My feelings all in all, after sinking a good couple hundred hours into this? I'm kinda done with this "IE-style" sub-genre. There's only so many times you can romp through a colourful setting swatting monsters without it getting old, regardless of the twists.
As to Deadfire specifically, the loss of attrition drives the nail into the coffin, turning gameplay into a monotonous grind of pressing the same awesome-buttons over and over again -- and this, just after PotD in the P1 expansions figured out how to design gameplay so this doesn't happen.
This game is good for what it is, but what it is frankly ain't worth much anymore. The formula has been wrung dry. This is much better than P1, but that won't cut it anymore: P1 came into a world where there had been almost nothing IE-like in years. It felt new. I was willing to cut it a lot of slack for that. DF isn't new. It's more of the same, only better executed, and while it's improved in a large number of small ways, it's dumbed down in a small number of big ways that hurt it. This is McBaldursGate2, with all the rough edges smoothed out and made palatable to people who can't handle weird curve balls.
So objectively, side by side, Deadfire is clearly much better a game than Pillars 1. But subjectively, I think I'll be replaying P1 a fair few times in the years to come... Deadfire probably not so much. Pillars 1 had a freshness, roughness, and newness about it the same as the original IE games did. Deadfire is a re-tread of safe slam-dunk ideas, kind of like a studio remaster of Obsidian's greatest hits that squeezes all the life out them. It isn't shit. It's just mediocre. And I really am pissed off that the root cause of the mediocrity is so unnecessary: Josh's obsession with fixing what isn't broken and pandering to goons who won't even finish the game anyway, at least not at anything harder than story mode.
