Game studio Obsidian Entertainment created some of the best Role Playing Games ever, just to name a few, games like Fallout: New Vegas, Knights of the Old Republic 2, Neverwinter Nights 2, Pillars of Eternity. They have a history of quality games and with Pillars of Eternity 2 they continue with the trend of creating great gaming for RPG fans. This is a gaming company you can trust to deliver on the promised.
In Deadfire you will continue your adventures as a Watcher of Caed Nua from the original game. Watchers are a rare bread of people who can draw power from the souls of the dead and speak with forever scheming gods of the land. One of the gods Eothas has awoken inside a huge adra statue and started his journey towards Deadfire island archipelago killing every soul that happens to be unlucky enough to be on his path, for reasons you will need to find out as a player later on. I'll tell you this much his plans do not involve a sun tan and rautai girls. The main quest is world changing, but you will also be able to change the the political landscape of the whole archipelago depending what faction you will help to achieve their goals.
When you start your new journey first you will need to create a character and this time the character system is even larger and more complex than in the first game. Pick a race, class, 2nd class if you wish, pick stats, skills, weapon proficiencies and you can start an adventure as a captain of your own ship.
In the first game you had to manage your Caed Nua keep, in this game you will upgrade your ship, or buy a new one, you will gather all sorts of strange crewmen that will help you fight and navigate through Deadfire archipelago. Every good RPG needs to have a lot of systems to keep you engaged, this game will overwhelm you with it's systems and the depth of those systems. You will need to spend many hours in Deadfire to get the best experience you can get. Luckily everything is smooth and easy going, new combat AI will speed up battle encounters and make them almost easy, if you find the game too easy because of the AI help, you can always turn off that option if you like to be 100% in command of your party.
Game environments are what can make or break a game like this, this is an absolute eye candy of a game, you will travel and explore tropical islands, huge ancient cities, ruins of long forgotten civilizations, dreamworlds and god realms. Obsidian graphics and environment devs really outdid themselves in Pillars 2. Just take a look at the screenshots and you will see for yourself. And the music, oh the music. You will love spending time in this game.
This game is almost perfect, but there is one small issue that might reduce your overall enjoyment of the game. Ship combat is needlessly overcomplicated and long, when you encounter a ship on the sea they will attack you and the game enters turn combat mode where you can do all sorts of maneuvers and actions to do the most dmg, but that never ends up like you envisioned it. In the end the combat always end up with boarding another ship where crew on crew battle happens. You will end up doing the boarding as fast as you can because that first part is very soul crushingly bad.
That is a small issue because it's not a big part of the game, you will mostly explore land locations, so it will not be something you will do very often. Other than that, every other part of the game is perfect.
Pillars of Eternity 2 will make every RPG gamer very busy for several weeks until they explore every island there is and kill every pirate crew on the seas. It is a huge game filled with content, I can recommend this to any fan of good old Forgotten Realms games like Baldurs Gate, Icewind Dale and Neverwinter Nights, you can definitely add Pillars of Eternity 2 to that list of greats. Score: 91/100