Pillars of Eternity 2

I thought I’d take a longer break before I played Pillars 2 but I ended up doing it pretty soon after I finished Pillars 1! A big deal for me considering how many times I had picked up Pillars 1 only to drop it for various life reasons lol

For a sequel, I think Pillars 2 did a really good job at carrying over story things from the first game while also making it feel like you could keep playing the same kind of character. A lot of the callbacks (I especially liked a certain archmage that makes his appearance again) are fun and following the reveal at the end of the first game they did a really good job with that (trying to be vague to avoid spoilers). Mechanically too the combat changes were pretty interesting too. The change to spells and rests made me much more likely to use my abilities which I appreciated.

Unfortunately (and this is probably more of a personal issue), I found a lot of the same gameplay issues with encounters with the first carried over into the second. It felt like a lot of encounters really boiled down into finding the status ailment the enemy party was weak against, inflict it, spam attacks, repeat until dead. And you had to do it this way since (at least for me) they did a lot of damage which would kill my party fairly quickly haha. The DLC had some more interesting encounters with varying mechanics that I enjoyed though.

The world map with sailing was also a really cool idea, but the sailing part felt a little shallow, specifically naval battles. I liked the idea at first, but found they were tedious and too time consuming so I usually just ended up boarding the ships to make it quicker.

The highlights with this (and Pillars 1) though was the dialogue. I liked the way the alignment system worked, rather than just generic good/bad there were different stats that increased/decreased depending on certain choices, and those would affect your perception (both positively or negatively). I appreciated that much more than just having a lawful/chaotic option, and thought it was more fun when an NPC would call me out for being deceitful but also respecting my generosity (funny as it sounds).

However, I think overall I still prefer the main story in Pillars 1. The scale in the second game got a bit too big for me and I preferred the “smaller” scale in Pillars 1 since it made the story/plot feel much more tight.

But overall I think both were great games! Perhaps a little much to play back to back and maybe if I had a bit of a longer break I might’ve been able to appreciate the second one more, but I still think both were good times.