Yeah, the electrified floor reminded me of Galvino's lab. Poko Kahara raises the bar to at least White March levels.
Yeah, I grabbed the wardstone, but that fight is probably the easiest one in the beta anyways.
Or, to the BGII starting dungeon
Piracy makes Pillars of Eternity II's seas more enticing than the land
Even at 600 metres away, the Rathun must be an intimidating sight. If you squint a bit they look like Vikings. But Vikings, even the really scary ones, were never ten feet tall. Or, for the most part, on fire. While the eye slits in the Rathun’s helmets suggest facial features, they merely give shape to the flames that lick beneath. When the Rathun smoulder, they really smoulder - the fire falling across their glowing shoulders like molten locks.
With a bark from our protagonist, Sassia, the helmsman spins the wheel to starboard, pulling the ship around 90 degrees to broadside the approaching Rathun longship. As a blue-skinned Aumaua, Sassia stands a good head above the humans on board herself. And as a multi-classed fighter and rogue she is officially a ‘swashbuckler’ - a designation that, perhaps falsely, grants some degree of confidence in situations like these. Still: better to keep our distance and hope the water can douse those flaming heads.
The Rathun longship cuts across the waves to close the distance to under 500 metres. Frightening, yes - but that brings it within the effective range of my iron thunderers.
The cannoneers light the fuses, and with a whoosh that shudders across my headphones in stereo, a couple of the cannonballs puncture the longship’s wide sail. If I can cut it down completely, the Rathun will be left bobbing like horny-helmed schmucks, unable to move. Being a walking furnace is no help when all you can do is stare.
What is extraordinary about this battle is that it is taking place entirely in text and static images. For their swashbuckling sequel to Pillars of Eternity, Obsidian have built atop the choose-your-own-adventure-style sequences that were a highlight of the first game. They were lavishly illustrated representations of the scenes where individual characters’ athletic and outdoor skills came into play. But here, in the sequel, they allow you to resolve naval encounters through art and prose alone.
A compass on the UI shows your ship’s direction in relation to your opponent’s, and a single figure on the dash keeps track of the distance between the two vessels. Together, these tools are enough to conjure 3D space and real tactical challenge. The glue is Obsidian’s evocative writing and some restrained sound design, working in tandem to suggest the spray of the ocean and the crack of splintering wood.
Thankfully, our galleon avoids any splintering this round. The longboat spends its single, front-facing cannon shot in vain, and speeds into close proximity at full sail. “Prepare to jibe!” Sassia yells. Then, with what is presumably a quite strenuous manoeuvre, the crew turn the ship 180 degrees, bringing the starboard cannons to bear.
These are specialised for short-range attacks: Vailian Hullbreakers, favoured by merchants and smugglers with cargo to protect; and nasty Chainshot Cannons designed to pick off the crew. Sassia orders the deckhands to hold the ship steady, increasing our percentage chance to hit. The volley is deafening. When the smoke clears there are fewer flaming eyes on the enemy deck.
Crew are a sailing resource in Pillars of Eternity II - as is food, water, medicine, ammunition, and the materials for repairs. Fail to keep your privateers well-fed and their morale will drop. Let them starve for too long and their numbers will dwindle as well. All of this upkeep plays out on an overworld map far more interactive than those conventionally included in classic RPGs of this kind. Fog of war blankets the oceans, and you freely explore them in your chosen vessel, uncovering new islands, caches of resources, and smaller areas to discover on foot.
This style of exploration is highly reminiscent of that found in Obsidian’s underappreciated Neverwinter Nights 2 expansion Storm of Zehir. In it, you steered your party manually across the wilderness between town and dungeon, uncovering side-quests and secret locations as you went. In Pillars of Eternity II, overland travel makes the Deadfire Archipelago feel like the unopened box of riches, curses, and luminous adra its colonists consider it to be. But the adventure is at its finest at sea, where you are accompanied by the continual creak of the rigging, and where ship encounters await just beneath the fog.
Crunch. As the distance closes to spitting range, the Rathun longship rams head-on into our galleon, slamming the starboard side and sending sailors flying. Both vessels take hull damage, but it is not enough to sink either, and boarding planks slam onto the deck. Ten foot tall. Flaming heads. The Rathun make short work of Sassia and her party, triggering the load screen.
The stakes are high for pirates in the Archipelago. But seconds later we are back on the water, determined to sink the Vikings and claim their wreckage as bounty in Pillars of Eternity’s unexpected new highlight.
Glad to help you out, Josh.
Pillars of Eternity II's quirky lore makes its world irresistible
From a distance, the first Pillars of Eternity could seem a little dry - drenched in pretend history then baked to resemble the best RPGs of the ‘90s, it is akin to a tea-stained map in an elaborate school project. To an extent, it had to be that way as the game promised to Kickstarter backers in 2012 was a return to what they loved about Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, and Planescape: Torment.
There was no room for the wild, creatively unrestrained colour of Divinity: Original Sin II, nor the weird communist world order of Obsidian’s own Tyranny. Pillars of Eternity’s nation of Dyrwood was born when designer Josh Sawyer flipped a map of the Dalelands in the Forgotten Realms - of Dungeons & Dragons - and stuck a bunch of new labels on it.
Obsidian tasked themselves with recreating the feeling of decades of D&D lore. On top of that, perhaps they considered that, in Baldur’s Gate, the shelves of Candlekeep library were filled with books referencing the stories of RA Salvatore and Ed Greenwood.
Obsidian wanted to match the commitment to detail of these fantasy worlds. As a result, some of the information stuffed into the Pillars games can feel extraneous. It is difficult to care about the fact that the Vailian Republics lie to the south of Dyrwood and Eir Glanfath, and are ruled by a duc elected by the Consuagli Asegia, a council of 14 ducs, including its five most prominent, the Ducs Bels. It just does not leap off the page.
But when you play Pillars of Eternity II, all of that fake history seeps into the people and the environments, enabling the kind of cultures and quests you have not seen before. The dryness of the first game is gone. It seems appropriate that you spend a lot of your time on the ocean in the sequel.
Welcome to Tikawara, a small village on one of the less fertile islands in the Deadfire Archipelago. The village is home to a Huana tribe, one of many loosely connected groups native to Deadfire. After too many fatal run-ins with colonists and slavers on the more popular islands, they have retreated here, where the land is barren. Caged on the beach are a gaggle of Lagufaeth, the four-armed amphibians who take the best of the local food. In some ways, this is their island.
The Huana live simply; in huts with thatched roofs. But wander towards the trading outpost at one end of the shore and you will see the beach become thick with lavishly-decorated rugs and finely-weaved baskets. The tribe’s plumage is on display in an attempt to attract passing merchants from the seafaring empires.
It is not working. The trading outpost houses a single nervous-looking dwarf - the remainder of an expedition sent to hunt for luminous adra on a nearby isle. When the expedition arrived, the Huana plied their guests with food and drink, treating them like the first clients of a new business. Their disappearance, however, suggests they are unlikely to be repeat customers.
Despite the setback, the local chieftain greets you and your party with a warm, if slightly fearful, smile. But behind that gracious hospitality is an ugly reality: the labourers at the bottom of the Huana’s cultural strata are going hungry while their guests dance drunkenly on the beach.
From the Huana perspective, this utilitarian commitment to the greater good of the tribe is not as callous as it seems. They visualise existence as two starving eels - one representing the overworld, the other the underworld, each devouring the tail of the other. Life and death, as the denizens of this village perceive them, are merely the experience of passing through the digestive tract of one eel and into the other.
That might sound a little (in)Human Centipede to us, but the upshot is that, just as the Huana pass through the eel of life into the underworld, they must also reemerge from the underworld and return to life. It is this sort of cyclic thinking that can make a caste system much more palatable.
In Huana society, the warriors and priests govern. Below them are the Kuaru, the craftspeople who live in relative comfort, and lower still the Roparu. It is the duty of the Roparu to starve during lean times, since they are destined to be reborn into a higher class in their next lives.
Understandably, some Roparu are more down with this than others. Meet Tamau, bound up to be left for the tides after repeated thefts and misdemeanours. “I say that I deserve what others have in plenty,” he argues. “Shade, a full belly, a moment to kneel on cool sands.”
And so a tiny hub for stocking up on equipment before the next dungeon reveals itself to be much more: a hive of tension and cultural unease, which becomes more fascinating with every conversation. Obsidian’s delivery of this lore is more subtle than in many of their peers’ games, too. Pillars of Eternity II borrows the tooltips from Obsidian’s last RPG, Tyranny, allowing you to hover over any highlighted word in a conversation to read more about it. It is an elegant system that takes away the chore associated with a pile of unread codex entries.
To describe the worldbuilding of Pillars of Eternity II as ‘rich’ or ‘deep’ would do it a disservice. Although those words are intended as compliments, they are in themselves a little boring. Lore does not just make the Deadfire islands rich or deep; it makes them unique and exciting. It makes exploring these maps an act of anthropology, rather than just exploration and monster-killing.
Pillars of Eternity II is not a made-up history book bound together in the name of D&D nostalgia, although it may appear that way at first. It is an altogether more alluring game for its alien logic and cultural quirks.
Lol, we'll see about that. I hope it will be at least nearly so in-depth as advertised.
Because I admire the craftsmanship and the actual mass of knowledge required in order to make up an artificial culture that sounds as convincing as the real ones I've read about. That's the whole appeal of the LotR universe for me.
