I've been quietly, and slowly, playing this game. 27 hours in over the course of 1.5 weeks, which is incredibly slow of me when it comes to an RPG, but more on why I can only play this game in short bursts later. I've gotten to the point where I must make way for Ukaizo so here are my onions of the game so far:
The plot in this game sucks. I can't get into it. Making it focused on the gods is a big mistake since the gods in PoE, or any other game for that matter, were never interesting. They added an incredibly lame hook of losing a part of your soul to Eothas to "try" and make it more personal, but this is a failure of a hook and Obsidian writers put no effort into it. I really don't care about my video game soul and it doesn't have any mechanical implications so I cannot get invested in the idea of getting it back. A plot that isn't a personal one is already a massive failure for me. PoE1 was much better in this regard, that game understood that making the conflict personal is the best way to get the player to care.
The writing is pretty bad. The game doesn't really do big info dumps on you often, and when it does, I can safely just skip a few pages of descriptive text that doesn't add anything to the experience. There's a lot of bullshit, infantile derp in it though, much of what I expect from Obsidian or any western writer for video games by this point. After I finished Maia's quest she wanted to tell me how blue she felt for assassinating an innocent person. Then she does a complete 180 and tells me that she wants my dick if I buy her bird some shark meat. Such a poor lack of grace on the writer's part. That may have been the lowest point for me. Otherwise it fluctuates between tolerable to just plain boring.
Alright, in to the actual part that I care about: the gameplay, and why it's hard for me to play this game for long periods of time. I like the inclusion of sub-classes and multiclassing. These are good new additions. I feel like the combat itself is less of a clusterfuck than it was in PoE1 where I was constantly getting raped by the engagement system until my Druid was strong enough to just blow everything up. I like the idea of sailing your ship with a crew, and up to a point I feel like it is well realized, but the ship-to-ship combat is embarrassingly bad and I see no reason why anyone would want to partake it. I always just board the vessels. I think you get better loot that way too, and you want that (trash) loot for gold that you sorely need. What fucks me up the most in this game though is that how the content is stretched way too thin for my tastes. Tiny dungeons and tiny encounters littered all over the archipelago. The dungeons are always on the small side and include 1 or 2 encounters more often than not and it feels really bad playing the game when you have to go through constant loading screens to get to this small bite sized content. It is incredibly tedious to sail around the world chasing after single encounters or small 20x20 dungeons. It feels grindy and this wears me down and makes it hard for me to get really invested in the game. I would've preferred less individual stuff to do but make each quest and dungeon more meaningful. I get it that they wanted to give you a sense of sailing the seas of discovery, but the end result, disregarding the intention, is just unsatisfying.
Graphics and art wise, this may be one of the best looking games out there. PoE1 was already really good looking, but this is so much better looking. The art department at Obsidian really need a nice salary bonus. Say what you will about anyone else working there, but these guys really know their craft. Oh, and the music sucks cock. Fire Justin Bell already.
Anyway, back to the game. Hopefully I'll get to the DLC stuff soon, I think I'll enjoy that much more than the base game.