![]() You can even buy new ships, although they're very expensive. You can buy new cannon, new hulls, new sails and a new wheel, and upgrade interiors for more comfort. Ships need to be crewed, you see, and crews come with various skills and experience, which improve the more storms they weather and battles they see (and survive). Consider the sailing again: it's not only a freeing way to travel but also an entire additional side-game to tinker with and think about. ![]() It's another layer in a game of layers, and within each is considerable depth. The ominous bells which precede a celestial whisking away. A cipher can enter the minds of sailors and forcefully increase morale a ranger can send a bird to scout ahead and see how long the storm will last or a druid can affect a tempest directly. Characters can use spells or abilities to aid in seeing out a storm at sea, for example. What's more, these sections reinforce the game's tabletop role-playing roots, as players are offered choices above and beyond their rote skill tree to solve special situations. I can't imagine an encounter with the gods being anywhere near as dramatic when explicitly put before you, isometrically. They are a perfect vehicle for delivering moments otherwise hard to realise in the game and to see them from an imaginative perspective. This continues in vignettes dotted throughout the adventure handling surprise encounters, environmental puzzles and more. Meanwhile drums thump, sailors shout and cannons roar - it's a story brought to life. Instead of pushing little boats around I instead choose orders listed on a page of a book - full speed ahead, turn to port, fire cannons, etc. Naval warfare is handled in a similar way. Take the string of events outlined above: getting to the snake chief involved lots of typical RPG battling and exploration, but talking to the gods happened via a kind of storybook mechanic combining narrative and illustration. What's so marvellous about the way Pillars of Eternity 2 handles the quantity is the way it breaks proceedings up and varies them. Queen Onekaza II is brilliant, like a Caribbean-styled Galadriel peering into your soul. There's an ocean's worth of places to explore, and sealing them on all sides by the sea makes these places discrete little pockets of adventure with their own styles, stories and themes. By taking the sequel to sea, Obsidian has found not only a sunny and ebullient new setting - refreshingly based in a non-white, non-human culture - but a way to spread the whole world out. To say there's a lot going on in Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire would be an understatement. Then as if to compound the issue, I'm attacked by pirates. I'm like the piggy in the cosmic, and not-so-cosmic, middle - everyone wants a piece of me. I need to sail my report back to the queen of this Caribbean collection of islands to fill her in, lest her many rival powers discover a weakness they can exploit for further gain. My feet barely touch the deck of my ship before I'm whisked away again by the other gods, a strange bunch, who want to know what their trampling brother is up to.
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