The Sharmat

First game's story is decent. At least it had a point. Grieving Mother talks way too much though I grant you. I've never found anything terribly funny in either one.

Actually, you totally can. PoE1's story happens without you as written. Because the story of PoE 1 is the Leaden Key doing the Hollowborn thing. And they actually succeed. You come to every site too late, they've already done their little dances. You're always behind Thaos. He gets down to the bottom of Sun-in-Shadow way before you do (as you've got sidequesting to do, and he just paused to collapse a doorway) he has enough soul energy from all those soulless kids to do exactly what he intends to do (empower Woedica), and just needs to flip a few more switches on the machine to do it. But to make you feel special, the writing forces him to wait until the player shows up, regardless of whether you got down there in 8 hours or if you took 8 months to tidy up the loose ends. Thaos won, but bounced on your plot armor at the last minute, trapped in stasis for no good reason. The Watcher's Awakening is completely irrelevant to what's actually going on in the Dyrwood. What if Obsidian were actually bad writers all along?

Yes, no one wants their family to reproduce. It's just gross.

Nice of Josh to be so candid on a dying niche forum. I know official forums suck but why SA of all places?

Agree on many points in your post, but just wanted to point out, that from the writers perspective the Watcher had the benefit of already knowing the Big Secret from the first game. If you were someone else, then they'd either have to ignore it or have the new character learn the same thing we already knew as players, which would probably be pretty lame. The big secret is pretty irrelevant in this game given how big it would seem to be.

A game you can suffer setbacks in, perhaps even lose? A game where the story and gameplay feed each other instead of hamper each other? Oh the horror.

No games are about telling the player they're special and strong and oh so sexy.

It only gets mentioned a couple of times, but apparently you can't stray too far away from Eothas because you start feeling worse. Your crew had to chase him while you were chatting with Berath in the prologue just to keep ypu alive. Also, when Eothas gives you back a piece of your soul at Hasongo, it is stated that you get some memories back with it. So yeah... I guess you do have memory loss but it's conveyed poorly in the game. Yeah you're technically a soul twin with Eothas after that but I guess they got so many complaints about how they handled the Watcher gradually going insane in Pillars 1 that they decided to not even try to depict any negative repercussions to that. With the way the physics of souls were set up in Pillars 1, the Watcher should experience a wide range of negative symptoms that intensify the further they get from Eothas, from severe depression to constant pain.

No it's not. I can easily play 1 on normal even with that annoying setting that makes the aoe's invisible that I accidentally picked my last pt, but I tried 2 on PotD with some Berath's blessings and it really is a lot harder lmao. Aloth, Xoti and the character I made at the inn dropped inatantly, and mobs kept going after my main instead of Eder, I also found myself using tons of items, and downright gave up on some fights. None of that applied to my P1 playthroughs on normal. Also people forget that P1 was kind of unbalanced after the addon content. It's challenging until after you did Whitemarch 1&2, then the endgame is ridiculously easy in comparison even if you scale it up. Perhaps you're just very bad the game.

That just says it all doesn't it. It's like if J. K. Rowling was one of the best fiction authors in existence. I mean it's not bad but there has to be more that can be done than this.

They didn't say it was this much smaller. They acted like it was only somewhat smaller. Deadfire shouldn't have involved the Watcher or Eothas at all and just been a game about the factions since that seems to be what they wanted to make. Instead both sides of the game just diminish the other.

If that's all they wanted the narrative they chose is very inappropriate for it. And I'd have appreciated if they'd been more forthright about just how small the main quest was. they said it would be smaller than Pillars 1 but this is a pretty tiny fraction of Pillars' 1's main quests.

I think maybe they should just stop trying to please everyone and either go full Morrowind or stick with a purely main quest focused game. They don't have the resources to do both justice.

OP is absolutely correct. Pillars 1 starts with a caravan of people blindly groping along the road with indifferent stars (Gods) refusing to reveal what they know. The prologue ends with Glanfathan warriors trying to kill you to please Gods who will never actually respond to them. Maerwald is at war with two different versions of himself who committed terrible crimes against each other because each thought it was what their gods wanted. Edér doesn't know if his brother betrayed his country and if so, why, and never will. Aloth becomes totally lost after losing contact with his superiors in the Leaden Key for no apparent reason. Durance worships a God that no longer speaks to him. Kana is searching for the original, true version of his nation's founding epic, and he can never find it. Sagana has left her family behind on a traditional quest that cannot be comprehended by the person it's meant to serve. Pallegina serves Ducs that refuse to even work in their own best interest much less reward those that help them. Hiravias behaved exactly as a devout Glanfathan should and was rewarded with a bewildering blessing that led to his exile. The Grieving Mother has no identity due to tampered memories but also points out that all memories are being altered all the time, so the certainty in anyone else is an illusion. Zahua is trying to save a people that no longer exist. The Devil of Caroc seeks meaning in taking sadistic revenge on people that wronged her that she can no longer even feel. Maneha found more of her identity and longs for blissful ignorance because it was so far from how she saw herself it became intolerable. Thaos believes in nothing but dedicates his life to deceiving others into believing in his pantheon. Iovara believed in people, and in the Watcher's past life, and was tortured to death for it. Virtually everything, even sidequests in Pillars 1 like the one from the Magran priestess in Defiance Bay, is about trying to find meaning in a universe that offers no clear one. There is a clear theme and thesis visible from the start. As far as I can tell, Deadfire has no theme. Just a sandbox with a bunch of toys to play with. An improvement for some no doubt, a lateral move for others. Personally I don't see why the couldn't have had that and a decent main story, but I suppose Deadfire was a pretty cheap game and resources are limited. Hard to deny that the story and companions are a major step back though, unless you just really like Xoti's eyelashes fluttering in dark amusement because [impassioned].

Deadfire is far, far easier than Pillars 1. Not even a comparison. The only challenge to be found on PotD is by deliberately going to areas intended for characters 4 or more levels higher than you.