I finished the game before I even hit the character creation
 

….LOL

I just wanted to test what happens if I reject the deal in first 2 minutes into the game… well, that was a surprise. Sort of like seeing one of the Torment ending as soon as you start the game.

Did you enjoy the game?

Yes, it was very atmospheric for the whole 2 miniutes ;)

On my second playthrough now :P

Seen this happen a few time with the Far Cry games.:nod:

It's a good idea for games that actually use choice and consequences. Loved it in Far Cry 4 were you are the bad guy by the end just because you didn't sit down and eat.

Played for about 5 hours. Enjoying it a lot more than D:OS2. Deadfire is definitely much less gloomy place than Dyrwood but I still feel the serious and dark undertone to the story. I hate the voice acting so turned it off completely. The combat still feels messy for me, and at the same time rather easy even on classic difficulty (the middle one out of 5).

A few questions:
1. How do I boost up the ship crew morale? The injured crew keeps on complaining every time I try to salvage items from the shipwreck.
2. Is there any recommended order of the exploration? I'm done with the first island and went to Fort that is ruled by some female pirate.

EDIT: I'm also experiencing stuttering which is starting to annoy me heaps… did anyone experience this? How can I fix this problem?

Yeah I turned off the voice acting as well. I find I do that more and more often in these kind of games. I wish there was a middle option where you could still have the occasional line of spoken dialogue when you select a character but not have them read out all the dialogue text.

It's definitely easy to see what's going on in TB mode, as you'd expect. I'm also playing on normal and most of the time it isn't challenging but there are definitely spikes, especially in the DLC. You've probably worked this out, but the number of skulls above a location indicate the level of challenge (a location with no skulls is considered a suitable level, and usually is actually quite easy).

Morale: I bought nice food and drink for the crew and that helped. Also, when you have an injured crew member, remove them from active duty and they won't drain morale. But the best way I found to increse morale was to share the coins (but not the loot) after a successful ship to ship fight - that gives you a massive morale booster. I quickly got it to 100 that way.

I think the game encourages you to explore. I did it in a certain way but I imagine you can do it however you want. Eventually you'll start completing the main quest missions.

Stutters and long loading times… yup. I have a pretty crap graphics card (870m) and no SSD though, so someone else might be better giving help with that!

Is there any mods that allows you to skip the ship battles + keep ship crew morale up? I gotta admit, not a big fan of the whole ship thing….

Yeah the ship battles are pretty annoying. I don't know of any mods but it's a common complaint so you might be able to find one in the Workshop I guess.

People have different workarounds for his. For example I always sail towards the other ship as fast as possible and then enter. Then you get a normal battle between the ship crews. I don't remember any disadvantages with respect to morale or other aspects.

I think there was a mod that removed the penalty for ramming the enemy ships, to immediately enter deck combat. I'm not sure how much that might unbalance the game, though.

I think I'm going to restart the game with TB mode, I'm not liking RTwP combat in PoE2 - its so messy

Meh I found the RTwP combat is the same as the first game.

Any reason why you feel it's to messy for you?

Reminds me of accidentally playing around with the fireplace in Myst and finishing the game in 5 minutes….

Couch, I felt the first game had messy combat too. Its much better as TB imo. Enjoying it more now.

Thoughts so far:

-I'm liking companions more in Deadfire than PoE1. I met Eder, Xoti, Aloth and Sarafen so far - the only one I don't like is Sarefen.
-Combat is much better in TB mode than RTwP (feels very chaotic/messy).
-Hate the ship combat, which in turn is making exploration not very enjoyable. I'm thinking of just following main quests only (+ companion quests)
-Not enough variety in class building options. Maybe I'm feeling this way due to finishing Kingmaker recently. Muticlassing is definitely fun but still feel quite restricted.
-Crafting seems quite essential in early games, only if for the cooked meal to keep ship crews' morale high. I haven't really been using any consumables since combat is quite easy on classic difficulty.
-Still experiencing stuttering, it's annoying.

Overall, easy to get into (unfortunately, feels rather shallow too) but good for time poor people (like me now).

Curious - did you find pathfinder: kingmaker rtwp messy ? If not can you compare the two (I've not played pathfinder kingmaker yet) …

Kingmaker combat is closer to IE engine games, you can clearly see each character's actions are based on a turn. Deadfire combat is true 'real time' combat, things happen all the time from different chacters really fast, its hard to keep up on who's doing what in RTwP mode.

So, I got this companion called Konstanten… is he a permanent companion or a temporary one?

He is a "sidekick" -- he's permanent, but doesn't have any quests of his own, and much less dialogue than the main companions.

Basically, the "sidekicks" are just companions they didn't have the resources to fully develop.

Yeah, and there are a lot of them.

As for ship combat: It's the weakest aspect by a fair margin. The trick is, as bkrueger metioned already, to just head straight for the enemy ship and turn it into a regular fight. Don't even bother with "ram" options and similar. Just buy ship items that increases the ship speed, and then head straight towards enemy ships -> engage regular combat. I don't remember the exact key combo, but I think it was something like 1, 1, 1, 1, 4 or what not.

At any rate, it's passable after that.

With the latest update I think you can just board the enemy ship at the outset rather than having to go through the horrid 1, 1, 1, 1, 4 thing.

Oooh definitely the preferred option then.

I just focused on upgrading my ship and basically outran like 90% of the battles. The only ones I had were really the scripted ones and one or two where I wasn't paying attention or because I simply was in the mood to do one :)

I loved having a ship but not a huge fan of the ship battles.

Hum. And people liked that game - what was it called - pirates or something like that - you basically had three things to do - ship to ship battles; dancing and some third activity i can't remember. Mind you i didn't care for it but it was wildly popular.

It's bloody hard to get any reputation with Aloth…. what's wrong with this guy? Can you still progress with his story even if he doesn't like you?

It's been a while, but I'm fairly certain you can, yes.

Glad you mentioned this! It gave me a good laugh - which I needed when I discovered that I didn't get my save file copied from my previous computer. It took QUITE some time with the PoE Wiki and my old screenshots to piece together (more or less) what I did four years back.