As someone who generally found PoE games not being great in practice despite being very good for me on paper (which somewhat disturbs me because I have an issue in articulating just what about Poe and Deadfire I dislike), I have to say that Hawke64 is absolutely right about the endgame of Deadfire. It's refreshingly short (in terms of real time spent, not in terms of content) and is less of a test of just how much players can cheese the game system (Kingmaker/WotR) or an uncharacteristically dense series of combat encounters that just does not work well with established mechanics (BG3) than it is a thematic cap of the game you've sunk at least 50+ hours into for a single playthrough. Which is quite nice, The Guardian would have been a one-off endgame boss like in some many videogames but in Deadfire it is just what you have to get through to get in the gate, the real boss is the decisions you've made along the way both in the form of your conflict with one of the factions (which I believe can be kind of weak, given the way you can theoretically not pay special attention to any given one enough to explain just why the hell they would come to stand off with you in El Dorado Ukaizo) to the last dialogue with Eothas himself. It's a very nice ending to a game I otherwise felt was unfortunately disjointed (the curse of a multi-game protagonist imo) and should be studied and tried to learn from instead of forcing us into yet another series of EPIC battles that have all the heft of a comic book superhero death.
Quote
while the fact that all of the possible romances were bisexual successfully avoided cis-heteronormativity and made the story more immersive and engaging for the LGBTQ+ gamers.
This is the one part I disagree with strongly enough to talk about, the romances felt very much slapped on and applied with the cis-hetero eye in mind. It's better than Bioware or Owlcat (other than the throuple in Kingmaker) but that's a very low bar to cross. I may get some guff here, but largely I felt that BG3 did a much better job at romance generally and feeling less relentlessly heteronormative.
But that's all minor quibbles and the opinion of a meanie zucchini. Maybe I'll get myself together and crank out some incomprehensible nonsense about gaming and dialectics/trialectics.
Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire & End-Game Design
in The Community Blog
A blog by Fionavar in Community Blog
Posted
As someone who generally found PoE games not being great in practice despite being very good for me on paper (which somewhat disturbs me because I have an issue in articulating just what about Poe and Deadfire I dislike), I have to say that Hawke64 is absolutely right about the endgame of Deadfire. It's refreshingly short (in terms of real time spent, not in terms of content) and is less of a test of just how much players can cheese the game system (Kingmaker/WotR) or an uncharacteristically dense series of combat encounters that just does not work well with established mechanics (BG3) than it is a thematic cap of the game you've sunk at least 50+ hours into for a single playthrough. Which is quite nice, The Guardian would have been a one-off endgame boss like in some many videogames but in Deadfire it is just what you have to get through to get in the gate, the real boss is the decisions you've made along the way both in the form of your conflict with one of the factions (which I believe can be kind of weak, given the way you can theoretically not pay special attention to any given one enough to explain just why the hell they would come to stand off with you in
El DoradoUkaizo) to the last dialogue with Eothas himself. It's a very nice ending to a game I otherwise felt was unfortunately disjointed (the curse of a multi-game protagonist imo) and should be studied and tried to learn from instead of forcing us into yet another series of EPIC battles that have all the heft of a comic book superhero death.This is the one part I disagree with strongly enough to talk about, the romances felt very much slapped on and applied with the cis-hetero eye in mind. It's better than Bioware or Owlcat (other than the throuple in Kingmaker) but that's a very low bar to cross. I may get some guff here, but largely I felt that BG3 did a much better job at romance generally and feeling less relentlessly heteronormative.
But that's all minor quibbles and the opinion of a meanie zucchini. Maybe I'll get myself together and crank out some incomprehensible nonsense about gaming and dialectics/trialectics.