

This frees Obsidian to write mountains of text without having to worry about recording dialogue for it all, and the result is a vast amount of detail.Īs characters speak, their body language is described, giving you a sense of their personality.

There’s some voice acting, from companions and in important story quests, but mostly you have to use your imagination. Page upon page of superbly written, vivid, descriptive text. The story in Pillars of Eternity is told largely through text. Waidwen’s Legacy, it seems, may be connected to your own predicament. However, this being an RPG, it’s not long before their fate becomes entwined in that of the Dyrwood itself. A useful power you might think, but an encounter with an old Watcher who has been driven mad by it sends your hero on a quest to discover who or what caused their awakening, in order to reverse the damage. They implant animal souls into children, power automated war machines with them, and perform all manner of bizarre, ungodly experiments that, understandably, have given them a bad reputation.Īfter surviving a deadly magical storm known as a bîaŵac, your hero’s own soul is ‘awakened’, turning them into a Watcher: a person who can use souls to see people's’ past lives. This mirrors the battle between science and religion throughout our own history, although animancers do a lot worse than tell people the world is round and clone farm animals. Animancers are convinced their work will put an end to the curse, but others think it’s an affront to the gods. When your hero arrives in the Dyrwood, a mysterious curse called Waidwen’s Legacy is causing babies to be born without souls, which becomes an important part of the main quest. Instead, the cultural tension comes from a controversial science called animancy, which involves the manipulation of souls. There is, naturally, some animosity between certain races and factions, but it’s rarely at the forefront. The Dyrwood is fairly multicultural, and I’m glad Obsidian didn’t go down the road of making racism a big part of their world, which is a fantasy trope we've seen before in modern RPGs. Though players can make any choice they want, or even load their previous Pillars of Eternity save file, beginners might want to stick with either Fair and Balanced or Benevolent Soul.People you meet will react to your race, class, and background, both positively and negatively, so the choices you make when you create your character have some meaning beyond personal preference and what you want your hero to look like. These different histories represent major decisions made in the previous Pillars of Eternity game, and the choice will affect some of the dialog options and plot developments in Deadfire. The character creation tool in Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire works a lot like any other: over a series of steps, players will choose everything from their sex and race to their character's background and weapon proficiency.īefore diving into those details, however, players will first be tasked with speaking with The Pallid Knight known as Berath and choosing their given legacy. Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Character Creation Process It's within that the player can craft a warrior of their own design, making use of a number of different menus that control everything from race, cultural origin, job, and weapon proficiency. There's a whole lot to see and do in Obsidian Entertainment's newest RPG release Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire, but before players can take to the open world and start swinging their weapons at passersby, they'll have to first go through the character creation process.
