As I stand on the deck of my ship, sailing across the Southern reaches of Eora and searching for a fitting place to dock among the archipelago, it feels like I’m on a tremendous adventure. It’s a feeling that Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire captures incredibly well, giving you so much freedom that playing it feels like a round of Dungeons & Dragons – something that’s usually difficult to capture in the confines of a video game.
Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, released on Steam on Tuesday, is Obsidian’s follow up to its successful first installment in 2015. It’s part of a computer role-playing game revival over the last four years, which has brought experiences similar to classic games like Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale to modern hardware.
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One of the biggest improvements that modern technology has brought to Obsidian’s newest adventure is a living, breathing world that gives a real sense of existing beyond the player character. It’s an active world that forces players to improvise as it changes depending on their choices, just like a classic tabletop adventure.
“A lot of what we try to do is be the dungeon masters for everyone playing the game,” says Justin Britch, lead producer at Obsidian. “We’re trying to do our best job anticipating everything players are going to want to do and offering reasonable outcomes for people who want to solve things in new ways.”
Many of the developers behind Deadfire have deep roots in pen-and-paper role playing games, so it’s natural that they want to give the player as many options as possible when exploring Eora, the games expansive world. “It always feels cool when you have a problem that becomes worse over time when you don’t deal with it right away,” says Britch. “There are unexpected consequences for nearly everything you do, and everything you don’t do.”
Non-player characters in Deadfire have their own schedules and missions, things change as the sun goes down in the evening, and big decisions – freeing a monster from an underground cage, for example – can have huge repercussions for nearby villages. The way you choose to interact with the world will change how it operates.
The same goes for major story objectives; your decisions will alter the world in ways you may not expect. Unlike other RPGs, little is off the table in Deadfire – even important non-playable characters can bite the dust, altering your quests in the process.
During an early segment in the game, my companions and I approach an island fort while hunting down a pirate named Benwith that we tussled with in the past. We have plenty of options to choose from as we approach. We could talk to the dominant faction there about the whereabouts of Benwith (who has taken over the fort), attack the faction upfront, try to stealthily locate him, or explore the area further for more options.
We decide to snoop around the structure more and end up in a damp corner of a dark dungeon looking for sympathetic pirates who may assist us with our mission. As we creep past a number of guards, we find a group of what the game calls ‘dirty naked men’ locked in a cell. After speaking to them, we learn that they are pirates who have fallen out of favour with Benwith and been thrown behind bars.
I have my thief stealthily finagle a key from nearby guards and the (now clothed) men give us the location of Benwith’s ship. But before we can reach the ship, we need to make quick work of its crew through combat – the result of most tabletop encounters.
Deadfire uses a real-time-with-pause combat system just like the classic titles it emulates; you can pause the fighting to choose the action of every party member before letting them loose on the enemy. The game also has a speed slighter so you can slow down combat and choose actions in real time, fight the traditional way and pause to pick moves, or have AI handle the moves of the other four members of your group in faster, more focused fighting.
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Once I’ve dealt with the crew, my party makes its way onto Benwith’s boat and rings the ship’s bell, drawing the pirate out from his fortified position. As soon as the encounter begins, he tries to barter for his life. “If you don’t deal with Benwith in the early parts of the game, things will go differently,” Britch says. “He’ll be elsewhere in the world, you’ll have to deal with him and the fallout of the person who asked you for help.”
I cut Benwith down where he stands, knowing that he will only cause more trouble for me down the line. But no matter what I decide to do with him, my choice affects the rest of Deadfire’s world appropriately. A different choice would have altered future missions and relationships with different characters in different ways, causing a chain reaction.
That’s what makes Deadfire so special. All kinds of actions, from big to small, can echo throughout the handcrafted map, leaving you to deal with, and adapt to, the consequences. “We understand how powerful it is to be able to express yourself through a character,” Britch says. “If someone wants to be a holy saint, they can play that way. If they want to be a horrible dog kicker, they can also do that. It creates a lot of challenges on the development side but is worthwhile to see players living out their adventures however they choose.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
