Pillars of Eternity

Pillars of Eternity 1 & 2 (Deadfire) are not new games, but I found myself going back to them recently. I'd played, but never finished, the first one.

PoE (not to be confused with other PoE's) fits neatly into the mold of isometric Western RPG. It plays much like the old Baldur's Gate games and such. Unfortunately, it's a bit weighed down by those conventions too. Maybe I'm "spoiled" by modern game design, but the heavy reliance on text over spoken dialog feels like a drawback these days. It's felt more strongly here because there is so much lore presented. 

It's a fantasy world set in the wake of a war caused by one of the gods taking an avatar and striding around the region before getting blown up. There are curses and lots of things going on with souls. One of the core threads is the PC awaking as a Watcher (who can see souls and read past lives) awakening to seeing fragments of a past live of their own that ties into the schemes of the "bad guy" who turns out to be a religious zealot leading a cult and shaping things for one of the gods.

All this story feels a little odd when the main "twist" at the amounts to: the gods aren't gods. Rather they're members of an ancient civilization raised to incredible power by lost technologies of the time and fed by spiritual energies of the cycle of reincarnation of souls. But... they're powerful beyond what mortals can normally attain. They seem to get something out of worship. They seem to empower priests in some fashion. I guess it's a matter of semantics, but they seem about as godly as most fantasy-setting gods...

Questions of divinity aside, pursuing the cult for robbing the world of souls while going on adventures with companion NPCs and building up a castle makes for a decent game overall. I think there's too much reading and the pacing of the game doesn't do any favors, but I found it a net positive experience.

The sequel immediately upends things by destroying said castle and killing the Watcher, bringing them back only as "herald" of one of the (not?) gods to pursue the one possessing a huge statue and stomping across the ocean. Back-to-back, it feels really weird to be faced with the narrative reveal that the gods "are not gods" and then only be alive because one plucked your soul from the cycle of reincarnation and revived you.

With some of the world established and a lot more text spoken and narrated, PoE2: Deadfire feels much improved on the delivery front. The game takes place in an archipelago, with ship travel between scattered islands a big part of things. I think I like that, even if the ship-to-ship combat offered plays out as a fairly static, text-heavy, minigame (which is optional and can be bypassed straight to a normal character fight between the decks). There are a handful of major locations and many more minor ones. I found the companion characters, returning and new, a bit more impactful - probably because of the greater use of voice. 

Overall, I think the game is improved, though it still suffers pacing issues. I felt there was a lot of running back and forth between locations, particularly within the main city, in following some quests. Some early levels felt hard-fought, but the last quarter or so of the game I pretty much steamrolled everything but one or two battles.

The narrative asks you to side with one of the major factions going into the closing act, and naturally none of them are perfect. I actually blew them off and went on "alone," not so much because I hated them all as because I didn't want to greatly tip the balance of power in any particular direction. None of the conversation responses really allowed me to express that, but I guess they can't account for everything. When the dust settled, the ending I got was... hmm... okay? It put the world in a perilous spot with some hope of fixing things, but a definite deadline should people fail. I suppose that's not as bleak as destroying everything at least, right?