Which only further emphasises how Eothas's gambit is batshit crazy. Try telling a live service's sysadmin to shut the servers down without a backup and he'll chase you out with a broomstick, but the supposed "god of wisdom" goes all YOLO on the world's life service and he doesn't even put up a downtime notice.
But if Deadfire's main plot is dubious, it's the narrative design that really scuttles the skiff. I originally meant to write a long screed on the subject but I've long since lost the interest to expend too much effort over Deadfire, so riddle me this - what if the Watcher doesn't pursue Eothas? How do the plot's critical events change if you just decide to kick your feet up on a Neketaka beach and sip margaritas? Nothing, Eothas goes on and destroys the Wheel. All you're doing is chasing after him, your only role in the main event is to find out what he's up to. Oh, sure, you get to make one (and only one!) side request 'cause he admires your persistence, but who gives a crap?
Concerning the final "battle", and this what really vexed me about Sawyer's reaction to this criticism, I remember seeing a response from him along the lines of "we literally told you that you couldn't beat him, what more do you expect?" Yes, Josh, you did! In the final act, the other gods literally tell you something like "I dunno, go see if you can talk him down, not sure what else you could do", there are repeated suggestions through the game that Eothas is beyond your power. One problem, though... "nobody can make that shot on the Death Star", "no way you can carry the Ring across Mordor", "no chance in hell Ford can take Ferrari at Le Mans" etc. etc. et-fucking-cetera! You implemented the precise pattern of setting up impossible odds to overcome in a heroic plot and now you're surprised that the consumer expected the rest of that pattern to play out to the end!
Basically, Deadfire's an RPG about futility. You never stood a chance to begin with, and that's a hard concept to centre yourself around in a genre that's essentially the videogame equivalent of the Bildungsroman. CDPR arguably did a better job in Cyberpunk by shifting the focus, at least in retrospect, to the protagonist's struggle with their own inevitable mortality, how they cope with that, but Deadfire remains fixated on a main event you play no part in. You can make an RPG about failure, but futility?... Your narrative had better sing, and Obsidian's didn't. Oh, and just to twist that knife in, I'll remind you that Durance, in the first Pillars of Eternity, already killed Eothas - that's right, a former companion achieved more than you get to... in his backstory!
Now indulge me for just one more paragraph with what could've been... Eothas is basically a big rock colossus, right? Hey, you know what people have used in the past to "fight" rock? Cannon! Which is to say, exactly the sort of crap you've got lying around on all those ships littering the game. So here goes - you forge an alliance with one or more factions, sail through the storm and then blast Eothas with cannon shot! As his legs crumble under him, he gets one last blow in and smashes the Wheel and they both plummet into the depths. Or, if you chose to go it alone, you arrive at Ukaizo but you don't have enough guns to do the job, Eothas still destroys the Wheel and you've snuck in a nice little Saturday morning cartoon message about the importance of friendship. Either way you achieve two things: 1) you meaningfully rope the factional conflict into the resolution of the main plot, and 2) you turn a story of futility into one of failure. You failed, Eothas succeeded regardless of whether he also fell, and the setting moved where Obsidian wanted it to, but the task was doable!
And I'm not even saying this is how it should've been, this is just an example of what I came up with waiting for the office kettle to boil a few days after I finished the game and I'd expect professional writers and designers to do better. But enough, I ended up writing more than I meant to here anyway.
