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.

It's a homeopathic poison.

I can only assume they're balancing them around people that play mostly just the main quest. Which is probably less than half the length of the Pillars 1 main quest. Would make the way they chose to change it make sense.

Yes I'm triggered by people using terms improperly and spewing their uniformed views all over the place that they regurgitated from some other uniformed person. It's extremely tiresome to see that constantly repeated by people who don't even know what they're talking about go on and on about it. That said you did admit you were wrong so thank you for that. That bit wasn't even directed towards you if it was I'd specified you instead of saying people. Cause you can't seriously believe you're the only one using that term on these boards. You have agreed with posts using that term so you know it's not just you. Like what sense would it make for me to say people in general if I meant you in particular? As for power fantasy it's a video game. Power fantasy is part of their bread and butter. If an RPG was to be realistic your PC wouldn't have nearly the amount of influence over how the factions win/lose as they do. Like the bs excuses are so tiresome. You don't like it. That's fine. (General you to make this clear)That doesn't mean it's not immersive or its some extreme outlier in all the other crap that's in the game. Why can't people just say they don't like something and leave it at that? Why all the bs justifications? Like if they had did this with established characters and you're like "that's not how they were before." I'd get it. But they used new characters for a reason. Regarding the OP I also get the aggravation on NPCs hitting on the PC first. But I really haven't experienced that? Even Xoti despite the clear thirst hasn't openly hit on my character in this play-through so I'm wondering if it's a dialogue trigger. No it does make it very nonimmersive for people that don't like power fantasies. Obsidian was supposed to be above this kind of thing but it seems to have given up. It's disappointing. My character would have less power over factions? Good! That would be interesting. Imagine having to navigate between the levers of power in a world where people don't inherently bow to your will, having to make difficult choices for unassured outcomes and never quite getting what you want. Sounds interesting. Much more interesting than another "which faction u want to win/which waifu/husbando u want fam?" I'm using hyperbole here naturally but it's sad that not only do people not seem to want games to try this, but they get mad that people even want a small niche of the market to have this and complain about it. There's plenty of Bioware RPGs out there. Let people with more, dare I say it, adult tastes have one.

There were - as far as I can tell - two bugged choices. Two. I distinctly recall having made more choices than that. There were more than that, the companion related ones were just easiest to see. For example in my game Falanroed and Mad Morena are both listed as being the last chair on on the Cengretta of the Principi, simultaneously. But only Mad Morena actually exists in game.

The huana have it coming to be honest.

No. Sidekicks get little to (in Ydwin's case) no content after recruitment. Ydwin is an interesting premise without any kind of story attached. If anything, the companions are less companions than the Baldur's Gate examples were. I think Rekke is the only one with much of any dialogue after recruitment.

You may not like it, but that is what peak performance looks like.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, the closest thing to a rpg with perfext ship-combat/crew mechnics integration is Sunless Sea. Obsidian could have taken a few nods from this and flawlessly intertwined it but no, they wanted to be innovative I guess. The result is a naval system that is just as unfocused and unbalanced as everything else in the game. Reminder that Sunless Sea has a crew depletion and boarding system you will never see because the damage values of guns prevent it and it was never fixed.

I do find the idea of taking one of the really old watcher portraits only to have everyone still drool over them amusing.

So Theos has this elaborate plan to empower Woedica to become ruler over the other gods by feeding her a whole bunch of baby souls, the Watcher foils that plan only to give her the baby souls anyway and then it just never comes up again or matters at all? Even in direct conversations with Woedica and the gods who overthrew her in the first place? This is the kind of choice you don't put in if you aren't going to do anything with it becaue not doing anything with it is in and of itself a retcon. You're right, but in this case I think that, perhaps, they weren't really sure whether they would be making a sequel down the road - after all, PoE was something of a financial risk for Obsidian. The "let the bad guy win" options aren't really problematic if you don't intend to go beyond just one game. None of Deadfire's endings will matter in Pillars 3 either and I'm sure they have one of those in mind.