Pillars of Eternity II - Reviews

Here are the first reviews for Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire:

• CGMagazine 9.5/10
• Game Informer 8.75/10
• GamesBeat 92/100
• GameSpace 9.8/10
• GameSpot 8/10​
• Guardian 4/5
• Hardcore Gamer 4.5/5
• IGN 8.5/10
• MMORPG 10/10
• PC Gamer 88/100
• PCGamesN 9/10
• Ragequit.gr 92/100
• RPG Site 9/10
• Shacknews 9/10
• Sirius Gaming 8/10
• Slantmagazine 4.5/5
• TheSixthAxis 9/10
• USgamer 4.5/5
• Wccftech 9/10
• Windows Central 5/5
• Worth Playing 9.5/10

More information.

Those are some high scores. I didn't enjoy the first one but may check this one out at some point.

Based on my early impression all of these scores are overpumped.
Especially the stupid MMORPG site that reviews what isn't MMO. No, it's not and cannot ever be 10/10. Just having better designed quests thatn in MMOs doesn't mean it's a perfect game.

joxer said:

Based on my early impression all of these scores are overpumped.

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and yet they are lower or close to POE1 scores and that is despite the grand majority of reviewers saying Deadfire is improved in all ways from the first game.


MMORPG started to include single player RPGs about 5 years ago, they made a public announcement about their coverage expansion back then.

Based only on initial playing (only about 15 hours though) I agree with the scores myself at this point. So many nice improvements over POE1 (which I also liked).

I haven't gotten that far into it, but so far I'd at least agree that there appear to be many improvements over POE. I don't think I would have quite given the original POE 9/10 though, so time will tell what I'll give the sequel.

It is way better then the first....everything is better. Combat works now as well as the character graphics are a lot better.

As a fan of the first game, I'm still a little concerned that the combat is going to suffer a little with the smaller party size, but perhaps the multi-classing options will somewhat compensate and the game will remain challenging in other ways. I'm also very curious to experience the improvements in NPC reactivity and the disposition system as well.

I finally activated my copy last night although no physical items have arrived yet.
If anyone else has received their boxed backer editions, be sure to let the thread know. Bring on the 10 page Watch impressions!

Pessimeister said:

I finally activated my copy last night although no physical items have arrived yet.
If anyone else has received their boxed backer editions, be sure to let the thread know.

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Are you a backer? You should have received an email like 2 weeks ago saying that physical items were delayed because of an issue with producing the physical stuff.

Well for me it is severly worse than the first one. At least the first one only rebooted my computer in the bonus levels from the kick-starter (it restarts my computer as if someone cut the power on entry to level 9, at least it did until October, haven't bothered checking that often).

This one displys the same "rather annoying" behaviour during the intro-scene with the blue path walking through what I assume is memories or other souls probably on the way to the intro/character creation.

Since they didn't fix it in 3 years the last time I'm less than optimistic this time. It looks like a heat/hardware problem but the only games causing (over 4 years of gaming) it is Pillars I and II. So far 0/10 from me. Thankfully I have Original Sin to finish while they hopefully patches it so I can play.

gulla said:

well for me it is severly worse than the first one. At least the first one only rebooted my computer in the bonus levels from the kick-starter (it restarts my computer as if someone cut the power on entry to level 9, at least it did until october, haven't bothered checking that often).

This one displys the same "rather annoying" behaviour during the intro-scene with the blue path walking through what i assume is memories or other souls probably on the way to the intro/character creation.

Since they didn't fix it in 3 years the last time i'm less than optimistic this time. It looks like a heat/hardware problem but the only games causing (over 4 years of gaming) it is pillars i and ii. So far 0/10 from me. Thankfully i have original sin to finish while they hopefully patches it so i can play.

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okay???

azarhal said:

and yet they are lower or close to POE1 scores and that is despite the grand majority of reviewers saying Deadfire is improved in all ways from the first game.


MMORPG started to include single player RPGs about 5 years ago, they made a public announcement about their coverage expansion back then.

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I think a sequel, especially one that uses many of the same assets and systems of an original needs to do some things better in order to get the same scores. This isn't just my opinion either. In general most reviews from big sites that I read will mark down a sequel simply from lack of originality if it doesn't do things better than the last game did.

CelticFrost said:

okay???

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(On my crash-problems)

Yep. We were a few in the Pillars I forum and now I have the same problem in Pillars II

It's totally incomprehensible that a computer that runs _any_ other game I've thrown at it for 4 years will crash and reboot (as I wrote, exactly like I pulled the power) at a few select spots in just those two games. Doing diagnostics and reinstalls and stress tests and you name it nothing looks bad (as many old PC gamers I've been building and dealing with hardware issues since early the 90'ies)

So in Pillars I it was possible to finish, but not the deep dungeon under the keep, but in Deadfire it reboots before I get to character creation.

Working with operations of servers and applications for a living I have much sympathy for the poor developers trying to find such a bug, but I fear I won't be able to play this until I upgrade the rig (it is due but I really want one more GPU generation so I can go full 4k on a single GPU-card)

The reboot part sounds like overheating or bad memory. I would monitor cpu temp or run memtst

Bad memory (almost?) never causes a "power cycle" reboot like he describes, usually causes an OS crash (which may trigger a reboot afterwards, but it wouldn't be like your plug was just pulled). If the CPU was overheating, you'd notice it because it would throttle itself down, before anything ever crashed, and your game would be running ridiculously slow.

First thing I'd do for a "power cycle" style crash is swap out the power supply and test it with a different one. Second thing, swap GPU and test with a different one.

Also, blaming a problem like this on the Pillars developers is pretty ridiculous. Obviously their game must be doing something to trigger your problem, but their game wouldn't be the root of the problem.

gulla said:

Well for me it is severly worse than the first one. At least the first one only rebooted my computer in the bonus levels from the kick-starter (it restarts my computer as if someone cut the power on entry to level 9, at least it did until October, haven't bothered checking that often).

This one displys the same "rather annoying" behaviour during the intro-scene with the blue path walking through what I assume is memories or other souls probably on the way to the intro/character creation.

Since they didn't fix it in 3 years the last time I'm less than optimistic this time. It looks like a heat/hardware problem but the only games causing (over 4 years of gaming) it is Pillars I and II. So far 0/10 from me. Thankfully I have Original Sin to finish while they hopefully patches it so I can play.

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Going to go out on a limb here and say that you may have some issues with your machine....

You know I had a similar issue although not with this game. Can't recall the name of the game but I do remember the problem as it drove me nuts. I would get crashes but only with one game and no other ones.

Eventually a friend with a lot more hardware knowhow figured it out for me. It was some bad memory in one of my memory sticks. For some reason that game was triggering something. I replaced the stick and the game ran fine.

Sometimes you get the most obscure issues. But to my mind something this specific seems unlikely to be the game itself and more its interaction with a PC.

In which case I certainly wouldn't rate the game low based on something like that. That is just wrong.

Not specifically gaming-related, but I remember a work issue from many years ago. Writing a certain pattern of bytes faster than a given speed would make a small but significant percentage of the memory controllers in our product lock up hard, requiring a power cycle to recover. Tracking this down was fiendishly difficult. (Amusingly, the solution was to implement a special version of memcpy() that was hobbled to never copy faster than the danger threshold. Cleaned the problem right up!)

The lesson here is that hardware is <expletive redacted> weird.

This is not strictly true on both points.The cpu will attempt to throttle down that is true but if it fails to do so fast enough and the temp reaches a critical level it will automatically shutdown causing a reboot. Try running an i7 at 100% without a heat sink (though this is not a healthy thing to do); like wise for memory. Yes if the application has an exception the os will catch it but if the os has an exception there is a reasonable chance it will reboot (and yes i've delt with this before - i had 32 GB of memory and the last 10k was bad). I almost never use 32GB but then i had to run an application that used all availalbe memory and the machine started crashing (I also started getting bad data on disk which was how I first noticed as the disk sub system I use has strong checksums (md5 hash) for all data. Anyway I ran various memory tests but they never found the problem because I tested 31.5GB. If finally bit the bullet and tested 33GB (yea running a memory test that has to page to disk is painful) and it found the error immediately - i tied it to a specific chip. Anyway I think it is a hardware issue from his description - it could also be a bug in his video driver that the program is utlizing. I'm sick of windows shitty layers - really wish steamos would take off so more of the better games would show up on linux = so much easier to track these things down.
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Btw for what it is worth I first thought this was a disk issue and the kenrel was loading bad kernel pages from swap; but after a few days of testing various things I realize the disk was fine and it had to be something else causing the issue. md5 might be lousy for security but it is fantastic for error checking.

Stingray said:

Bad memory (almost?) never causes a "power cycle" reboot like he describes, usually causes an OS crash (which may trigger a reboot afterwards, but it wouldn't be like your plug was just pulled). If the CPU was overheating, you'd notice it because it would throttle itself down, before anything ever crashed, and your game would be running ridiculously slow.

First thing I'd do for a "power cycle" style crash is swap out the power supply and test it with a different one. Second thing, swap GPU and test with a different one.

Also, blaming a problem like this on the Pillars developers is pretty ridiculous. Obviously their game must be doing something to trigger your problem, but their game wouldn't be the root of the problem.

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High scores all around, eh? Will have to wait as my backlog is just ridiculous. Still havent finished POE1 plus WM.
As time passes.. I find less and less time, must be some algorithm in the matrix..