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It's taken me a long time to figure out what I feel about the Pillars Of Eternity games. The first one was rougher in so many ways, and I thought I hated it. The second one, this one, Deadfire, I thought I hated, too.
But with both of them, I just kept playing for some reason. All the way to the end. Multiple times. And then I realized that really, it's not that I hated them, it's that I wasn't really seeing them. I was seeing what I was projecting onto them.
Deadfire is the (slightly) larger of the two and most recent, so I'll put the review here, but the first one really is a masterpiece in its own right (ragged edges inherited from clumsy D&D paradigms and all). Both games benefit tremendously from a few judiciously chosen mods to either polish or expand or balance certain little things.
Mechanically, if there were ever a spiritual successor of the famous Infinity Engine RPGs like Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale or the Electron / Aurora Engine NWN, it must be Pillars Of Eternity. Which should surprise no one, given the lineage of the designers and direct references. Absolutely luscious, gorgeous environments, tactical combat with just enough complexity and depth to be tactical, and a good basketful of companions to take with you, both games are the perfect archetypes of classical western RPGs. No one could say they have a right to comment about the RPG genre without having played these two.
And so now I'm gonna give critical comments about them.
Although the companions are diverse and usually have compelling personal stories and interesting or attractive personalities, they (almost all) suffer from a crippling problem: they're extremely "safe". They tell boringly predictable stories about tediously superficial drama and your relationship with them resembles nothing quite so much as being their unpaid therapist. This is a problem born of the demands of corporate-governed game design, and it's just tragic. Thus, the companions come across as shallow Saturday morning cartoons for tweens. For one example, Tekehu is an obnoxiously blunt token hypersexual himbo whose story mostly revolves around his privileged immaturity... but his confrontation with the exhaustively-demonstrated injustices of his culture consists of approximately three lines of dialogue in which he mopes that he wants you to hug him. So brave. A man asking for a hug. Such radical progress. What an amazingly non-toxic masculine - NO, he actually is just a shallow slut dumping his insecurities onto you and requires you to tell him what to think about it all. After a short exchange of melodramatic navel gazing and clumsy, rushed pleas to be your lover. Eder's major foible is that he's supposed to be "racist". Not racist like ... *racist* though. No no no. That would be too much. He's "racist" with quotation marks because he wants to pet the Orlans like he pets literally anything smaller and hairier than he is, and sometimes he says so and ohhhh isn't that super awkward and racist you guys?! Woooooow... If he were allowed to be portrayed as unlikeable or hateful somehow, that would be a line too far for the game's main character. Yes, Eder is the main character.
This pattern is one demonstrated through virtually every dialogue interaction. Your companions just can't help themselves but to constant provide vapid one-liners and trivial interjections begging for a giggle that's almost never deserved. Why? Because any sincere humor would be risky. The horror is mostly just a muddy old ruin where there's some stinky piles of poop laying around. There is one dungeon that attempts to really go all the way, showing how the lives of the underclass ~~slaves~~ workers rot in heaps where they were disposed in the dank bowels beneath the city. But this is not really a point ever remarked upon or brought up elsewhere. You see the environment, but it may as well just be a random undead-themed dungeon. Once you emerge from that place, none of your companions ever talk about it. There's a token throwaway comment about it in one dialogue when turning in the quest and that's about it. When you go to the island where the ~~slave~~trade is being conducted, this shrieking silence continues. The game obviously wanted to confront the ugliness and realities of colonial-era labor rights and industrialization, but absolutely and completely failed to do so. Except for the technicality that the plot designers took care to point out that no one in the Deadfire is actually "the good guys". But that was a perfunctory, bare minimum. The overall moral of this fable about the responsibility of divinity is handled in such abstract terms that it actually fails to have emotional impact because even the few moments during which the player is confronted by this plot point are presented in such a casual, nonchalant manner.
If you are able to understand the constraints placed upon a work of art like this by the accountants and executives at Obsidian, you can probably forgive them for not really exploring these things in the depth they would need. For one thing, it'd be rather expensive. The plot could easily sprawl far beyond its scope just to discuss and illustrate those things (the Watcher is able to subvert and weaken certain factions in some ways, but leading a revolution to liberate the oppressed and exploited slave-caste of Neketaka, for example, is just not possible).
Similarly, if you can overlook the now-well-examined frustrations of ancient D&D game design mechanics (Vancian spellcasting, I'm looking at you...), or if you can install a few mods to help alleviate the most egregious problems, you can fairly well enjoy the tactical combat while also having an immersive fantasy life experience. The multiple difficulty settings allow you a great deal of power to determine the degree and type of difficulties you face.
Perhaps the only fault that truly is the responsibility of the game developers (rather than their managers, marketers and financiers) is that the character models are... ugly. Especially if you want to wear robes.
Last notes: don't use the turn-based mode. It was added eventually just to satisfy some loud, toxic voices of their playerbase. Mechanically, it is absolutely not balanced (since the fundamental design of your action economy being affected by your choice of equipment just goes out the window), and is simply not necessary, either. And use a mod to get rid of the absolutely stupid non-party-friendly AoEs. Yes that will make you "more powerful", but in practice it's only a quality of life improvement.
These many years later, the Pillars Of Eternity games are both masterpieces of their genre, only surpassed by the more modern Pathfinder games by Owlcat.