Kinda dissapointed with PoE 2 :(

[Masticator]

I'm pretty happy with the game. It's been my favorite RPG in a long time. Not much has came out recently that I like other than Witcher 3 (which I've only played once and get bored trying to play it again).

 

That said, I still feel like the game is missing something. I'm not sure what. I'd like to see them put forth some effort for a truly involved and epic quest/storyline. Kind of like the Baron in the Witcher 3. Too many quests in this game while good, are too short.

[Kargouel]

As stated before, I think the game lacks a few multi level interesting dungeons. I can only think of two that actually caught my attention.

 

Open world exploration is fine with me. I didn't have any problem figuring out where to go next as the main story pushes you to do quests/side quests around that area. If you go too far away, you encounter islands that are above your level.

However, the act of exploring is lacking. It would be cool to be able to walk in each island with your party, not walking in the world map, and discover hidden pirate treasures, maps to other treasures etc (instead of having the dialogue option that tells you how much time has passed and what you discovered). In a sentence, something more like Skyrim, where you can explore each cave, each dungeon has a different story, different books and loot to collect, some reason to care about what I find in these random gravesites...

 

The main story is okay but as stated before, it could use a bit more urgency (finding burned villages, and ashen corpses througout the archipelago), maybe visions from the Gods, losing your consciousness as Eothas moves further away from you (they used that only once). 

 

On the plus side, I like the voice over, the fact that dialogues can potentially form the character of a companion and the fact that your place of origin is recognized in the game (my character is a pale elf from white that wends). 

[gloomseeker]

Anytime someone calls story or characters "bland", I read "I don't really want to play this game". This argument is just so vague and subjective. It's alright, you are not supposed to want to play every game, all the time. When you get in the mood for it, the characters won't seem "bland" and then you'll start it again and get into it.

 

This. ^

 

"I'm trying to force myself to like the game" 

 

If it's not fun then maybe what the OP needs is a break. 

 

Personally finishing Deadfire prompted me to replay the BG series one more time... I assume that once I'm done with ToB this game will have been patched and some of these flaws will have been fixed (and I'm really taking it slow). 

[algroth]

 

 

Also I do not see how all that one can take out of this setting is that it's a "pirate setting". Far as I'm concerned that's a fairly secondary element to the setting that sets the tone to a couple of quests but hardly to the setting as a whole. To say it's a "pirate setting" is to ignore the many other elements that are present and are arguably as important or more in defining the region's feel, such as the many colonial themes what with the cultural clash, the Dorado hysteria present in the search for Ukaizo, the pioneering drive and progressivism classic of the Renaissance era, all mixed too with the touch of metempsychosis and metaphysics that lend the setting a particularly otherworldly vibe... To say this is a pirate setting is about as reductionist as claiming the Dyrwood is just a medieval Europe fantasy land.

 

 

 

The piracy theme is just one party of the greater whole.  The setting sort of feels like the Caribbean meets the political intrigue of Renaissance Europe.

I love the setting very much, it's immersive and exciting and tons of fun...but it's not terribly original, it's just the Maluka Archipelago circa the 16th century translated into a fantasy setting. That's all it is. I don't mean that in a derogatory fashion; these aren't themes that are commonly explored in video games and it's a setting that isn't commonly seen in a video game, both of which are really cool. I just mean that it isn't some masterpiece of uniqueness and originality.

You say it's not, but on my behalf I cannot think currently of another example of a fantasy setting using this same period and place as a root. I also think that plenty of the unique and interesting feel about it comes with the details to the setting's overall construction. I'm not necessarily claiming it's "the most unique thing I've ever seen", but I am finding it pretty unique and particular and not just "a pirate setting" which is what I was particularly responding to.

[Mereinid]

The main quest, for me, is kind of a moot point, he told me he's heading to Magrans Teeth, or something like that. Which tells me, go ahead and level your character up and do all the exploration and side quests, do all the bounties and when you have reached max level, come up and find me and we can do this thing. 

There is zero sense of urgency and the constant Gods stopping in an asking for an update is pointless, they are Gods right or something close to it? (I appreciate the nemesis of a game waiting for me to level up enough to spank his arse. At least in PoI 1 the bad guy didn't really know I was an issue until I popped up at his holy Woedica temple and then commenced to opening all my cans of whoop ass on him.)

 

The other thing, that someone mentioned up there, and I'm only about level 8 or so in the game and may not have found them all, but I have done my fair share of exploring so far, but the dungeons I have found so far are just meh, at best. I had more fun going through Dunnage as a kind of public Dungeon. When I played the beta and I did the Pokohara Ruins (sp), I was like, yes, and this is a beta test dungeon, the other dungeons they are not showing us are going to be fricken Endless Paths 2.0!! So far, I have found a 2 two level temple that was a placeholder for a potential crewman. 

 

The ship battles are pointless, as many have said, almost a late tack on to the game. You toggle halt, fire, jibe, 'repeat' or full speed ahead and board and fight, that's it. If you do it any other way you are just there to look at the parchment slideshow. 

 

The other thing, that I think, is just another tack on was the pulling your POI 1 character into PoI 2. I brought my Paladin over, she was like level 17 or 18. When I put on my armor on the ship I was level 1, with a piece of god-damn cake in my inventory and broken magic sword for my time. I even had to completely pic a new face, and even sex or race if I wanted to. Why even put that in the game if you are just going to hold the players down and piss all over their previous time in PoI 1?

I deleted the save and just remade my Paladin from the game but changed her name as this character was a new breed of Pillars of Eternity character from the ground up.

 

Don't get me started on the load screens! New zones are at least a min in load time, I know a minute is not very long, but it's a top-down isometric game, and on my rig, it should be nigh instantaneous. 

 

But, despite all of these things, I am having a nice time playing, I am on my 5th or 6th character, just trying to get a feel, all of them are Thief based, as you will miss a ton of lewt otherwise. So if your reading this dump your points into perception and mechanics and Sleight of Hands/Pick-pockets. By the time I left the first island, I had over 12k in monies and many magic items. Okay, I am getting off this soapbox and going back to play me some PoI2. I hope the DLC adds some Marianas Trench depth in level dungeon crawling, perhaps some undersea cities or tombs. I mean every world has a Cthulhu monster asleep in the oceans, right? Got to stop that thing.

 

Luck and loot all.

Mereinid

[dunehunter]

After finished deadfire, I’ve an urge to replay icewind dale 2, with tactics mod.

[Khagmas]

I completely passed the Pillars of Eternity 2, 141 hours lasted this adventure and it turned be ambiguous.

Pillars of Eternity have 89 metascore and Pillars of Eternity 2 now have 88 (90 on start). For me Pillars of Eternity 2 is 75-80.


About main story:

It would be possible to tell for a long time what is wrong in the main story... But it is simply: the plot does not surprise.

In the first game we were hidden from the truth about the origin of the Gods, there was a charismatic antagonist who was making machinations with the destinies of people. There was a tragedy  "Waidwen Heritage", which in one way or another was solved. Happy end?

In the second game we have to follow Eotas for one reason or another. There are almost no riddles, he simply crushes the mechanisms of the Wheel of Beras. More like revenge to fellow Gods. How should this help the inhabitants of Eora? After passing the game, I had only questions.


About balance:

In the first game, the wizard was the most interesting gameplay class. In general, there was balance in one way or another. There was an uneven enchantment system, but in general I had to use scrolls and potions. Sometimes even traps. Each class was unique. Characteristics of things did not add up, and small bonuses were suppressed by high ones. It was interesting.

In second game - wizards and rangers are totally nerfed. Difficulty? About potions, poisons, bombs, scrolls and so on, you remember a couple of times per game. Dragons and bosses are weak, Subclasses are ambiguous. Multiclasses are unbalanced. The all characteristics now will be are stacked, by the end of the game one multiclass character can kill everything without problems. Particularly strange are the subclasses of wizards. Against the backdrop of inviolable grimoires, they spoil the class more than make the game interesting for it. A resource system for abilities has been introduced. What for? She spoils everything. Ship-battles not interesting. Rather, they are even burdensome. Rotten "Floating Hangman", which is unique in appearance and absolutely weak in its characteristics (The submarine is good). Other uniques? A lot of sabres, swords, greatswords and flails. Not enough uniques hunting bows, crossbows, wands, battle axes, сlubs, maces, stilettos, war hammers, rapiers, pollaxes, pikes, morningstars and rings for all companions and sidecicks. Romantic lines are bad. New portraits? Most good migrated from the first game.
Skill-Trainers? Remove this. Berath blessings? Nerf or rework. Legendary quality enchantments for all? SRSLY? In first game Superb and Legendary are rare.

And bugs... Bugs is everywhere.

I believe that after 3 DLCs and a pile of patches by the end of 2018 we will see a finished product that will really cost all the money that the community sacrificed. Now for me this game is in the alpha test phase.

It is unfortunate, I dissapointed.

But I love Pillars of Eternity, and I want to love Pillars of Eternity 2. I hope that in the future developers will give me and the community this opportunity.

P.S: and this for example...
POE2

awesome? its POE1 and community

P.P.S: Many thanks for Effigy's Resentment and Gift from the Machine, but where other talents from saves-import: Blooded Hunter, Song of the Heavens, Wild Running, Dungeon Delver, Flick of the Wrist, Dozens Luck, Mental Prowess, Second Skin, The Merciless Hand, Mob Justice and normal Scale-Breaker?

I thinks this is true "Berath Blessings".

I WANT HELP YOU, OBSIDIAN


 

Edited May 29, 2018 by Khagmas

[Porcelyn]

I don't like that I'm not locked out of factions until the end. that kills replay ability for me. Each play through doesn't feel unique or special because you can do everything on one character.

[Itach]

The game is good but it has some problems such as:

 

- Loading time: It's annoying like you just want to enter a house talk to someone then get out but you have to go through 2 loading screen. Couldn't they have made the inside of houses in the same map but hidden so your character just teleport there instead of loading a 5x5 area map.

 

- Bugs: Broken quest chains, broken quest, description not showing the correct numbers etc...

 

- Quest journal: Probably one of the worst, it doesn't save the last viewed quest, you can't set quest as active, sometime it lacks information that you have to go back to the conversion in the history chat.

 

- Main quest: Very short, not ambitious, the last boss is underwhelming. I though "Oh Eothas is going to break the wheel, that's great let's see what happen" but then the game end. They could have made a last act to deal with the aftermath.

 

- Ship battle: A bit boring, it's hard to see how the crew XP matter, I guess cannoneer increase accuracy and medic lower the injury resting period but the rest ... ?

 

I guess most of the problems will be fixed with patches but it won't fix the main quest unless they make a extension like BG:TOB.

[malchiorita]

P.S: and this for example...

portrait_eder_convo.png portrait_eder_lg.png portrait_pallegina_convo.png portrait_pallegina_lg.png POE2

 

portrait_eder_convo.png portrait_eder_lg.png portrait_pallegina_convo.png portrait_pallegina_lg.png awesome? its POE1 and community

 

P.P.S: Many thanks for Effigy's Resentment and Gift from the Machine, but where other talents from saves-import: Blooded Hunter, Song of the Heavens, Wild Running, Dungeon Delver, Flick of the Wrist, Dozens Luck, Mental Prowess, Second Skin, The Merciless Hand, Mob Justice and normal Scale-Breaker?

 

I thinks this is true "Berath Blessings"

 

 

Oh boy, every time i see pallegina portrait i think it's a bad joke. Really, the watercolored portrait is unbelievably poor made... Like made by someone like me with no art skill whatsoever. The very first thing i did was changing portraits with the community made ones... How did it pass the release team checks? It reminds me of this

http://www.2oceansvibe.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/restored-ecce-homo-1024x768.jpg

 

I mean it's very very ugly

Edited May 29, 2018 by malchiorita

[Rulin]

My "romantic moment" with xoti happened right after a jungle-fight with 2 companion deaths/ko's and lots of corpses on the floor.

[Sceptenar]

I really enjoyed the game overall, but the game floats by on the strengths of the side content, the main quest narrative is a 10 yard dash to a disappointing ending. That's a shame, but then again I wasn't sold on the first game's narrative either and I still backed the second game.

[akiasura]

My biggest gripe with the game is the main story is pretty awful.  I don't care about it.  I love sailing around, being a pirate, landing on strange places, and really enjoyed learning the story behind each little island.
But isn't a soul sucking giant made of stone on its way to destroy the world?  Why am I doing this?  I even have a calendar, I'm literally wasting weeks going to each island searching for loot!  It's fun but I can't care about the main story at all.  Its basically FO4 for me compared to New Vegas.

The other problems are small.  Romance and imports are bugged, convos are bugged, combat is a joke with how easy it is once you get to PL3 or so for most characters.  Balance is insane.  Monks (Import from game 1) are broken, Rangers/lots are broken, Paladin/Chanter is broken, Wizards are broken.  Ciphers seem bad, druids seem just okay, priests are so terrible it hurts.  But this is fixable.

The other big gripe are the companions.  They are all average, and I can't say I care about them if they weren't in the first game.  If Maia wasn't broken I wouldn't use her most likely and just use a sidekick.  POE1 had some bad ones (Mother...) but the good ones made the game.

[Rulin]

Personally I don't expect a crpg to deliver more than books or movies bring on the table.

 

But I have to say the overall difficulty balancing definitely needs adjustments. I hope the next patch doesn't take long.

[Katarack21]

Personally I don't expect a crpg to deliver more than books or movies bring on the table.

I don't understand this mentality. I get *WAY* more out of a CRPG than a movie, and almost as much as I do from a book. Most movies are fairly shallow; it's a function of the timespan. You don't get to slowly learn about a character of the course of two weeks. You don't get to develop a relationship with them; you just get told a bunch of things.

 

Movies are entirely passive, which brings with a specific type of shallowness due to an inability to *effect* the world and *interact* with the characters.

[Tawmis]

I'm trying to force myself to like the game, but there are issues that just won't go away. I really hope Obsidian can patch some of this, but some feel unfixable:(

 

Some of them:

 

1. Load times are still considerable and the game size is too big for SSD. Running through Nehetaka is a string of load time where I find myself starring into the black abyss of my monitor, thinking about how I'm sitting in front of my monitor and looking into blackness of it.

 

2. Companion romances are in need of dire fix. Cca 1 day and 4 hours of world time, having basically not spoken to Maya, she proclaims that she wants to pursue romantic relationship with me. I felt nothing, because there was no setup, no prior interaction. It's just poorly done.

 

3. Open world is a detriment to the tightness of the story. In PoE game flowed neatly, but never felt too narrow, as you had a lot of sidequest around your main quest. So you could do some sidequest, clean up your journal, progress a bit further with the story and then open new sidequests and so on. It felt natural. Here you are thrown into this huge open world, with a huge main city right at the start, and you basically forget what you are supposed to do. Chasing a statue? Why do I care about that? Yes, it has my soul, but no one mentioned that for the past 20 hours and there doesn't seem to be any urgency around that. You are thrown into political confrontations of three factions and that starts to feel like the main game, instead of progressing through the story. Here is 50+ quests you can do, and not one of them ties that much into the main story quest.

 

4. The quest seems bland. NPC's seem bland. After a while, I got lost in all the names I was finding in my journal and started just running quest without even realizing and caring why I'm doing them at all. It was all do some random thing for some random guy who is in trouble due to this other random guy.

 

5. I like going through textual interactions with only my keyboard, amico. You can imagine how infastido I got when every third frase has a world that breaks my immersion in the game mond, and forces me to move my topo to see what the word means, and then trying to put it in forma with the meaning of the sentence. Aic, amico. And then you kind dimentico what you just read 6 seconds fa.

 

6. Ship to ship combat is: 1. Get in desired range. 2. Turn left. 3. Hold. 4. Fire. 5. Jibe. 6. Hold. 7. Fire. 8. Jibe. 9. Hold, 10. Fire, Jibe.....really not feeling this part of the game. And it's a considerable part of the game.

 

Combat is good though. GFX looks sweet, especially spells. DW pistols fees awesome. Multiclassing is great.

 

But in the end, I'm kinda wishing there was a mod of PoE that adds multiclassing, DW pistols and improves the GFX a bit.

 

I'm kinda sad right now.

 

1. Load times were long; but black screen? It should have a load screen that talks about Fortitude, Penetration, etc.? Granted with enough load screens you have read them all fairly quickly in the game. But it was never overbearing to me.

 

2. I loved the interaction. In terms of Maia, I always assumed

given her occupation and her questionable deeds of assassinating people

, the best thing to do was try to romance you, so you would be smitten with her

and not question her.

 

 

3. I thought the game did a good job of showing the damage done by the "statue" on various islands. And everyone is seeing this as an opportunity to better their position. Very real...

 

4. Got to disagree about the quests.

 

5. I thought the language was great! It added a whole new level for me. It didn't take me long to get to remember what words meant what. For me, that actually added immersion into the game.

 

6. Ship combat... Okay. You got me there. I tired the first six times to do ship combat by firing cannons and doing it the right way... then I just started doing the 2nd option of ramming ships side to side and fighting that way... way more satisfactory that way, anyway, I felt.

[Katarack21]

It's kind of mystifying how some people are experiencing *worse* load times on PoE 2. I'm not saying it's not happening, I just don't understand why or how. In my experience, the load times have been *DRASTICALLY* improved.

[ThacoBell]

The load times for PoE1 and PoE2 are about the same for me. 30-45 seconds per screen. I really wish Obsidian would work on that. Easily the worst part of playing these games.

[algroth]

Weirdly enough I don't think I ever minded loading screens. I feel both Pillars have generally been faster than the IE games were back on my Compaq Pavilion, but even back then I didn't really mind the wait. But that's me, really. On my side Deadfire has been about the same as Pillars on this front, haven't noticed an improvement or a deterioration. However, I will say that I've noticed plenty of freezing and stuttering during the ship-to-ship combats.

[hadiqa4444]

thats dissapointing to here,

 

maybe play the game when you are in a better mood

[Tawmis]

However, I will say that I've noticed plenty of freezing and stuttering during the ship-to-ship combats.

 

I see that as well - especially once the spells start flying.

[M4xw0lf]

Loading screens in pillars 1 tended to get longer and longer the more the game progressed, until they were absolutely disugsting. I have not experienced the same with Deadfire, loading times are shorter in general and do not notably grow with game progress. (Running the game from an SSD, mind)

[EgnLkv]

 

However, I will say that I've noticed plenty of freezing and stuttering during the ship-to-ship combats.

I see that as well - especially once the spells start flying.

Same stuff with me. While all battles I had on the ground were well then when I try to ship-to-ship combat it becomes insane freezing and sometimes it takes 4-5 sec between action. I really hope it'll be fixed with the patch is coming.

[Tawmis]

 

 

However, I will say that I've noticed plenty of freezing and stuttering during the ship-to-ship combats.

I see that as well - especially once the spells start flying.

Same stuff with me. While all battles I had on the ground were well then when I try to ship-to-ship combat it becomes insane freezing and sometimes it takes 4-5 sec between action. I really hope it'll be fixed with the patch is coming.

 

 

I suspect this is because during land battles the graphics are (other than the characters), pretty static... however, in ship to ship - it's got to render the ocean moving every single second, so it's more graphically intense.