Video Gamers Podcast - Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire Review - Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: April 10, 2023

Gaming Watchers Paul, Josh and Michael are chasing down Eothas and sailing the seas in our latest gaming Deep Dive. Legendary pick from the legendary Toro, Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire is the 2nd entry into the series. We give our gaming takes, discuss the plot, combat, RPG elements, game play and more for Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire before moving into our rating and ranking it on the Leaderboard. This is a fantastic episode you can’t miss! Video games covered this week:  Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire Thanks to our LEGENDARY supporters: Gideon Is Lit, Toro, Scrump, Gaius, Remi, MarbleMadness, Dr. Catatonic, Blackstar (DQ), Glapsuidir, Phelps, Michele B, Redletter, Nevo, Waynerman, TFolls, AceofShame, Jake, RangerMiller, and Ad Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/multiplayerpodcast Join our Gaming Discord: https://discord.gg/Dsx2rgEEbz Follow us on Instagram: instagram.com/multiplayerpod/ Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/MultiplayerPod Subscribe to us on YouTube: youtube.com/channel/UCU12YOMnAQwqFZEdfXv9c3Q  Visit us on the web: multiplayerpodcast.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There's so many things I want to do and see, like redoing the basement without having to do it all myself, or doing absolutely nothing, with a spectacular waterfall view, of course. So, I'm starting here, investing with RBC. When it comes to reaching your goals, personalized advice and performance matter. And now, you can get $300 when you invest with RBC.

Offer ends March 3rd, 2025. Terms and conditions apply. invest with RBC. Offer ends March 3rd, 2025. Terms and conditions apply. Invest with RBC today. What's up, fellow gamers? Welcome to the Multiplayer Gaming Podcast. We are a show run by three lifelong gamer dads today we are going to be deep diving pillars of eternity to deadfire this is a huge game to try to tackle we're just going to get straight into introductions i am your host paul and joining me

he's traveling around the globe just trying to get a piece of his soul back that was stolen unfortunately it's in the hands of a god that stands about 700 feet tall it's josh why why does my soul have to get stolen paul i don't i like my soul you're gonna have to fight to get it back josh all right all right that's on 700 700 foot you said uh that's just my rough guess in playing this game he looks looks about 700 feet tall. Good with anything under 750. Nice. And joining me and Josh, he is currently in a starry-eyed gaze. Every once in a while, he just sort of zones out because he's in the beyond talking to the gods, maybe taking their orders, maybe defying them. It's Michael. I am? I am. Yes, that's true i am here everybody i know exactly where i am right now was not was not zoning out i'd like a large fry michael uh did you want to supersize that oh dang

it proper down all right so before we jump into the content here covering pillars of eternity 2 josh you're gonna read us to review someone Someone left the show. Oh, I love reading reviews, you guys. And yeah. Hey, if you haven't left us a review yet, take a few seconds, leave us a review. I know a lot of you guys and girls out there only listen on Spotify. Hey, you can rate us five stars there. That helps a lot. But if you have Apple, you can leave us a written review and there's a very good chance we're going to read it on the show. Just like this review that comes in from BalloonMonkey13 and is titled, One of, if not the best, podcasts ever. And it says, I've been listening to you guys for around six to seven months now and never have I been bored by your episodes.

I was searching far and wide and amazing podcasts that fed me all of my gaming needs. All three of you guys still stand to make me laugh out loud. Even when I'm traveling, I will listen to you guys because your podcast is so entertaining. I don't know if you guys will see this, but if you guys do, hello! There is a PS, and it

says waffles will always outweigh pancakes, no matter what. But anyway, the rest of the review is great. I feel like he adds those waffle parts. there is a ps and it says waffles will always outweigh pancakes no matter what but anyway the rest of the review is great i feel like he adds those waffle parts i feel like i feel like we just talked to each other on this podcast so i love hearing those reviews that were actually like making people's day like it makes me so happy it's the point of this whole thing it really is yeah thank you so much what was the name balloon monkey 13 monkey 13 love it great great username that means there's also 12 other balloon monkeys, guys. Right. They're out there somewhere.

They're all taken. Yeah. If we get all 12 of them to review us, that'd be great. There you go. We also owe a huge thank you to two new supporters on Patreon. Every time we have new supporters, we always give them a shout out. Thank you so much to Casman signing up with Epic Status. We also have Apollo 47 who signed up with Rare status. And we also owe a

thank you to another Patreon supporter because it's why we're covering today's game. Michael, can you give us a little bit of a rundown of how Patreon works and why we're covering this game? Absolutely. So we're what you call an independent podcast, which means we're not funded by Comcast or GE if you watch 30 Rock, things like that. Essentially, how you can support the show, this independent podcast, is you can support us over at MultiplayerSquad.com. You can pledge as little as $5 a month, and we give you something in return for that. If you do that, you get extra episodes, cool Discord perks, extra fun stuff like that.

But if you go legendary and we call you the legend, you don't just get the gold nameplate in Discord, right? You get to pick any game you want for us to play for two weeks, and then we do a deep dive on the show of your game of your choosing. And this time around, it was legendary supporter Toro who picked this video game they call Pillars of Eternity 2 Deadfire. And we are so grateful to you, Toro, who picked this video game they call Pillars of Eternity 2 Deadfire. And we are so grateful to you, Toro. It is finally your time to hear your special episode. This one's all for you, but appreciate you.

Toro's been waiting a while for this. He went legendary a while back, and we're finally getting around to it. We had a little flurry of legendaries in a row, and this will almost get us caught up. We now have another legendary game to play down the road but we also want to say thank you to our current legendary supporters red letter and gideon is lit along with our epic supporters ace of shame yoda remilia papa thunderfist master wayne 01 and now casmon yes so all right guys aothis is wreaking havoc across the land he's harvesting souls.

He's killing people by the hundreds. Let's gather our party and deep dive Pillars of Eternity to Deadfire. Okay, here's the description on Steam. Pursue a rogue god over land and sea in the sequel to the multi-award winning RPG Pillars of Eternity. Captain your ship on a dangerous voyage of discovery across the vast unexplored archipelago region of the Dead Fire. Is that how you pronounce the word? It's archipelago. Archipelago.

There you go. I have to... Oh, it's tough. It throws me off every time I see it written, and I know I'm going to say it wrong, and I feel like I'm always going get it right. The second time. Archipelago sounds much more exotic though. It's the archipelago. Yeah.

It's like air conditioning in Spanish is area condition auto. It sounds way cooler. It just means like collection of islands, right? Something like that. Yeah. I feel like that's way too hard of a word to say collection of islands.

All right. So one thing that I do want to note here is that since we only have two weeks to play these games, all three of us have day jobs and we have families. So we only have so much time we can devote to these games. We told Taro that he totally understood. We had a goal of at least getting 20 hours of playtime in. So for those of you out there who are hardcore long-term Pillars fans, if you have a thousand plus hours, we might get a couple things wrong here or there. Just try to extend some grace. We're going to give it our best. We got pretty far into this game, each and

every one of us. And I also want to say that we are not going to get into any major spoilers. We're just going to talk about the structure of the game, what we think about combat and some of the different mechanics of the game. We'll make sure not to share any end game spoilers. Yeah. So first of all, did you guys ever play Pillars of Eternity 1? I did. I did as well, but not very much. What's your story, Josh? Same for me. Did you get it for free on Epic Game Store like I did? That's exactly what happened, man. And then I hopped in. I feel like I put like six hours into that game. Definitely got a feel for the flavor of it, the combat.

There's a lot of similarities between the two. So it was kind of nice to jump into this one with at least a very basic understanding of gameplay and how the game works and how it's structured. Yeah. And Michael, this was your first foray into pillars i got a small confession to make i was confused pillars of eternity with pillars of the earth the book series and so i didn't know this existed oh see i always confuse this with paths of exile because they are they're all poe and every time i see it i'm like wait which which one are you talking about? Which one's the Diablo? Which one's the RPG? They're kind of hard to keep straight. Yeah, I got it for free on Epic Games Store about two years ago.

I played a little bit, but since we were running the pod, I couldn't set any time aside to play that game because we were covering our stuff for the show. So I think I got about two hours in and realized it was just going to be way too long to try to play on my own. So for anyone who's not familiar with the lore and the story of this game, I'm going to give you just a very brief summary. Basically, it's a very traditional fantasy RPG. Takes place five years after the first game. You play as a character who is a watcher, which means you can interact and talk to other people's souls. You are on the verge of death because the God of Light, whose name is Aethys, is believed to be dead at the end of Pillars 1. In Pillars 2, he awakens and basically is sucking people's souls and killing them. You are on the verge of death, and the God of Death, Bereth, comes to you and promises to save

you if you will follow Aethys, try to figure out what he is doing, and if you do the god of death, Bereth, comes to you and promises to save you if you will follow Aethas, try to figure out what he is doing, and if you do the will of the other gods. So basically, you take your ship, you build a crew, you make a bunch of choices, change the world around you, and then basically call it a day. So what'd you guys think about this story? Did you guys find it compelling? No. No?

No? It's not that. The story is not bad. I will say that I found the story to be a little overdone sometimes. And I'll clarify that because you were dealing with a god drama dispute thing going on, right? Aeothys is wreaking havoc. The other gods don't know what's going on they basically are like aothis has gone rogue we don't like what's happening we don't know what his intentions are and we want you to figure that out and come back and tell us so we know whether we have to like wage war or what he's trying to do i you know i

love mythology man which always deals with drama amongst the gods. The only problem that I had with the story in this game is this game does a good job of anytime somebody is talking, you can hover over a word that they say. So for instance, if they say, I know who Aethys is, you can hover over Aethys and it will pull up like a little description. The problem is, the description is like a paragraph. And not only that, it's like, Aethys, god of light, god of love, god of earth, god of water, god of this, god of that. And it's like, dude, just tell me what Aethys is the main god of. You know what I mean? So I did find the story in this game to be a little convoluted. That's not to say I didn't care about what I was doing, but I did take a little bit of thrown in the middle of this battle of the gods, like Josh was saying. And I thought that was actually very compelling because it did

influence some of my decisions with my main character. To go a little bit deeper into what Josh was saying, though, is this being a direct sequel of the first game taking place five years after the first game? You're kind of expected to know what happened, except because the beginning of this game, you start off with this traumatic event and are near death. You kind of get to build into some of the side conversations and bluff a little bit when your companions are like, oh, yeah, what about this? You're like, I don't remember. I was half dead, which I thought was a really good way to make it in universe that I haven't played the original game. But if you did remember, you had dialogue choices to say what happened in the first game, which I thought story wise was a very clever way to make it a sequel flow through for both new and existing players. Yeah, I think this one was a little tough to get going in the beginning, not having played very much of the first. So I think if you jump right into Deadfire, you might struggle a little bit until you get sucked into the story. But I will say there's also a lot of focus on exploration and side missions, so it's not just the main story. The main story in this game is actually relatively short. It's only a handful of quests,

but there's a lot of other stuff going on at the same time. All right, now let's jump into combat. I would say this is a very straight up, very traditional CRPG, which stands for Computer Role Playing Game. We've done a couple deep dives on crpgs in the past do you guys agree that this is pretty traditional are there any games you might compare this to and how it functions i've only watched people play um like pathfinder series like pathfinder kingmaker in those games and i thought it looked exactly like that so i believe that's turn-based whereas this you have an option for turn-based as well. But it looked very similar to that series to me. Yeah, I really enjoy CRPGs. I grew up playing them.

I'm a fan of the genre because back in the day, consoles didn't have really good RPGs. And so the main thing with a CRPG is they tend to be much more in-depth. They tend to be much more in-depth. They tend to be much larger in scale. You really, I mean, if I jump into a CRPG, it's like, hey, this is an 80 to 100 hour game. Like that's just the expectation. Combat wise, it reminded me of Dragon Age would probably be the closest major game

that most people would know about that would say, hey, I've never played a CRPG. I don't know what the combat in this game is like. It's not exactly like Dragon Age. I find that with this one, it is a little bit more kind of micromanaged, I guess, in that sense. They do offer a turn-based mode, but that came later as a patch. So I would say like the Dragon Age games, if you're familiar with like, you give your characters orders and then you just kind of unpause, you let them run around and do their thing. Maybe this character is getting rekt, so you have to pause it, tell your healer to heal that character, unpause it, let everything

kind of play out. That's basically the gist of the combat gameplay. I think it's weird that you mentioned the turn-based. I think this game, as I played it, I'm thinking this would be much better as a turn-based game because I played the live action. I think it was almost designed to be turn-based originally, but for some reason, they didn't go that route. I think it'd be better that way. Yeah, it's interesting that they give you the option because I found myself almost turning it into a turn-based combat game because I was playing live action with pause. And I realized I just had to pause so often that it basically turned it into turn-based. Now, the game does have a very complicated AI system where you can set all these parameters.

If this character's focus is above this amount and their health is here, then cast this. I felt like it was going to take me 30 hours to program all that, so I didn't want to. I just basically made it turn-based in how I played. I would say out of the CRPGs we've covered in the past, which would be Wasteland 3 and Divinity Original Sin 2, this is far closer to DOS 2 than it is Wasteland. Wasteland had a lot of humor, and it was a little more tech-based. This game is more straight-up fantasy. You have characters that are casting spells

and things of that nature. It's not really like getting mini-nukes and rocket launchers like in Wasteland. Yeah. All right. Now, for better or worse, Pillars of Eternity 2 has about a million options for anything that

you want to do. I'm talking the number of classes, the stats, the status effects, what your shipmates are going to eat or drink. There's a million things to choose. This all gets into those little minutiae of an RPG. Since we're on the topic of combat, let's first talk about classes. There are primary classes which include Barbarian, Chanter, Cipher, Druid, Fighter, Monk, Paladin, Priest, Ranger, Rogue, and Wizard. You might be thinking that sounds like a lot of classes, and it is, but that's not it. But there's more. There's more. In addition, you can combine pretty much any two of these classes into a hybrid class. They call them subclasses here in this game.

This is going to give you things like Berserkers, Ascendants, Lifegivers, Hellwalkers, Tricksters, etc. I didn't count them all, but it looks like there's about 60 options that you can choose from. Not only are there different classes, guys. Every class has its own separate power source. So you are using some different kind of resource, whether it be rage, focus, nature, discipline, faith, even if I don't know what the heck they do or what they're called. Hellwalker, what is that? Oh, that's a cool name. Yeah, it really is. And so I love having cool class choices. This game knows that it throws a lot at you. And so when you are actually leveling up, you can choose a subclass at that point. Or when you meet a new character and it's kind of like, hey, what do you want this character to be? It will give you class options,

right? And it'll say, hey, do you want to default to this character? We saw that in Divinity Original Sin 2, where it's like, I don't really need another rogue in my party. I sure could use a caster. And it's like, do you want this guy to be a caster because he can be um and so this game kind of does that a little bit um i i like that but the game does tell you hey if this is your first playthrough you probably don't want a subclass that gets real complicated real quick in that regard so i kind of like that they warn first timers yes but but the option is there or if you're you know replay value playing through as a multi-class character or just different classes, I think would add a fresh take on like a second playthrough. I think that one of the things that complements the classes, which first of all, I love the fact there's so many classes for this reason. The game also implements that later on down the road as you get companions as you go, you can actually create your own companion and make a brand new fresh from the start.

It was really cheap. It was like $1,500 gold to make a level six and pick a new class. So at any point in the game, if you don't like what you've got, you can choose another class to play along with, which I thought was really nice. And because of that aspect, I didn't mind that there was so many classes and subclasses and so forth. Granted, I never tried a hybrid because the game made it very clear, like to Josh's point, do not do this if this is your first playthrough. And so I didn't do that.

Yeah, it's in all red letters when you get that new companion. Yeah, so I did the same. I did not do any subclasses, just the basic ones. And you're not just playing this game as one character at a time. You have a squad of five, which is kind of big because there are some RPGs

where you play as a squad of three, maybe even kind of big because there are some RPGs where you play as a squad of three, maybe even four. I don't know if there's any games that are bigger than five, but that is a lot to manage. So you can swap your characters in and out. You're going to recruit far more than five over the course of the game. And I felt like it was sometimes a lot to manage between five characters inventory plus their classes and leveling up i know i joked with josh that in one playthrough all five of my characters leveled and i saved and i quit and i loaded the game up and i spent about 45 to 50 minutes just leveling my five characters and then i saved and quit so like i didn't even get into a single fight because this game is very

detailed. There's so much you can do. That's hilarious because I had the exact same situation happen to me. It was late. My family was doing something and I'm like, hey, I'm going to hop on. I'm going to play some Pillars of Eternity 2. I had saved right outside the castle or something. And it was like, okay, this is a good stopping point. Came back the next night. I had about an hour to play before we were going to watch TV or something. I hop in. I see the little glowing plus marks over all my characters' portraits. And I'm like, oh, oh, I forgot. I get to level up. No lie. 60 minutes later and reading a thousand different spells and abilities and these sorts of things. It was like I was finally done leveling up all my characters, picking their skills,

assigning attribute points and all that stuff. And then it was like 3am. And then it was like, okay, well, uh, well there's my hour. I guess I'll like,

I'll, I'll play the game some more tomorrow at that point. No, even I went super simple. I was like, I'm going to pick like one, one specialty. Like,

okay, this person's going to be really good at sneak every time the level sneak and i'm like okay the bottom one is some kind of other ability nice okay next page i'm done right no there's another page oh there's another page okay cool there's another page then you finish all that stuff a million descriptions there's another page okay and then times five yeah there is daunting yeah it's very daunting that's the best word for it it it can require a ton of research if you want to min max stuff and play on higher difficulties this game is going to provide that to you in spades and if you just want to play it a little more casually then you can put it on story mode and you can play that way too if you want so i think they try to split the difference for

everybody but i think it's definitely going to work best for people who want a slow, intentional experience where you're doing every decision for every swing of the sword and all of your stats and all of that you can very much micromanage. All right, now for anyone out there who doesn't already know, we would love to connect with you guys over our Discord server. If you don't know what Discord is, it's a free app or you can use it on the website. You can connect with us and other listeners. It's the main way that we communicate with everyone. We also solicit feedback on there. Totally

free. Just follow the invite link in the episode description. We'd love to have you guys follow us also on social media. We're everywhere at MultiplayerPod. Josh has been putting in a lot of work with a lot of content lately. We'd love for you guys to come check it out. There's so much there to follow. All right, we're going to take a short break and we will be right back. Are you crushing your bills? Defeating your monthly payments?

Sounds like you're at the top of your financial game. Rise to it with the BMO Eclipse Rise Visa visa card the credit card that rewards your good financial habits earn points for paying your credit card bill in full and on time every month level up from bill payer to reward slayer terms and conditions apply this is an ad from better help online therapy we always hear about the red flags to avoid in relationships, but it's just as important to focus on the green flags. If you're not quite sure what they look like, therapy can help you identify those qualities so you can embody the green flag energy and find it in others. Better Help offers therapy 100% online and sign up only takes a few minutes. Visit betterhelp.com today

to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com. All right, continuing with the show here, since we're on the topic of there being a million options for everything you do in this game, let's talk a little bit about the leveling system and a little bit more specifics. So every time you level, basically you get to put a point into an active combat skill. This might be something like stealth, athletics, arcana, alchemy, something like that. You also put a spell or a spell. You put a point into an inactive skill.

This might be something like intimidate, survival, streetwise, diplomacy, something like that. The inactive skills give you extra options in dialogue, or they're used perform certain checks almost like a dice roll in dungeons and dragons after you choose those you click next now you get a new screen like michael was mentioning where now you get to choose an ability or two abilities depending on what level you are to unlock and also when you hit level four and then every three levels guys you now choose a weapon proficiency to add onto your character. It's a lot. It's a lot to do. And not only that, I created a wizard first.

And when I first leveled, I see about 22 spells just available to me in tier one, not to mention tier two on, which you unlock later as you level right off the bat i had a little bit of choice paralysis because i'm staring down 22 spells and some of them like weaken or disorient or confuse and like there's all these status effects a million choices it's a lot to take in it really It really is. I had two casters in my group, a cleric and a sorcerer or wizard or whatever, one of the magic ones. Fireball! A wizard. So there's so many class names, sometimes I get a little jumbled because it's like, wait, is that a wizard? Is that a sorcerer? Is that a warlock? Which one is that? But I'll be honest, I love skill trees and builds and things like that. To me, that is just a lot. It's almost like a mini game in and of itself. So leveling up should be a good time in a game. And it is in this one, but it is daunting. I mean, when you have 20 first level spells that you can pick from, maybe that's an exaggeration.

It's probably more like 10 or 12, but it's a lot, man. It's about 20. Yeah. And then you can pick like one. And then it's like, wait, what? I only get one of these? How can I make that decision, man? I don't know.

And then the other goofy thing is that some of them are buffs. Some of them are debuffs. And this game has a weird naming system for things like you know like standard stuff like it's like oh well this affects uh faith you know i don't even know what is that but and then it's like poise this affects poise and it's like all party members get five poise for the next duration and it's like well wait is what is poise strength is that dexterity is that damage resistance just call it what it is man or does it's like well wait is what is poised strength is that dexterity is that damage resistance just call it what it is man or does it change like a hit to be a glancing blow

or a critical yes there's a million things for everything i mean even if you want to be a magic user there's weapon proficiencies in rods scepters or wands. If you want to do one-handed melee weapons, there's 12 choices to be proficient. Daggers, battle axes, clubs, flails, hatchets, maces, rapiers, sabers, spears, stilettos, swords, and warhammers. Not to mention all the other weapon types. So when we say that Pillars of Eternity 2 is a big game, This is a game that you have to just slow down and play and sink your teeth into it fully. This is not like a fast food meal. This is that steak that you're going to want to take a bite and chew it a hundred times, squeeze as much as you can out of it before swallowing. Status effects. Guys, I'm not going to read a full list. If you do a search for Pillars of Eternity 2 status effects and find the wiki page, it's probably 6,000 words devoted to all the different status effects.

I'm only going to give you a couple. Someone got their dissertation off this thing. It's like a full PhD document. Yeah. All right. You ready for this? I'm not. This is only a very partial list. sickened weakened enfeebled hobbled immobilized paralyzed petrified staggered dazed stunned

confused charmed dominated distracted disoriented blinded shaken frightened terrified you have injuries like acute rash bruised ribs concussion critical injury fatigue frostbite gaping wound lingering frailty major injury maimed serious burn smashed hands which is my favorite sprained wrist swollen eye system shock twisted ankle wrenched knee and wrenched shoulder and guys that's only a partial list of the negative statuses there are just as many positive ones which even include bonuses if you visit um we're a family-friendly show i'll just say a worker of the night which will also give you a various buff. So guys, this game is all about the details.

If you like details, go pick this game up right now. Okay, so on details, I got to go back to the different choices on your skill tree and spells and so forth, right? So guess which class I picked, guys. Shouldn't be hard. Paladin. The best class in gaming, right? So there's a million different choices

for classes in this game. And I chose a paladin because I'm like, hey, sword and board's super easy and I get to heal, right? Million classes. And I'm looking at the 20 different skills and spells you've got at level one and then level two and level three. They're all support

stuff. There's almost no attacks. I i'm like this is not a paladin it's a cleric and so i was a little bit frustrated with that because as i picking i'm picking my one here and there but the passive abilities were really good and so that was nice uh but on weapon specialties real fast how did you guys pick your weapon specialties because i'll tell you how i did it every time i got the weapon specialty i was like okay good i've got one of those in my inventory that one's gonna work for me because i already have one yeah i sort of well with my initial wizard i added rod scepter and wand because i figure that's probably what he needs but even then you can like mix things if you want you can run around with two wands or a wand and a rod or a wand and a shield so i tried to just like pick whatever i thought was cool

and then just try to ride with it like honestly to me i was like i'm not gonna go out of my way to find a certain weapon and then add the proficiency i'm just gonna say you know what i think maces are really cool i'm just gonna do mace and shield and roll with it and see what happens so how'd you guys feel about the actual combat system did you find it to be fulfilling and enjoyable in this game it it was very up and down for me to be honest there were moments where i was like this is a great fight it's tactical i'm you know i'm i scrape by by the skin of my teeth i have two guys that are down two guys left you know and they're there's two enemies and it looked grim and

then it was like i got a couple really good hits in um you know cast a spell that landed and it's like victory and i was like oh yeah and then there were other times where it was just like i felt like i was watching my ranger just reload their blunderbuss for what seemed like 40 seconds i'm waiting for my powder josh dude i'm waiting for my warrior to like swing his sword again and it's like five seconds later where he's getting ready to swing because you know that's one of the mechanics in the game i've got my rogue who is my main character and it's like oh i have to position him around to try to backstab this guy wait are there backstabs in this game? Yeah,

there are. Okay. But my rogue is moving past somebody. And then it's like, I accidentally click like one step too far. And then it's like disengage. And then the guy gets a free attack on me. So it was like, it was this very weird dance of like,

there's these really tense moments and awesome victories. And then there's the frustration of like do something like i feel like i'm poking it with a stick and going dude move shoot your gun like quit standing there i i will say some of the classes were far more satisfying than others so when i recruited seraphine and he's a cypher and he's doing more mind stuff i didn't find that to be as interesting adair is just like a straight up tank and and he's fine i actually really enjoyed spell casting because when the wizards start casting a spell it's almost like that one scene in lord of the rings when gandalf starts like speaking whatever dark language it is. And it starts getting a little rumbly and echoey. Lava root beyond siege!

Chanting these Latin type incantations. And then all of a sudden you throw out this giant flaming boulder that's going to roll and it's going to damage everyone it hits. I thought that was really neat. I did also really enjoy the fact that you could use stealth before engaging in combat. So you could try to strategically place everyone in your party. Okay, I want my rogue to start the fight here. So you could kind of stealth your way around. So I thought that it did add for good tactics. But I will say, aside from

spellcasting, all the physical abilities felt a little underwhelming to me. Yeah. Two quick things that I can say about the combat is, one, I really think this should have been turn-based, because I felt like I was treating it like turn-based, like you said, Paul. Pausing it, and I had to mentally figure out, okay, who's on... Man, now I can't even think of the word. Who's on first? Cooldown! Who's on first? Might as well be that. What's cool down who's on yeah who's on first might as well be that what's on second no but who's on cool down who's doing what pause it for a second unpause it and like oh that guy's ready now so i can click on his button but the one thing that i liked a lot about the combat is it felt very much like dnd with the way that crits worked most video games

a crit is like you get a small percentage like crit chance sometimes doesn't even matter to war the warcraft you're like 120 crit sometimes doesn't even matter. War of the Warcraft, you're like, 120% crit chance doesn't really matter that much. In this game, when you crit, you crit hard. And when enemies crit against you, they crit hard. Like, I had characters that had great armor, and then one hits half health

because they happen to roll the dice just right. And I thought that did implement a really nice, refreshing thing that you don't see in a lot of video games where you can be a tank, and sometimes the enemy hits you just right and you're at half health which kind of scared me a little bit which i like in a game when i get scared so moving off of combat because there's just so many other parts

of this game i think maybe my favorite thing about pillars are i guess what i'll just call scripted events so as you're exploring the world or doing different things, all of a sudden the game kind of just like transforms into a book where you get a little, like a drawn animation, and then you get text. And something is happening in the world, and it gives you choices that you get to make, and then something will happen after you make some choices. And I thought this was some of the best stuff out in the open world, because instead of it just happening real time, this to me kind of felt like a throwback text make some choices. And I thought this was some of the best stuff out in the open world because instead of it just happening real time, this to me kind of felt like a throwback text adventure computer game at times. Almost like a choose your own adventure sometimes.

Yes. Absolutely. But in a really cool way. Do you guys remember any particular examples that you might want to share for how this looks? Absolutely. I was sailing and I'm just in the middle of the water and all of a sudden it says, you get a knock at your door and it's my crew. And they're like, hey, do you want to play a game with us?

And I had like a couple of choices. One was shove off. One was okay. One was I'll pay you 500 copper to go away or whatever. And I chose to play the game and it wasn't a game. It's literally just me doing dialogue choices

on do I want to aim for the middle or aim for the side of this Fox dartboard and the nose of the mouth. And I aimed a couple times and it gave me five morale just from interacting with the crew and telling them, hey, I appreciate you. When they're like, hey, what do we stand for? And I'm like, we stand for whatever we want to stand for as long as we know that everyone has a part of the ship and everyone has an importance. And they liked that. It was great. I really enjoyed this system, to be honest, because it pulls you out of that isometric view where you're in the world. And it almost makes it more personal in a way. I joke about it being a choose-your-own-adventure, but that's kind of

the feeling I got is it's like, hey, you're presented with this situation. How do you want to respond? And they go a little bit above and beyond that sometimes. There's this hidden underworld in the main city that you can access. And it's kind of like a side quest for some of the faction stuff that you can do. And it's like, number one, you have to figure out how to locate this place. And then once you locate it, you can go there. And it's a real part of the game. And it's back to the isometric view. But one of the cool things is you have to talk to these people.

And they have to give you clues on how to find this place. And so when you go there, it literally pulls up, it goes into that storybook setting and says, you were looking down a dark passage and it branches off to the right and continues straight. What would you like to do? And I'm like, oh, well, the guy told me to take the first right. So it's like, go right. And then it's like, you turn down the path and now the path continues straight or it turns to the right again. And it's like, so now I'm like doing this maze. And you see some light in the right, but you also see a gas coming from straight ahead. Yeah, or it's like you hear voices coming from your left.

They're distant and whatever. And it's like, it's a very neat storytelling mechanic that I really enjoyed. It's a nice little flavor changer for the main game, and I found them to be really enjoyable. So let me tell you about my favorite one. All right. I don't know if you guys ran into this well or not, but there's a well relatively early in the game, and I see that it's got a rope hanging on it. And so I threw a pebble down the well and it says after about a second,

you hear a plop. So I have my main character hop on the rope and climb down and he sees a bag of gems. Well, what I didn't know is it was going to do like athletics checks, which my wizard didn't have any. So I start trying to swing and I grabbed the bag of gems, but it catches like a jagged edge and it rips open and half the gems fall

and start falling. And it tells me, do you want to reach out and try to catch the gems or just hold on to the remaining? And of course, I was like, I know exactly what's going to happen, but I can't help myself. I reach out for the gems and it says, not only did you not catch those, you fumble and you dropped the entire bag. All the gems fall into the well. You climb back up and now you have nothing. So there's just little things like that in the world that I think really flesh it out and make it feel like you're making actual decisions in the game. You're not just walking from here to there and now fight the boss. There's little moments like that along the way. There's even an entire area around a lighthouse where you can actually sneak

your way through by swimming through these different areas and working your way around enemies. It's very clever how they build that into the game. It's not in the combat, but sometimes it does impact combat as far as where you're going to be in the world, which is very neat. Yeah. All right. Well, let's talk a little bit about the overall world map. So you can travel by boat or by foot if you're on land. And when RPG worlds are fully fleshed out like this, I always really love it. So basically what you can do is if you're in your boat or if you're on the world map, you can just kind of explore and go wherever you want. The game does keep a list of all of your known locations. So if you know, I want to go back to Port Mahe or however you pronounce it, it's on

your list. You click it and your ship will automatically course and get there. But if you just want to go off on your own, maybe you see this island has like a statue and there's something going on here. You can just go check it out. And so when it builds things like that into this kind of RPG, again, I think it really adds to the immersion and it makes you feel like you're actually exploring a real world. It's not just go to the next area, boom, you're there and now you fight and you leave.

It's actually pretty interesting how they add this into the game. But at the same time, there's also an element of naval combat because there's a lot of other ships that are out in the seas and sometimes they might come attack you or you can choose to go attack them. Did you guys get involved in any naval combat while playing? Yeah, I did do naval combat one time on the boat and I could not figure it out. It was literally a book, like the storybook, and it says the other enemy turns to starboard i'm like great turns to starboard i'll close the distance by 50 meters right and you have choices between turn left turn right close distance at full speed close distance to half speed man the cannons all that stuff or man your stations i couldn't figure it out because

every time i man my stations i'm like okay is that how i shoot how do i shoot at them and i'd man the stations and it would shoot twice because i guess on that side of the boat i had two cannons and i missed three-fourths of my shots so finally i just went and said board the stinking ship and so every time i did naval combat now i just boarded the ship and just fought him that way because i could not figure out the boat combat i was so disappointed that the naval combat was through those scripted events yeah yeah i thought for sure i was going to be controlling my boat and moving it and clicking on a spell bar or something. And the fact that it was purely storyboard,

I found very disappointing. It was disappointing. You don't have to flesh this ship combat out, like Assassin's Creed Black Flag or anything like that. But just shoot two cannonballs, man. Make it a little arcade game or something. I mean, you are actively sailing in this game. You are exploring, and the way you get there is through your ship.

And you'll see other ships around, and sometimes they're traders, and sometimes they're pirates. And you've got places you're trying to get to. We just bragged about how much we enjoyed like the storybook thing but man for naval combat that just that's not where it just doesn't work yeah so it was it was a it was it was a kick in the gut a little bit to be like oh oh this is what this is like okay i mean make it a game of worms or stratego anything but that something yeah my uh very first naval combat me and the other ship got stuck in a cycle because i only had cannons

on the starboard side and apparently the other ship did too so both of us kept saying turn port side and we just kept like going back and forth and so like nothing was happening and i did what michael did we're finally i was like all right we'll just charge the other ship and then you know you actually get to fight like normal but yeah naval combat is weirdly underbaked compared to everything else in this game it's not weirdly underbaked it's dumb yeah it's dumb i was very disappointed it was the most disappointing part of this game for me. All right, now, it wouldn't be a good RPG if choices didn't matter. There are tons of endings. There's about a million things that can happen. This is the kind of game where once you're done, you get an update on what happened to all of these different characters.

So there's a ton of choices you can make. Is there anything in particular that kind of stood out in that system or anything you guys want to speak to? Anything you found funny or interesting with choices? The one thing I can say about the choices is this is the first true RPG game where I felt like there was so many dialogue options, but there was always truly one that I wanted to do. And I knew that these different dialogue options actually

meant something. Because when I was talking to a companion, it would give me several that were like, you ever done a personality test that they all look like they're kind of the same thing, but they're slightly worded differently. And you would just say this. And then you could tell because you get like morale points or whatever with that companion. I loved the fact that there were so many choices because in most games you're like that's confusing there's too many you knew that every single little thing mattered and no matter how insignificant i guarantee it affects your slide cards at the end of the game just because this game really thought that out it seems like it was really well baked i

might have gone on a little bit of a murder spree. I think he's like crazy about murdering. This game does allow you, this is, I really enjoy this with RPGs because it's like, play how you want to play. And this game has a lot of dialogue. And I,

there was some guy I'm, I'm in the underworld part of the city. I kind of enjoyed that part. It was CD and there's all these different characters down there and stuff and it's like one guy wants me to go talk to this guy because he's not paying him the money he's owed and stuff like that so it's like i go over and i talk to this guy and this dude gives me lip and i'm like oh no you're going down and it's a shop it's literally a merchant in the game and i'm like dude you don't talk to me that way and i attacked him and i killed him and all of his guards i looted his body i looted all of his guards bodies i robbed the heck out of his store and i go back to the guy that was like that sent me there and he's like i i heard that

you killed and enzio or whatever that's whatever the erizio or whatever the guy's name was down there and it's like i was like yeah i did You told me to solve the problem. The guy's like, well, that's one way to do it. Here's your reward. And I was like, whoa! I didn't break the game by doing this. And so this is one of those games where you can do whatever you want. You want to try to fight the queen of the city and wipe out her whole royal court? You can try. And if you do, you're not going to break the game at that point. No joke. I have another example that goes exactly with yours right now. Same guy, same merchant. I went and used my diplomacy and he backed down and gave me the money, right?

As I'm walking back through the undercroft or whatever it's called, the underbelly, I go back later on and I run into a random assassin down a dark hallway and he's like, hey, do you need anyone that needs killing? And I killing and i'm like yeah that guy because he gave me a lip and i paid the assassin to kill him after i already got the money from the uh from the quest giver just because i didn't like the way he gave me lip so many choices yeah oh yeah another option for stuff like this you can kill characters as opposed to letting them join your crew like i remember the probably the the funniest thing that i saw in this game because this game i don't want to say it's humorless there are occasional funny dialogue options but the game itself is very serious for the most part

but at one point i was told hey there's some people researching souls up on the roof of this building go check it out and help them out and I go and I start talking to the first person and they're like, oh yeah, I'm tinkering with this Audra and some copper. And my dialogue choice was, well, I don't know what you're doing, but I know that you're dangerous. And then it said attack in parentheses.

And so I had just saved the game. So I did that. I wiped them all out. Well, it turns out that it's Edwin who you can invite to be part of your party. So like there's stuff like that in this game where if you don't talk to the right person or if you don't do that quest or if you don't even want to let them join your party, you have those choices, yes or no. And sometimes that'll also change how your party members think of you or how they think of each other.

So all of that builds into the game as well. Um, all right, well, we're going to take a, a one last short break here and we're going to come back and we're going to talk about everything else that we left out and then jump into our regular segments.

Okay. Now that we are back, what else do you guys want to talk about? Let's all pick like one thing maybe that we didn't cover so far on the show. I I'll mention, cause Michael touched on it. I thought this was one of the coolest things in this game because this guy's, I don't know. I think he's like 10 to 12 hours into the game and you get into the, this place called Delvers row. That's like the hidden area under the city. And I've got all these quests going on.

And I'm like, dude, there is just so much going on in this game, man. Like, and I find this assassin whose name is rust. And he's like, do you need me to do anything?

Like you can hire me for special events or something, you know, he's being the whole sneaky thing. And I'm like, yeah, I do. And I had this quest where I had to go to this Island, Rob, this tribe of this, this conch of waves uh shell i think is what it was called and and then

bring it back to this guy because he was then going to help me do one of my missions that i needed to complete and i'm like yeah i do and one of the options was i need you to go get this conch this conch for me from this island and this is a full-fledged side quest that I could have easily spent an hour or two doing. And the guy was like, yeah, I can do that for you. It's going to cost you that. And don't get me wrong, it was pricey, but he's like, okay, come back to me tomorrow.

And no lie, I came back the next day and the guy hands me the side quest item. And I was just like, that's freaking cool, man. In a game that's a hundred hours long the fact that i can skip some of this stuff if i want to so that i can kind of just progress and see what happens i thought was a really neat feature just goes into the immersion these people really thought about making this game immersive that you're really in this world and you can make so many choices that your character want to make which i love um the only

thing that i want to touch on as far as the the the last piece is i just want to complain real fast we're not talking about time as a mechanic but there is one thing that just drove me nuts my crew was always starving and then we're always all their morale was always low i feel like i spent half of my 21 hours in this game buying food and at least a third of my money that would just up my crew's morale and i just it was just driving me crazy because it especially if you're at sea it goes like crazy i had 150 food items i went and spent like 13 000 gold on 150 plus three morale food i sailed no joke for a half an hour it was all gone and i was like why is this a mechanic this is just too much so i just wanted to complain about that real fast. I did find out later, though,

that if you actually go and engage pirates and kill pirates, it does much more to your morale than food would ever do. But I didn't know that until I paid the 13,000 gold price. Dude, winning a ship fight, my crew had one morale. Because in the beginning, this is going to leak into the one thing I thing i was gonna share which is the inventory system but in this game you can have as much food and water in your inventory but if you do not click and drag it under ship management no one on your crew is eating or drinking anything right so i had a crew that was mutinous and then i just i got into naval combat i think it gave me like 30 morale if if memory serves. Nothing will raise morale more than winning in combat in this game.

But the inventory system I found to just be sheer overload. Oh, man. Apologies to DOS2 for as much as I love in that game, it has exactly the same problem. You open up your inventory, and you've got 7,000 things. I don't know what they are based on the pictures. I have to mouse over a million things to try to sell or parse out. I have to click and drag 14 different food options for my crew. I've got fresh fruit. I've got hard tack.

I've got all these other kinds of meat for drink. I've got grog. I've got juice. I've got water. I've got all these things and you've got to manage so many of meat for drink. I've got grog. I've got juice. I've got water. I've got all these things. And you've got to manage so many things in this game. I found it to be just so hard to sort through. And goodness gracious, why is right click on items not equip? It gives you a pop-up with an explanation of that item. And if you right-click something twice, it puts a second pop-up window on top of the first one. It's really bad.

Why can you not just right-click a crown or a hat or whatever, and it goes on your head? That, to me, drove me wild. The inventory in this game was just a little much for me. It was a lot much, because not only did you have 500 different food items that's not counting the crafting items right so you've got leaves and mushrooms and i i mean legitimately there's probably 50 different things mixed in my inventory and i like to just see the all view and yes they do have tabs but it's inconvenient to have to click all these tabs to like filter everything and it's like why i have so many different it's inconvenient to have to click all these tabs to filter everything. And it's like, why?

I have 50 different things of food. I have 50 different things for crafting. I have 18 different types of armor, all of which are garbage. It was just like, dude, it was not done well. Well, and then I don't even know how this happened. Because the first half of the game, everything that that i alluded was going into my group inventory and then all of a sudden like halfway through the game i go somewhere and i'm looking at something i come across my personal inventory and there's things in there but randomly it just started putting stuff there it didn't do that before so now i've got all these other items in each individual person's inventory that have no

rhyme or reason on why they're not class specific. I have no idea why they're there. It was so confusing. All right. So going into our remaining segments for the rest of the show, how about some hot takes? Ready or not, that's a yes.

Ooh, we just did mine. My hot take was this is the most complicated and awful inventory system I've ever seen in a game. Maybe it's not a hot take since it's all there, but I guess throwing the gauntlet out there and actually saying it made it a hot take, but there we go. I do remember in DOS 2 checking my inventory and having severed rat tails. I don't remember seeing anything quite that bad in Pillars of Eternity, but I feel like there's a couple RPGs that haven't quite figured out inventory systems. My hot take is I think this is the most disappointing main quest line of all major RPGs. I'm talking either popular or critically beloved.

The main storyline in this is perfectly fine. I don't think it's bad, but I think that this game excels far better as it's just like an RPG immersion world that you can live in, as opposed to taking on this main quest line where you're following Aethys, you figure out what he's doing, and you can make some choices at the end i didn't find it to be ultimately terribly compelling so that was kind of my hot take is is for a game that's beloved by many i think it really shines outside of the main storyline as opposed to completing it yeah i get what about you josh what's what's your hot take my hot take is I'm trying to get a little bit more bold here. My hot take is this is the most complicated RPG I think I've ever played. And now don't get me wrong.

That is not necessarily a bad thing. If you want a world where you can just discover a gajillion different things, if you want a deep and I mean deep dive the lore, you can hover over all these words that they highlight, and you can probably read a novel's worth of backstory and lore and culture and all this stuff. And so I don't mean that as a negative necessarily, but the hot take is I don't think I have played, and I played a lot of rpgs in my day that is more complicated than pillars of eternity deadfire it's almost like it's what they were shooting for like let's make this as tactical and complicated as possible and for the people who like it they're gonna absolutely love it i think if you play this game for three to four hours it's not gonna change

a whole lot beyond that i mean you'll learn the systems better um but the game does not give you a lot of quality of life there are no quest markers anywhere you have to open your journal read figure out where to go you know things of that nature it is very complicated but if that's your thing this will be your all-time favorite game i have i have no. There are tons of RPG players who say, this is my favorite game of all time. I'm sure there's a lot. Honestly, because there's so much to dive into. Yeah. All right. Well, let's go into community reviews. Josh, what do the people think of this one? All righty. As we always do, you've kind of heard how we break down

the game and we always pull some reviews from the community to just kind of give some different perspective on things some good some bad that we can kind of know what jives with people and what doesn't so this first one comes in at 260 hours on record and it says yeah i stole the kraken's eye inside the kraken's eye in then i went to the innkeeper to ask him why it's called that. He was sad and mad and said someone stole the eye. It made me save scum. It made me care. It's a good game. I love attention to detail like that.

This is that freedom of choice that we talked about where you can legitimately do anything you want in this game. And that's such a cool feature in an RPG. But this one made me laugh because I remember the Kraken's Eye and it's just funny. So this next one is recommended. These are two short ones, so I pulled an extra one here. 40 hours on record and it says, solid game. Lots of dialogue choices with freedom to do whatever you want. Don't like that mouthy NPC giving you a quest? Kill him and take his loot. I spend most of my time pirating at sea and collecting all the stray cats in the world i have 10 cats so far plus some so many an imp and a ghost pig dude so many cats you can

all these cats running around the city and you just go up to them and you're like my cat now and you shove them in your backpack yeah and they but they give you like you can have like a pet active and it gives you perks for the pets that you have. All right. This next one is not recommended. 16 hours on record. And it says draggy, lengthy storylines, too much dialogue sometimes between the characters. Can't this game be made simpler to be played?

Gameplay is fine, but there's not much help with tutorials. And most of the time it's frustrating trying to figure out what's going on with everything in this game. A lot of unnecessary details which can be removed to make this game more enjoyable for players who just want to enjoy a simple RPG game. They're not wrong. That's why that's 100%. I picked this review because the complexity that is in this game is going to be off-putting for some people when i was getting ready to leave for the ashen ma to follow aethys there right before i left when i completed the mission right before that i want to say i spent about 20 to 25 minutes

reading dialogue and making dialogue options before I actually got to play again. And I don't mind games that have long cutscenes or a lot of dialogue options, but there was a couple times playing where I thought, okay, this is just going on a little too long. I get it, but I'm not reading a book. I'm trying to play a game and this is crossing a little into too much reading. I can empathize with that a little bit. It's pacing. You know what I mean?

Don't interrupt the pacing of a game so much that it's like, dude, I just want to play the game now. You know? So, all right. And then this last one. Oh, wait, no, not last one. We got one more after this. So this next one is not recommended. 16 hours on record.

And it says, this game has way too much stuff to do. It's overwhelming. It's too much open world. After you leave like the starting Island, there's too many places to go. I went straight to this major port city and there's way too much for me to do here.

Way too many people to talk to. And they all have so much to say. There's multiple maps just within the one city. It's a lot. It's a lot. That's true. Yeah, kind of, yeah. You know, and so... For better or worse.

Yeah, honestly. Okay. And then this last one is recommended. 75 hours on record. Hours one through six. I'm not a pirate. I'm a noble fighter ranger from the living lands out to stop a mad god we all go murderous well i'm not a pirate i'm a freaking bounty hunter those people have done wrong and i must bring them to justice no i don't know what they did and no i didn't ask hours 12 plus you're i'm a pirate i will say that I thought I was going to get a shortcut in the game by choosing to fight someone. So previously I said, my beep's not with you. Just let me through. I'm on a mission.

And they said, sure, you can go through. And finally it got to like the end place. And they're like, before you get past here, you got to go get this other item in another part of the map. And I was like, no, we're just going to fight. And then I just straight up murdered them and then it turned out you had to go get that item anyway i don't think i was reading the dialogue closely enough so then i still had to backtrack and do it anyway but oh so funny you thought you were saving time and then you caused yourself a faction problem that's great

yeah i just murdered some innocent people and then had to still do all the same stuff right all right so that's some of the reviews from the community now we're going to play a little game that we always do on our deep dives where we try to guess the actual overall rating of a game so we use the steam rating which is the scale of 0 to 100 in a percentage and just kind of try to guess where we think this game ends up as far as like all the all the reviews i don't want to play michael one last time yeah i don't want to i don't want to play michael one still rising we all remember yeah absolutely so michael you have to pick first my guess is one i'm kidding i'm

kidding i'll actually guess um please please don't be right please don't be right uh i i have integrity so i actually have to give this a shot. I feel like this is one of those games where people who love it are going to be very vocal and are going to review this game. I feel like people that hate this game are going to be very vocal and are going to hate this game. That being said, I think most people probably thought the game was all right and pretty good.

So I don't want to put it in the 90s i can't i'm gonna go high 80s just go round number 88 okay 88 for michael please josh is this when we say one and two yeah right let michael win please lose my my immediate reaction was 90 that's what I put down. I think being a sequel, most people who buy it played and liked the first. I think it's going to be pretty high. I think the complication is the only reason that it's going to bring it down a little bit. So I'm going to say 90. 90%.

And I guessed 84%. I thought it was probably going to wind up in that like, this is a good game, but it's not for everybody type game. Our winner and returning champion is Michael. All right. That's all we have time for today, folks. I want to thank you guys for watching. All right. Happy gaming.

The actual score was 87% all-time Steam reviews. Oh, so close. I got it close, too. So, Michael, let's see if you expected to win this one why don't you go ahead and take us into our next segment buddy hey Barath I must be hunting treasure cause I'm digging you

there you go I'll take it over last time I'm a pirate theme cause I went more pirate in this game I was gonna throw in a Hoana reference like Ho, go on a date. Oh, I like that. Yeah.

All right. Well, tell us about this segment, Michael. All right. So this next segment we call Make Love, Marry Murder. It's essentially our ranking system, not a ranking system, but a rating system. So make love means the game was all right. Everyone should maybe play it and check it out. You know know it's not one of those games you play forever that's what mary's for mary is a game that you are going to stick to you replay it every couple of years

because it's one of your all-time favorites you put it in your top 20 every time you're at one of those parties and you talk about all your top 20 games and then murder means hey this game sucks don't play it i think that's about right there we go that's about right yeah so michael since you're already talking let's let you go first what would you rate this game man i feel like this game it's there's really no make love it's because it's such a commitment like you either have to marry this game or you have to murder this game that being said i am making love to this game, which is so weird, because I think that it's not

an expensive game. I think we found it for like $3. It's normally around $20, but you can find it out there for around $5 if you want to look at GOG and stuff like that. Full price is $40, and you can buy it far, far cheaper. Yeah, and so here's my reasoning for this. Ultimately,

I loved the choices that you got i like i said earlier rarely do i play an rpg where i really feel like my dialogue choice is listed what i would want to do i played lawful good in this game except for that one murder thing which i just thought was funny uh so i did it um and i thought that was great so i love the fact that truly it very is very. The choices were incredible. Everything you do seems to matter. That being said, main story, even though I was compelled by it, what I did look and find out,

because today I was talking about progress with Paul, and he was like, oh, you're towards the end. And I was like, no, I just barely started this story. And then I realized I was actually halfway through the main story when I looked at a list of quests. I'm like, that's far too short for a game that you can spend 200 plus hours in if you really want to. And also the inventory was absolutely terrible. And one thing that really made me kind of gripe about it is that storybook thing we talked about earlier, right?

When you actually look and you've got the different choose your own adventure type thing. All of the main story stuff also used that. You never actually saw the gods in the first 20 hours of the game you never got to see any of that it was you talking to all these like main story things that i feel like could have been cut scenes maybe but there were no cut scenes and i'm thinking if i wanted to play dungeons and dragons i would play dungeons and dragons and not have to read all of this i'd like to see it because i'm playing a video game which to me worked great in the side stories, but not in the main quest line.

And I just can't marry it, even though I really liked the game. Those things were just too much for me. So it's a pretty mid-range make love to me, like right in the middle. I'd like to continue it, but I'll never play it after I beat it. What about you, Josh? I found... I was up and down on this game, to be honest with you. There were times where I really did not like the complexity. I'm a fan of CRPGs, which by nature mean they're more complex than just a normal console RPG or something like that. I found that it was almost a little too much at times.

And I kept asking myself, why? Why are you putting in all of these links that I have to hover over to find out that this god is the god of 18 different things? Why can't he just be the god of something? The names for the different factions and the races, none of that made sense to me. They weren't memorable or anything like that. So there was a lot of times where I just kind of went, I don't get it. Like, why are you doing this?

But then there were other times where I'm like, this is a really good RPG, you know? And so I was very up and very down on this. The game is beautiful. I like the settings. I like the scenery. I'm not a fan of the pause, the action type combat. I'd rather it be turn-based.

They added that later on. I did not play the turn-based because everything I read said this really slows the game down a lot. And I wanted to make sure we could get through as much of the game as possible to talk about it. So I went with the real-time pause, the action combat. So for me, it's a make love i mean i have to recognize that this is a really good rpg i i have to recognize that for a lot of people this is going to be an easy mary for them i just i find for my personal taste that there's better ones out there um this to me is like i want to be dos two and i'm not um you know And so I have to compare it to some of the

greats as well. But that doesn't take away from the fact that this is a very good video game. So for me, it's a make love. Yeah. For me, comparing it to DOS 2 makes a lot of sense. I think DOS 2 just does everything better for my personal preference i find the combat to work better i think the storylines are more interesting i like the companions a lot more in dos 2 this game your companions they're all right i like to dare a lot i thought he was a really fun tank to roll with uh but for me this is gonna be a make love i will say i think i played this about the worst way possible for for me and my gaming takes i think if this was a game that i just bought and i wasn't doing this podcast and i just played it for an hour a day just casually over time i could see this being a game that

sucks me in for a full year where i just still dabble in it and i play it and i want to get dlc and all that but because i had to truncate it and there were times that I was forcing myself to play, like I got to get a couple hours in today and I got to get a couple hours in tomorrow. And it started feeling a little too much like work. And so I think if I had played it differently, maybe it would end up as a make love. I think this game is dos two adjacent i think it's definitely worse but that's only because it's too detailed for me dos two i think finds like the the pendulum is a little more in the middle if you're more detail oriented you might prefer this one but i'm gonna say make love as well which is weird because i think we're all saying the same

thing you're gonna play it 100 plus hours or three and quit there's not a whole lot of like yeah honestly i think that's that's hitting the nail on the head right there you're either really gonna get sucked in or you're gonna go this isn't really my cup of tea right but yes go try it right buy a steam key on a third-party website for six dollars you very well might find your favorite game of all time you can get the first one for free a lot of times and i you know there there are different ones but this game is very similar to the first one at least what i played now again i only played about six hours in the first one but every it's all the same it's the same mechanics the same story like the flavor it's still pizza

you know what i mean some of the same characters right yeah exactly and so i would say dive into the first one give that a shot because usually you can pick that up for free or like a buck if you find that you like it this one by all accounts from from most of the reviews and people say this is a good one like the second one's better i would say though here's a cool thing about that to josh's point go do that because if you love it you can import your character which is the same character you play in the sequel to the sequel so if you love it play the first one get the second one to import your character more of the same yep there you go all right well guys we only have one more segment let's go to our leaderboard and see where this Backs up. All right.

If this is your first time joining us on a deep dive, we have an overall master leaderboard. Every time we finish a deep dive as a three person consensus, we have to figure out where does this game go? Is it going to fall into our top 10? Is it going to be down in the middle? Is it going to be all the way on the bottom? going to be down in the middle? Is it going to be all the way on the bottom? We currently have a list of 92 games that we have done deep dives on. If you want to take a look, the full list is at multiplayerpodcast.com. Just scroll down a little

bit there on the main page. We've got some stuff in here like Disco Elysium at number five. We've got Hearthstone at 16. We got near automata at 33 further down the list we got some stuff like the saints row reboot at 59 we've got phasmophobia at 71 we've got first spoken at 81 and so on and so forth so looking at this one being three make loves i'm guessing we're going to be somewhere kind of in the middle third maybe i've been there's two games i've been i've been really trying to prepare for this part i i even cheated before the show and started peeping at the leaderboard which is on our website by the way multiplayerpodcast.com if you want to check it out there's two games that are jumping out to

me as like comparison type games one One is Fallout New Vegas at 31. And then the other one is Lost Ark at 43. In my brain, I kind of want to compare aspects of this game with both of those. So my brain says it's somewhere in that range. That's so funny because my brain is putting it at 35. Okay. Which is a little bit further down. Which is kind of in between those two.

I would rather play this. I'm looking down. I'm like, this is a lot like Lost Ark, but Lost Ark kind of sucks now. I was the lowest on V Rising for all of us. I feel like I'd rather play this than a lot of our deep dives. I'm recently like Evil West and Steel Rising and Ibn Ab. So I'm like, hey, but Nier Automata was kind of better. So kind of below that and above Evil West.

Boom. That's where I landed. Where you at, Paul? I guess you guys are a little higher on it than me. I would have had it down in the late 40s. For me personally, I'd have it somewhere around Tribes of Midgard, Far Cry 5, Raft, High on Life, which I guess, politically correct,

you're not supposed to bring that up anymore. That deep dive, I'm glad we got that one out fast before there was any controversy. Yeah, so that's kind of what I was thinking. So it sounds like we're probably going to land somewhere mid to late 30s as a compromise. I would have a bit of heartburn putting

it above Evil West, but if you want to put it 37, I'd be fine with that that i think that's a good spot no that's perfect yeah that's okay that's not too low for you guys i i don't think so at all i think that's a really good landing spot um it's a good game i mean it you know yeah and i know 37 sounds like a lot but we have covered a lot of games yeah so my thing is i just didn't i would have had a heartburn if we'd have put it below v rising and lost ark so i'm happy where it's at yeah that was kind of lost ark was my like my no-go like it can't be under that game yeah and so anything above that

at 43 i think 37 is perfect lock it in baby buck it, no game's taken a bigger beating on the leaderboard than Rainbow Six Siege. We have it at 38 now. That game we had in the top 10 for a long time. We played a lot of Rainbow Six Siege, and it was a lot of fun with friends. There was a lot of frustration. But I think over time, we've kind of just gone... We've soured. Well, there's better games out there, too.

Do hackers get that game, too? Oh, yeah. Hackers get everything, man. One games out there, too. Do hackers get that game, too? Oh, yeah. Hackers get everything, man. One third of people are hacking. That's what we learned on the last episode. Yeah, go listen to that one. It's fun if you didn't listen to it. All right.

We will lock this one in then at 37. I think that's fair. And that wraps everything up here for today. We want to say thank you once again. Thank you so much to Toro for going legendary. If you want to pick a game for us to play you can do the same as him or if you want to support at a lower amount just check it out at multiplayer squad.com you'll get bonus episodes no matter what tier you pick along with a shout out on the show also find us on socials everywhere at multiplayer pod and then our next

deep dive game is going to be in two weeks. It is going to be the Resident Evil 4 remake, which our Discord, I think like half the people bought and played it. There's been a lot of talk on Resident Evil 4. Yeah, there has. I've actually been playing it a lot. I'm ready to go, guys. Let's just record it right now. Yeah, this will be one of the few games that I binge, not towards the end of our two-week cycle, but at the

very beginning. I'm going to play it tonight. Oh, I've been waiting. I only played the first 20 minutes, but now that this is recorded, I'm going to jump both feet in on Resident Evil 4. I'm so excited. Alright, and then in the meantime, of course, check out our episodes that release every Monday, Thursday, and

Saturday. And until next time, happy gaming. I was going to have some pirate thing here, but that's, dang it. Bye. Oh boy, I get to follow that. All right, see you everybody. Bye.