Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire

A very conflicted game.

On one hand it may be the best looking CRPG with the best world building ever made. On the other, problems that were prevalent in the previous game weren't fixed, pacing is strange because the world is so expansive, and the game seems to suffer from the all too common Obsidian problem of 'ran out of budget' in things like run-on Choose-Your-Own-Adventure text box events.

If you are a fan of the first game you will like this game. Deadfire is a flawed, frustrating masterpiece.

It's awesome. Definitely helps to do a little research before playing. lol

One of the best stories ever written for video games. The complex narrative and the decisions you have to make from theological, political and personal perspectives is unique and challenging. I just finished avowed and had to come back for yet another playthrough. While I'm disappointed that there probably won't be a POE3, I think this game is the bedrock that the franchise really can continue to build off of even today.

I had placed a negative review on this game, due to incredibly bad performance and stutter. Was unplayable. Seems it wansnt the games fault after all, so im changing my review to positive: Nvidea´s drivers, are currently in a bad state. I hadnt realized it until i catched a gamer´s nexus recent video explaining this problem. Drivers 572.xx or later, are causing issues for 40 series cards such as mine. It is recommended, if you have a 40 series, to roll back to driver 566.36, as its considered to be stable. I did that, and now this game is running flawlessly. And its a really nice game so far, just what i was looking for. Thank you! :D

Some of the best writing you'll find in gaming, with swashbuckling action, thought provoking ethical choices, and gripping nautical exploration. A lot of reading but if you have a love of language, then this is the game for you.

A lot of refinements from Pillars 1, including more interesting class builds, better combat and encounter-building than before, etc. The story kind of struggles to move forward with any momentum and the ending might leave some cold, though I thought it was pretty great.

An overall inprovement on PoE1's formula: more flexible gameplay, better graphics and deeper exploration. Really enjoying it.

Not as pretty as BG 3, but the story is great and the combat is a lot of fun.

Pillars 2 is a great sequel to Pillars 1. I had a lot of fun with it and there are many choices to make. It was also very nice to have almost everything voice acted compared to Pillars 1 where you read most things.

The gameplay in Pillars 2 is much better and I enjoy the ship traveling format. I will say that the text based naval combat is not great and sometimes takes forever to load so after a while i stopped even using that feature. The boarding process for ships is fine though and satisfying enough.

I think the worldbuilding and story of Pillars 1 were better and I feel like this game would lose much of the charm without having played Pillars 1. It is a very solid game even without playing Pillars 1 but I would highly recommend you do so beforehand.

This game to me felt shorter and less in-depth than Pillars 1. The companion quests were shorter and they were not as related to the main plot line. The main quest line felt much less mysterious and the plot is fairly straight forward in Pillars 2. Despite this it was still a great plot and the companions did still have input along quest lines.

I definitely recommend this game especially if you are a fan of Pillars 1 or CRPGs in general.

Great game, I played it on my macbook and have had zero glitches. The story is full and has lots of depth to it. The combat is tricky to master but once you get a handle on it its amazing. Great game.

I wish the quality of this game had been made clearer to me sooner.

Perhaps the bext crpg I have ever played, with excellent writing, voice acting, characters, mechanics, classes, and an open world that feels meaningful and expressive to interact with. I sincerely hope that there is a pillars of eternity 3.

Not as good as DoS2, which I started at the same time, but still worth playing.
Camera is annoying + having to hover over everything to see if you can interact.

Pillars 2 is a very good CRPG, but i still have a few gripes.
The turn based combat is slow slow and fighting something like megabosses with it made want to kill myself ngnl. But also the forgotten sanctum enemies were so annoying that i had to reduce the difficulty so that it would not take 30 mins against trash mobs.

I really liked the story and the factions, but i do think the companions were better in pillars 1.
Overall solid 8/10

Very enjoyable 170 hours including all the DLC. I highly recommend this game!

I had some reservations with the whole setting with rum, pirates and booty as it differs from the usual medieval CRPG setting but I'm glad that I managed to get past those. Hopefully there will be some game continuing from were the story was left off.

Played Turn-Based in Classic, and this is the first PoE game I've played. Definitely recommend. Will be playing PoE1 for sure.

This game shines in the worldbuilding department -- great voice acting, the faction quests (and to a lesser extent the companion quests interacting with the factions) build out an interesting socio-political landscape, and the jockeying of the gods is entertaining. The art style is pretty and fits the setting. Player choice is set up to really matter. Narratively, the game is extremely strong until the last third where I felt it kind of fell flat (i.e. after I'd finished all the faction quests and all that was left was the main questline). It's not /bad/, it just doesn't live up to the rest of the world's complexity.

Gameplay-wise, it's OK. A few bugs, but nothing that killed my enjoyment. Combat was easier than I expected after the two levels, I consistently explored areas above my level and was fighting enemies with multiple skulls over them. However the weapon and armor selection was pretty mid, and I felt like I only ever used a couple of abilities on each of my characters once they had an established build. It is nice that you can respec at any shopkeeper though.

Honestly I think I enjoyed this more than BG3. (Although nothing can beat BG3's House of Hope bossfight soundtrack drop for an individual moment of awesome.)

Pillars of Eternity are the best CRPGs. Great game. Recommend playing both in order and transfering your saves.

I keep coming back to this game with new computers hoping changes in hardware will make the game's performance issues bearable. Deadfire suffers from a memory leak issue resulting in stuttering after playing for a bit. This issue has existed for years and Obsidian has not been able to fix it. You can find forum post after forum post going back to release with people trying to find ways to resolve the problems (Special K, in-game settings tweaks, out of game settings tweaks, etc.). Deadfire has a good story, writing, combat, and music. It's just a shame Obsidian decided to use the awful Unity Engine to make it.

Best faction-based, philosophically written story I've played since Fallout: New Vegas. I want to keep replaying as different characters, siding with different factions, and getting different perspectives. I also love the exploration on the ship, it reminds me a lot of Sid Meier's Pirates

This game is stunning, with incredibly divine music, solid gameplay, and an enjoyable story. Constructing your ship is exciting, although the ship-to-ship combat feels ineffective. It's definitely worth playing—enjoy!

Quite arguably my favorite game of all time. While the main story may not be as tight as the first one - and indeed I would say the main questline could use some tightening up - the land of Deadfire is such a wonderful take. It mixes piracy and sailing the high seas with fantasy, which is a great combination. The gameplay is also much better than PoE1, with the mechanics being tightened in a wonderful way.

One of the greatest worlds in any video game I've ever played, with truly fleshed out lore from politics and economics to mythology and cosmology. Especially unique amongst an endless sea of games set in Medieval Europe or Japan. Reincarnation and colonization as major themes is something right up my alley. This game in particular added the Huana, and Tekehu, perhaps among my favorite factions and characters in a long time as they represent Indigenous struggles so strongly (and Tekehu is just charming). Highly recommend doing all the Roparu quests too. Still, things are never one-sided and I found reason to empathize with each faction (less so the Vailian Trading Company). The writers really know their stuff with all the real world counterparts to everything.
Loved the game and I would consider it one of my recent favorites.

Baldur's Gate + Sid Meyer's Pirates.
isometric CRPG, modernized before BG3 came out.

Gets a bit tiresome on the last chapter, but it's a joy to explore until you reach that point

Don't know if it is just me but I found this game frustratingly difficult. I played PoE1 on veteran difficulty and it was somewhat challenging but PoE2 on normal difficulty is stupid hard. My party gets wiped fighting trash mobs. I wouldn't recommend this unless you really love a challenge.

Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire is a fantastic CRPG and an incredibly satisfying sequel to the first Pillars of Eternity that improves on the previous game in almost every regard. It's a shame it doesn't quite nail everything it tries to accomplish in its ambition to create a reactive fantasy world with an abundance of meaningful roleplaying and choices, however later patches and DLC support have gone a long way to polishing the game from when I originally played it shortly after it came out to the point where my latest playthrough was 90% frustration free.

Personally, I adore this game series, its setting, the deep lore and the world-building especially. However, the writing of the individual scenes and characters brings it all to life in a way that just clicks harmoniously with me much of the time, and multiple times through the stories of both Pillars and Pillars 2 has given a much more rewarding perspective on the unity of the writing, themes, and questions explored throughout all my time spent in Eora. If you're the kind of fantasy-nerd that isn't afraid of getting buried in text in order to experience a classic, epic fantasy adventure that rivals the Baldur's Gate CRPG series, then I would highly recommend this game.

Awesome game and direct upgrade from the sequel across the board in my opinion. I'm not really into isometric type games to begin with but liked every bit of this game.

A vast improvement over the first Pillars of Eternity (I personally wouldn't even bother playing that - this is everything that game should have been). Once again, microstuttering is an issue however - I guess because of Unity. I found a way to get it down by about 95%.

Put these as command lines:
-force-d3d11 -window-mode exclusive -nomemrestrict -norestriction -availablevidmem 1.1 -percentvidmem 100

In addition to these command lines, for some reason the game caps out the max refresh rate 1 hz below whatever your monitor can do. Anytime there's a discrepancy between the windows refresh rate and a game, I've noticed micro-stuttering will increase. Force your max refresh with the following command line:

-refreshrate XXX

(Where XXX is your monitor's max refresh rate, mine was 240hz - game "max's out at 239hz")

In game settings:

-Limit max frame rate 60fps
-Set FXAA off
-Set antialiasing to 1x (the registry "fix" that sets this to "0" causes the green radial around characters to disappear, I don't recommend that)

For the NVIDIA control panel (if you use an NVIDA card, obviously) and for this game specifically (not global):
-Turn on FXAA
-Turn on Transparency antialiasing to 2X

And that's about it. Reduced my microstutter by about 95%. Much more manageable now. I didn't have success with Vulkan (messes up the colors) or Special K (setting the threads to half doesn't seem to improve performance at all, watched the 1%/.1% lows stay at 7FPs).

Great CRPG, full voice acting is really bringing out the awesome characterization of the party members, amazing reactivity with choices made in the first game, party members actually contributing to dialogue very often, pretty interesting RTWP combat, gorgeous pre-rendered backgrounds

Somewhat inferior to the first, but still one of the best RPGs ever. Josh Sawyer says the Pillars games are his most compromised works because he had to account for the kickstarter requests. I would say that forcing to reconcile popular demands with his own vision has created a unique and amazing experience.

The best CRPG ever. It has amazing story, 1st part was great and the white march 1/2 were great expansions. However, Deadfire has even better story and DLCs are even better then main story. God challenges are just amazing for people who want additional challenge and the ultimate is just a next level challenge. None of the CRPGs come even close to that type of challenge. Despite all that even if you play it on lowest difficulty just for story it is well worth it. Very replayable with all the factions and decisions in questlines within those factions etc. My only complain is naval combat. I really dislike the text combat between ships, it takes too long and is very repetitive. 10/10

Great RPG, very underrated. Biggest problem with many RPGs is I lose interest after the gameplay is "figured out", but this combat was consistently fresh so that I even played through DLCs.

It improves in most ways on POE and I find myself theory crafting new builds. Great game.

I bought this game years ago but was sick and never really got into it. Now I retried it and remade a wizard and I have to say, this game is much better than most current rpg's. It brings back all the nostalgia of Baldur's Gate and other similar titles. Its so refreshing to come back to it after a long work week and hunt some pirates! Its lovely to inspect all the rich art and cultural detail and I love the old school illustrations and deeply atmospheric ambiance that the developers blended seemlessly. The island theme is so beautiful after you get used to it. I love making two snipers and watch as they one-hit enemies into a fiery ball of muck, aaaaah so satisfying! Chunks like bloody mess fallout style! Ahhhh Obsidian did a good job on this one in my opinion. Nothing I saw was enough of a negative to share compared to the poor quality of most other titles these days. Thanks Obsidian for the great game!

Man I love this universe....I decided to try the Pillar series in anticipation of Avowed.

The first game had some hiccups with combat AI that were fixed in this one. Gone are the days of your party staring into the distance, refusing to do anything, and honestly, I felt comfortable enough to let the AI take over for my tank and melee dps.

This game has a turn-based option too if that's more your style.

You're rewarded for being thorough in your first play through by doing achievements with *Blessings of Berath* that make subsequent play throughs easier.

The voice acting is good! Though you'll notice a bunch of familiar performances if you've ever seen Critical Role. I....don't like redneck Laura Bailey and i'm from Appalachia.

The story is decently placed and interesting enough that you wanna chase Green Jesus across the Deadfire.

The factions are all interesting and I understand why folks would side with any of them.

The only part I dislike is when the story gets good and begins racing towards the climax.....the DLC hits and it really slows you down. Beast of Winter is by far the best and it's the only DLC you can do from act 1. The Arena from seeker, slayer survivor should be doable from the start, and the Wael bit really needed to be a part of the main story, but you can just....skip it.

The companions are fun, Maia surprised me, but Teheku and his cosmic mom in my head was very grating.

Overall, if you're looking for a fantasy RPG that is also about pirates you'll have a good time. Hit the seas, plunder some islands, eat a ton of hard tack and water and welcome home loveless.

A much improved class, leveling, and combat system from the first game. Really fun to play.

The overall story is still excellent, but not as good as the original.

I rank both games as equally good.

Not quite as good as the original, but still a really fun RPG with good storylines and good PC interactions.

Love the isometric artstyle. Although I expect more from the naval combat, and rationing of foods and wages does not feel punishing enough.

Fantastic game. I have 216 hours and have not even started the ending yet. There are so much to explore and so many ways to do things. If the combat in the first game puts you off, try this instead (turn based, my beloved<3)
Anyway, it stands on it's on well enough and explains most things if you don't mind a lot of reading.

Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire takes the deep role-playing of the first game and sets it loose in a massive, open-world archipelago where you command your own ship, make tough moral choices, and get into some seriously tactical battles. It’s Baldur’s Gate meets Pirates of the Caribbean—but with more gods, more intrigue, and way more ways to mess up your party’s relationships.

The writing is top-tier, packed with rich lore, branching dialogue, and choices that actually matter. The world feels alive, full of factions to befriend (or betray), and the turn-based or real-time-with-pause combat lets you play at your own pace. Plus, sailing around, upgrading your ship, and getting into naval battles adds a fresh twist to the classic RPG formula.

For fans of deep, choice-driven storytelling and tactical combat, Deadfire is an absolute gem. Just be warned—your crew might not appreciate it when you side with their enemies… or forget to pay them.

Engaging writing. Quality character development and interactions. Very deep battle mechanics. The best RTWP iso-crpg ever made.

Fabulous followup to the original. The original still has it beat, but this expands on the lore to a wonderful degree.

An amazing sequel. It beats Pillars 1 in terms of setting, makes the combat even better, and takes some interesting risks plot wise. Decisions from, the last game carry over in fun and surprising ways, both large and small. Companions, sidequests, roaming the high seas, and music are all amazing. A must have for anyone who likes CRPGs.

The soundtrack is pretty amazing, especially tracks like All Gods—very haunting after talking with Berath (my favorite deity in Eora). The slang like Aimica, Gellarde, and Bazzos is used very well in the right places, making the world of Eora feel immersive. Almost no modern phrases like "demmmn" are used, which sometimes ruins immersion, so nicely done.
QoL since Poe1 are significant, conversations no longer pause the game, with characters instead idling naturally while dialogue unfolds. Footnotes in dialogue add depth. While it might seem unconventional, mods from Nexus (like these and this further refine these features, making the experience even smoother.

Story

The main story feels rushed and lacks the philosophical depth of PoE1 Thaos arc, still, I liked the final conversation on the Raftel last island Ukaizo about existential debate. Faction quests, however, shine brighter, I recommend halting the main quest at Ashen Maw to complete all faction storylines first(you know when to stop)
The Beast of Winter DLC is truly the best in terms of story and choice impact. Forgotten Sanctum is just okay but has the hardest battles in all DLCs, yes, harder than Seeker, Slayer, Survivor (I played on veteran).
Now all dialogue is fully voiced (except Badema interaction, maybe bug or something), unlike PoE1 maybe 40% only. The voice acting is great—like King Wingauro o Waturi I when he denies blame, full of emotion, shaking and anguish in his voice. Also I can’t get enough of Pike Trickfoot (Vox Machina) or Ashley Johnson’s voice for narration, so good of her!

Something I did not like

• Weapon balance is bad, really really bad: swords, sabres, greatswords dominate the unique loot pool, while others are cried in the corner, sad days for me when using War Bow as main weapon, now has to change to dual pistols, glad that I found Thundercrack pistol really on early game. Beware of Wand or Scepter, almost non exist in early and mid.
  
[*]Performance issues and glitch: The game freezes every time when first opening it after booting, resulting in "not responding." Poor optimization causes FPS drops in a 2018 CRPG, even on my decent rig on 2024, yes 2024 not 2025 :sadge:. Sometimes saves won’t load (gear icon error), forcing me to move the 'folder save' repeatedly. NPC quest givers like Nungata vanish after finishing bounties Uamoro (RIP my completionist behaviour)

Conclusion

A strong 8/10. The immersive world, voice acting, and QoL improvements shine, but performance issues, loot imbalance, and a rushed main story hold it back. Still, a must-play for CRPG fans willing to overlook its flaws.
Edit : okay, rushed may not the correct words, more like too short, go there, seek there, find there, contront them and suddenly done for main quest.

Highly recommend, although the optimisation of the game is horrible. Reducing my used cpu core count from 8 to 3 tripled my ingame performance (silly game cant handle more threads). Apart from that, if you love crpgs and enjoyed the first game this is a perfect game for you.

Great game, lots of fun and interesting mechanics

very good game with horrible performance on modern hardware and too small of a community to have fixes available for the steam version.

One of my favorite CRPGs that I keep coming back to over and over. Love trying different builds, items, etc. It's not flawless, but it's flaws are few and far between. Highly recommend to anyone that enjoys CRPGs.

Good game with engaging story line and good classing/multi classing trees

Giving this a positive review after seeing the detail the developers put into the game. I was swimming through water and saw they actually have an animation for the animal followers in your party.

Great top down game. Very good story and combat.

Good game with great gameplay, but the storytelling could have been better