Witnessing a story that actually unfolds and shifts based on many different decisions you take from the very character creation screen is certainly impressive. What makes the game far from being memorable or interesting to explore is the lack of a strong writing that keeps the player hooked. Thorough the story the main drive is almost always chasing different magical mcguffins to make your character over powered and renowned, doing quests from people you choose to be friendly with as opposed as those you antagonize, which is a very cool concept.
The issue with this is that there is a clear lack of depth since, once you betray or antagonize a member of a faction in some occasions, you are going to fight that same faction thorough the rest of the game, making someone willingy to play like a smart villain who carefully plays factions against each other very hard to do since there are few occasions and with very little consequences where you can actually manipulate the people around you, even with high stats in this game version of speech check. For example, at some point my character made a sound argument, recognized by most of his allies, which had the consequence of winning a huge battle but while downplaying other important allies who were reasonably acting like daft twats and not helping the war effort at all. In return, these allies got so pissed that I was never, ever, allowed to attempt a meaningful strategy with any of their troops, no matter how reasonable the situations were they just acted like I murdered their families instead of doing the right (in perspective) thing.
So the story shifts based on your decisions but also the minor decisions you don't take are gatekept hard from you in a manner almost inconsistet in a game where you play for a faction of cunning evildoers. In fact, there were multiple instances where two armies battling each other decided on the spot to make a truce just to attack my party because I was nearby and my existence was more important to them than the actual war they were fighting. Bloody hell.
This sounds way bigger than it actually is, the game is still pretty fun to explore but the real deal breakers come in the form of: 1. bland character writing, none of the members of your party (with the exception of maybe two who were not really interesting but at leastly smartly written and very idiosincratic) have any sort of humanity or meaningful interaction with the player character of among themselves, nothing like dragon age origins, baldur's gate, even persona and mass effect...; 2. there is just no hook, the whole game revoles around lore, worldbuilding and magical shenanigans, which might be fine for people deep into studying fantasy stuff for their own reasons but it lacked the quirkiness, the mystery, the symbols, the characters and the themes that make actually great fantasy stories memorable. It played like any standard fantasy world you are expected to know with very few little twists and none of that weird enough to function as the hook for the whole game (Kyros and Tunon certainly kept me interested but I got bored with the Spires and Oldwalls and Banes and Edicts and Archons and Beastmen pretty fast.)
It certainly an improvement over Pillars of Eternity 1, at least the writing is a little more focused on characters rather than just worldbuilding, but it still falls far from the heights of masterfully written rpgs.
Edit: Oh yeah also lots of character's quests and important stuff about the world are in DLCs because Paradox.jpeg
The issue with this is that there is a clear lack of depth since, once you betray or antagonize a member of a faction in some occasions, you are going to fight that same faction thorough the rest of the game, making someone willingy to play like a smart villain who carefully plays factions against each other very hard to do since there are few occasions and with very little consequences where you can actually manipulate the people around you, even with high stats in this game version of speech check. For example, at some point my character made a sound argument, recognized by most of his allies, which had the consequence of winning a huge battle but while downplaying other important allies who were reasonably acting like daft twats and not helping the war effort at all. In return, these allies got so pissed that I was never, ever, allowed to attempt a meaningful strategy with any of their troops, no matter how reasonable the situations were they just acted like I murdered their families instead of doing the right (in perspective) thing.
So the story shifts based on your decisions but also the minor decisions you don't take are gatekept hard from you in a manner almost inconsistet in a game where you play for a faction of cunning evildoers. In fact, there were multiple instances where two armies battling each other decided on the spot to make a truce just to attack my party because I was nearby and my existence was more important to them than the actual war they were fighting. Bloody hell.
This sounds way bigger than it actually is, the game is still pretty fun to explore but the real deal breakers come in the form of: 1. bland character writing, none of the members of your party (with the exception of maybe two who were not really interesting but at leastly smartly written and very idiosincratic) have any sort of humanity or meaningful interaction with the player character of among themselves, nothing like dragon age origins, baldur's gate, even persona and mass effect...; 2. there is just no hook, the whole game revoles around lore, worldbuilding and magical shenanigans, which might be fine for people deep into studying fantasy stuff for their own reasons but it lacked the quirkiness, the mystery, the symbols, the characters and the themes that make actually great fantasy stories memorable. It played like any standard fantasy world you are expected to know with very few little twists and none of that weird enough to function as the hook for the whole game (Kyros and Tunon certainly kept me interested but I got bored with the Spires and Oldwalls and Banes and Edicts and Archons and Beastmen pretty fast.)
It certainly an improvement over Pillars of Eternity 1, at least the writing is a little more focused on characters rather than just worldbuilding, but it still falls far from the heights of masterfully written rpgs.
Edit: Oh yeah also lots of character's quests and important stuff about the world are in DLCs because Paradox.jpeg