You must hire a crew to work the ship, and maintain several kinds of supplies to keep them alive and happy. But while you don't need to sail your ship, you do need to manage it. Navigating the Deadfire amounts to clicking a point on the map and watching your ship travel across the ocean. Pillars II is hardly Sea of Thieves in terms of its representation of sailing. There's even a quest line dedicated purely to charting the Deadfire's waters, wherein a local cartographer will pay you for exploring the archipelago's islands, and let you name them as you please. These range from simple supply pick-ups and little text adventure vignettes, to full-blown quests to embark on and Dungeons to explore. The archipelago itself comprises dozens of islands, most of which will have one or several points of interest on them. It puts a few pins in the map for you to follow, such as the enormous city of Neketaka and the pirate haven of Dunnage, but you can equally chart a course in a random direction and carve a stripe across the Deadfire's massive, almost entirely undiscovered map.

Once you've finished following the story through Port Maje, Pillars II returns you to your ship and lets you sail wherever you like in the Deadfire. Here you spend a few hours fixing the local governor's problems, reacquainting yourself with the core systems, and discovering the first major plot-point before the game opens up to you properly.Īnd it's in this notion of “opening-up” where Pillars II really differs from the original. Once you've created your character, you awake aboard your trusty sloop the Defiant, are promptly attacked by Pirates, and ultimately wash up on the shores of Port Maje, aka Tutorial Island. Either way, jumping in without having played the first Pillars is going to involve swallowing a lot of lore very quickly, and there's a whole bunch more to digest in the sequel, an issue that we'll discuss later. The game lets you import a previous save so that your choices carry over, or establish your character history either through a broad-strokes conversation with Berath, or making more specific decisions in the game menu prior to starting a game. It's possible to play Pillars II without having experienced the original Pillars, although I'm not entirely sure I'd advise that. Specifically, Berath tasks you with following Eothas into the Deadfire Archipelago to discover what exactly he's up to. Berath scoops your soul out from Eternity and offers to place it back into your body, provided you agree to do her bidding. This ability has attracted the attention of another God – specifically Berath, the God of Death.

And I thought I had problems with mice in the attic.įortunately for you, you're a Watcher, a person who can speak with the souls of the dead. When he wakes up, the very first thing he does is destroy your home and kill you. Pillars II certainly starts with a bang, as it transpires that Eothas, a God whose disappearance from Pillars' pantheon was a major plot-point in the first game, has been sleeping underneath your castle the whole time. But I also worry that it reaches a little too far in its ambitions, and that its added scope comes at the price of focus and finesse. It's the biggest RPG Obsidian has produced since Fallout: New Vegas, and one which also fixes many of the problems present in the original. You can even take on jobs to find and name uncharted islands. Alongside the main story that sees you hot on the heels of a wandering God are a host of subplots that involve piratical politics, fractious local tribes, and warring trading companies. Your home base is not a castle but a ship, which you can sail to dozens upon dozens of islands amidst the crystalline waters of the Deadfire. The sequel takes place in a truly enormous island archipelago, and goes to great lengths to encourage exploration and discovery away from its central storyline. I don't know whether this was something Obsidian Entertainment was itself aware of, but it's interesting that Pillars of Eternity II makes fleshing out the map a core part of the game. Yet despite all that, Pillars of Eternity didn't have the grand and sweeping scale of, say, the original Baldur's Gate, and while the core of the game certainly wasn't short on content, the fringes of its world felt comparatively less fleshed out. Yes the art was lavish, yes the stakes were high, and yes it contained a dungeon beneath your castle so deep that it for all intents and purposes took your party back through time. It feels churlish to say this about any game that offers 30+ hours of play, but it could be argued that the original Pillars of Eternity lacked a certain level of scope.

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