It’s time to get through another of my New Year’s Resolutions for video games with Pillars of Eternity 2, which I’ve finally beaten.
Pillars of Eternity 2 finds a very good way to shake up your status quo, by taking the very large statue of Eorhas that is under your castle from the first game, bringing it to life with the spirit of Eothas, who then goes walking towards the Deadfire Archipelago with the intent to smash The Wheel that regulates reincarnation of souls (which is located there), with The Watcher of Caed Nua (your character) in pursuit, both to try and stop Eothas, and also try to get some payback for his wrecking your digs. In the process, you have to handle various imperialist powers trying to take control of the region, the indigenous (and isolationist and extremely conservative) monarchy, and the local pirates.
This does lead into some tonal problems – of the “Everyone here kinda sucks” variety. Don’t like the Imperialists, well the indigenous monarchy has a rigidly enforced caste system where lower castes are kept in poverty while having to do hazardous grunt work, and bringing them food so they don’t starve is considered smuggling (and also the government is homophobic but will tolerate it if your part of the nobilit and you keep it on the down low.) Or there are pirates, who do what you expect of pirates – murdering, pillaging, there’s implied to be some tape but it’s not mentioned and is kept off camera).
Fortunately, this doesn’t apply to your party members. PoE1 had the Durance problem – your starting healer, Durance, is a horrible misogynistic piece of shit who felt like a combination of all of Richard Dawkins worst traits – but he had healing and resurrection magic for the whole game, and he had a connection to the inciting event of the game’s plot, so you had an incentive to keep him with you. Here your default first cleric is actually a pleasant character to be around. The party members you pick up from some of the other factions are also enjoyable (and some, like Pellegrina, are returning from the last game), which also puts a twist on the faction conflict – do you turn on this colonial power, with the possibility that you’ll have to fight and kill this other colonial power later?
The other wrinkle on this comes from the geography – as your travelling across an Archipelago, you need a ship, a crew, and ultimately you’ll need to equip it for naval battles. I generally didn’t have too much of a problem with keeping my crew happy, though Naval combat was kind of hit or miss. By the end of the game the ship that you’re expected to need in order to make it to the final dungeon (though you can use other ships) cannot be modified with the helm and sails and hull that you’ve upgraded any of your ships with, so you’re at a disadvantage in combat, combined with an interface for naval combat that is minimalist and abstracted, but in a way that makes doing the naval battles strategically clunky.
The rest of the game is what you’d expect from this style of isometric RPG, with very nice graphics that don’t require a complicated computer to run. This is helped as well by a turn based option to combat, which mitigates some of the pathfinding problems I had with the first game. In the first game, I’d spread out my characters to, for example, attack a dragon on the flanks, and so they wouldn’t bunch up and get killed by the breath attacks, only for them to bunch up when I gave the attack order, and promptly get TPK’d by the breath attack. Here, the turn based option let’s me avoid that and put my characters where I want to, and to place spells strategically. It still runs into some issues with reminding the player where the splash area for that fireball you’re casting is going to go, but that can be addressed by just paying attention.
In all, this game was fun, so while I’m looking forward to playing Avowed to spend more time in this world that way, what I really want is a Pillars of Eternity 3.
You can order Pillars of Eternity 2 on PC through the Humble Store (affiliate link).
Please support my Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/countzeroor
Buy me a coffee at Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/countzero
Watch my Live-Streams on http://twitch.tv/countzeroor
Check out my Let’s Plays at https://www.youtube.com/@CountZeroOrPlays
