[Click here to start from the first progress log]

Something that’s really starting to bug me is how everyone speaks with a bunch of made up words in addition to casually referencing lore that force you to use the Tyranny-esque tooltips to figure out what the hell they’re actually saying. The made up stuff in Planescape: Torment worked because you could figure out what it all meant through context, but there’s so much thrown at you here that it comes across as needlessly self-indulgent more often than not. Despite that and several minor irritations, though, I’m having a decent enough time with Pillars of Eternity 2. Some of the current praise for it will eventually prove to be overblown, and there’s no way the god-awful ship combat will be looked back upon as anything other than an awkward mistake of a feature, but I have a real soft spot for games like this.

First, the good

The first Pillars had a unique combat system, but Pillars 2 uses a much more standard RTwP combat system, and my created character skimped on some stats that have rendered him unusually squishy because I didn’t know what I was doing. Point being, my preferred method of solving problems relies on stealth, thievery, and good old-fashioned assassination rather than open combat, and you’d better believe that I had a good time blowing up a baddie with a trapped harpsichord. This isn’t the kind of thing you can do all the time, obviously, but it still brought a smile to my face.

And now for some complaints

Ship fights basically play out in a CYOA section. You can ram your ship into theirs and fight them in standard combat, but I wasn’t nearly strong enough at this point to take on the entire enemy crew like that, which means that my only real option (early on, at least) was to indulge the CYOA stuff. It’s horrible; I’m all for descriptive text and imagination and whatnot, but the whole thing is repetitive and frustrating.

I had to sneak into a pirate fort to blow up that guy with the harpsichord, and this went perfectly at first. Then someone irritated me and I ended up slaughtering about 15-20 pirates in the main area without any penalty whatsoever. That made it all the more jarring when trying to slaughter other groups of pirates who were in my way resulted in an alarm bell being sounded (apparently some of the pirates have telepathy), which wasn’t conducive to the whole stealth part of the equation. I get that massacres aren’t really a stealth tactic, but inconsistency like this bugs me.

Yeah, I think this short video of the pathfinding freaking out speaks for itself.

After reaching a new area, I ended up kinda-sorta allying with one of two quarreling families, mostly to have an in allowing me to rob them both the moment an opportunity presents itself. This family has an underground vault area, so clearly I had to sneak in there. Let me just say this: the sneaking mechanics in this game are really weird. Sometimes the guards here became hostile when they saw me, while other times they had no problem with me sneaking around. It seems to be totally random, though it might have something to do with the first two guards never becoming hostile. It’s hard to work around the mechanics when the mechanics can’t seem to make up their mind about the rules, and it’s ruining thievery for me.

[Click here to go to Pillars of Eternity 2 log #1]

The post Pillars of Eternity 2: Progress Log #2 appeared first on Killa Penguin.