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The next game in the Pillars of Eternity series is an interesting specimen. Overall it is a great improvement over the first game. There’s full voice acting, graphics are improved (marginally from what I can tell), combat is “improved” (We will get to that), and they added sailing and ship battles, cool! However there are some issues that I have with this game that need to be discussed. In this review I will break down the game and discuss various categories including: Factions, plot, combat, ships and sailing mechanics.
Factions:
The faction system has been greatly expanded over the first game. You now have primary factions that branch off into several different secondary factions that are roughly related to the primary factions in some way. Four of these primary factions can be joined and have their own quests to complete. You have the Principi, the pirate faction (you can guess what they are about). The Vallian Trading Company, they are about making as much money as possible through mostly legal means. The Royal Deadfire Company, they try to maintain order and law around the Deadfire. And finally the Huana, who are the natural inhabitants of the Deadfire and try to keep their culture alive and in power. Each of the factions is shown as being “morally gray” with no clear good or evil option. They all have their own agendas and sometimes use shady tactics to get what they want. The player technically doesn’t have to side with any of the factions if they don’t want to. The ending when you have to reach Ukaizo will be a bit more difficult but the game lets you not pick sides if you don’t want to. Based on your actions you can lose or gain reputation with a faction. Having high or low reputation does have an effect on gameplay whether it's through dialogue or affecting whether certain guards are hostile or not. In the end I think the faction system is well done. Each one is unique and has its advantages and disadvantages. This was one of the exceptionally designed aspects of the game in my opinion.
Plot:
The main plot is pretty simple but it works. Eothas ( the god of light, renewal, redemption, rebirth), has somehow materialized himself into the giant adra statue underneath Caed Nua and digs himself out. This destroys your fortress from the first game and ends up killing you. Eothas then starts treading far across the land destroying and killing everyone and everything in his path as he makes his way to Ukaizo so he can break the wheel, stopping the process of reincarnation and trapping all the souls in the in-between. Your character is then brought back to life by the god Berath with the catch of being her servant and tasked with stopping Eothas.
So, throughout the main story you are following Eothas’s footsteps to find where he is and try to talk him down of what he's doing. However, along the way as you progress your quest, you will be forced into councils with the various gods who debate and argue on what to do with Eothas and Kith, with the option to chime in once in a while to voice your opinion. You will eventually have to make a choice if you agree with what Eothas is trying to do or not, however I don’t think there is much of a difference. I might be wrong but I don’t think you can actually stop Eothas from breaking the wheel, but you can tell him how you feel and tell him how to “inspire” Kith to move on after the wheel is destroyed. I think the main plot and villain was more nuanced in the first game. Thaos, while he had his problems with how they incorporated him in the story, was still a much more interesting character and “villain” than Eothas in my opinion. I hesitate to even call Eothas a villain since while yes he is murdering a lot of people just to get to Ukaizo, couldn’t he have at least tried to be a bit more careful not to step on people along the way? But his end goal wasn’t really malicious and he is viewed as more of a “morally gray” character. Of which is a recurring theme with all the characters in this game, there really are no “villains” except maybe the Crookspur slavers or the vampire lord in Splintered Reef but they are such a small part of the game. Overall I think the plot is one of the weakest aspects of the game, being so simple and lacking much real choice in the end.
Combat:
The combat is mostly the same from the first game. One big change is that now each spell and ability are all per encounter instead of per rest. This lessens the amount of down time between encounters. Since spells and abilities are all per encounter, there is almost no need to rest. You can go through one tough encounter to the next without having to manage your spells or needing to stop and heal. Another big change was how the health system works. In the first game characters had health and endurance. When they took damage, their endurance would lower along with a small amount of health. When their endurance reaches zero, they would be knocked out and would re awaken after the battle is over or by being revived from a spell or scroll. After a battle endurance would regenerate, but health did not. To regain health, you had to rest. Now in Pillars 2, you no longer have endurance, instead it’s just health and “injuries”. Your health works the same way endurance works in Pillars 1. Injuries would occur if a character takes damage in some special way like through failing a skill check, or sometimes, but rarely, in combat. Once a character becomes injured 3 times, they die. I actually don’t really know what happens at that point because that never happened to me, but I am assuming they have to be revived in some special way. To recover from injuries, you have to rest. There are also special bonuses that can be gained from resting, like in Pillars 1. These are gained by resting at an inn, or by resting with certain types of food that you have on you when out in the field. So, you no longer need to rest to regain your spells, abilities, or heal. Now the only reasons to rest are to recover from injuries or to gain some bonuses to your stats. Honestly it’s hard to say which system is better for combat and resting mechanics. The original focused on resource management and made each fight feel like there is more on the line. You can’t just throw all of your spells and abilities at the enemies constantly and have to decide which is necessary to use depending on the situation. While in Pillars 2, being able to use your full arsenal in every fight does allow you to utilize and experiment more spells and abilities than you otherwise would if you were limited. This does also have the consequence of making each spell and ability feel less special and makes each fight feel more homogeneous. Ultimately I think I prefer the system in Pillars 1 which takes its inspiration from D&D and the infinity engine games.
One last important thing to note about the combat is that there is an option now to pick either real time with pause or turn-based. I actually picked turned-based for my playthrough. Even though the first game was RTWP, I wanted to try something new this time around. Well lets just say I ended up regretting that choice about half way through the game. The game was originally designed as RTWP, like Pillars 1. However turn-based was added later as an update, and it shows. The turn-based mode functions fine and actually feels pretty good for the most part. The problem however is that many encounters were not designed with turn-based in mind and also the dexterity stat becomes pretty much useless. Some combat encounters start really far away from enemies, so you have to sit through turn after turn to slowly get your characters over to the enemies in order to actually attack them or do something. Luckily this is pretty rare and I can only think of a couple instances when this happened, but it was rather annoying and concerning.
Review continued in the comments.