.

[Great Rumbler]

Level-scaling has always sucked.

[Bebpo]

What do you guys think of the questing so far? I've explored two of Neketata's areas out (Queen's Berth & The Gullet) and just entered a third (Brass Citadel), doing all the quests I come across and it's been a bit lackluster so far. Like it's fine, but none of the questlines have much depth (they all end really fast & easily for a Sawyer game) and the factions seems less interesting than Pillars 1's main city. I've still got half the city to go, but while I like the battle system improvement and the choose your own adventure parts improvements, not sold on the quest design yet.

Then again, Act I of the original was the most boring part. But the main city was the start of Act II in the original when it got amazing. Not feeling that jump up in quality at the main city here...yet.

Companions so far seem alright and story is way too early to have any opinion on yet.

[Freyj]

Quests get better in The Gullet (well...way down into The Gullet) and The Sacred Stair I thought. Piriki’s has some good questlines if you explore enough. Queen’s Berth and Serpent’s Crown are mostly just kinda there. Family feud quest was whatever, shouldn’t have been so easy to make everyone see eye to eye.

Sometimes the interaction points don’t pop the text over their icon but do show up in the dialogue log. Always check that if you don’t see it.

[Freyj]

went to the beta branch because I'm one shotting things on Veteran which kinda sucks and even though the latest patch says level scaling fixed I'm still one shotting things

fps is vastly improved though

Level scaling may actually have some sort of limiter that gives a range to enemies, I'm not sure if it's still broken or I'm misunderstanding that. Either way even when I'm fighting mobs of the same level Veteran is still waaaay too easy. The only challenge I've had recently was an island I went a little too far north to find with level 16 naga on it (I was level 12). That fight felt just about right for Veteran and that should be a good indicator of just how far off Veteran and POTD are right now. Given that Obsidian knows their audience pretty well I'm surprised the game's difficulties were released in the state they are.

I'm really enjoying Deadfire but there's something about it that makes me long for a more traditional sequel to Pillars of Eternity. The sailing and islands get a little bit bland sometimes and I feel like the dungeons suffer for all the new systems, etc. Myself (and I'm sure most others) were expecting a BG1 -> BG2 step up and Deadfire really isn't that so much as it's something very different.

[Bebpo]

Yeah, I'm a little worried about that. Not greatly worried because as you say it's a ton of fun, but maybe a little bland is how I'd describe the game so far. Like because everything is so separated by islands it feels like a bunch of short mini-stories rather than this big fleshed out connected world of one area of the continent.

What's the downside of opting into the beta? I think I'll try that next time I play just for the fps improvements.

[Freyj]

I had my first crash coming out of a one off battle but otherwise had no issues in 4 hours of playing tonight. I’ll go back once the release patch is out later this week.

[Bebpo]

Wowwwwww

Played with the opt in beta and it's fricken night and day. The game is so incredibly smooth in a way that no area from the start has been. It's like the background is a still painting and the characters move quickly around it with no hiccups. I never knew I needed this but now I need this.

Not sure if they dialed down some of the effects to get the performance fixed. I might just be placebo but it looked a little more plainish, like the lighting effects or some other effects were gone, but boy does it run smooth now.

Explored out the Brass Citadel. 3 areas left in the city to check out...

[Freyj]

Right now? Considerably easier than Pillars 1.

Biggest barrier I can think of is you’d have low class resources for per-encounter abilities.

[Bebpo]

This city kills the pacing of the game. In Pillars 1 it was fine because there was a full act prior and Act II was essentially the city and questing in it and surrounding areas. I was playing a lot of Pillars 2 really into it until I hit the city, but it's so big with a ton of rooms and npcs to exhaust that I do one section of a city and then I'm tired out. Can't wait to finish exploring the city so I can get back to combat, questing and dungeon crawling.