Maybe I’m just getting old and jaded, but this doesn’t recapture the magic of the Infinity Engine games. After about forty hours I find myself struggling to stay interested.
What this game – and its predecessor – needs is a villain with a clear motivation and a setting you can understand without reading pages and pages and pages of exposition. I don’t remember Baldur’s Gate or even Planescape being this opaque, and I played those games when I was eleven.

It’s not even that the world of Deadfire isn’t, or can’t be, interesting. It’s a matter of presentation. Of finding ways to make the player immediately understand the stakes even if he doesn’t quite understand the world around him yet. Baldur’s Gate 2 did this with Irenicus: A mysterious mage who held you hostage and tortured you in a dark dungeon filled with sick experiments. Boom. Instant motivation to go after him and find out who he is and what he wants with you.

A rebellious god stomping across a continent can make for an interesting antagonist, but I need a reason to care. A reason that is presented to me upfront, not hidden away behind countless encyclopedia entries that I need to read in order to understand the game’s setting (seriously, I feel like half the text in a given dialogue is a blue link that leads me to some long-winded piece of exposition). I’m only ever told that I should go after Eothas, I never feel like it. Instead, I’m off doing side quests, which admittedly is fun for a while, but even that starts to become stale, because they’re not that interesting and a game of eternal side questing doesn’t have any stakes.

But maybe I’m focusing on the wrong thing, as I was told the meat of the game isn't in the story, but in the various factions you can join. And while they are kind of interesting, I’m honestly struggling to keep track of their names, ideals and how they stand in relation to each other. This, again, is down to their presentation. They are rarely shown to me in an organic way that lets me intuit who they are and what they’re about. The evil pirates are not seen doing evil pirate things, the imperialistic invaders don’t have a heavy and oppressive presence in the city streets. Rather, to learn about them, I need to go to each of their headquarters and talk to one of their sparsely characterized representatives so s/he can tell, tell, tell, tell me all about their philosophy, goals and history (in dialogue nodes with tons of blue links leading to yet more encyclopedia entries that I need to read to understand the context).
Contrast this with the factions in Baldur’s Gate 2. Did you need to exhaust several extensive dialogue trees to understand who the Cowled Wizards were? No, the second you tried casting a spell and they teleported out of nowhere and nuked you to oblivion, you knew all you needed to know about them. Characterization through in game events, rather than endless exposition.

If only the faction mechanics were robust, like in New Vegas, where building up a reputation with one faction inevitably meant alienating another, where being a legionnaire or an NCR ranger actually earned you staunch allies and terrible enemies. In my Deadfire playthrough I tried sucking up to the pirate faction, doing all their quests in the hope that the game would, you know, eventually treat me like a pirate, condemning me for murdering, pillaging and being an all-round ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, but aside from a few throwaway lines here and there, no one seemed to care. I could still waltz into the headquarters of the trade federation – the pirates’ mortal enemies – and have a cup of coffee with their leader. It’s perfectly possible to achieve a maxed-out reputation with each faction, even if, logically, this shouldn’t be possible. This is because there’s little to no interplay between them. Rarely are you tasked with killing a certain NPC for the pirates and protecting that same NPC for the trade guys. And if you are, nothing much comes of it. At one point, the vile pirate king sent me to a remote island to slaughter a village of natives (who are a faction in and of themselves). The rest of the natives in the game didn’t care, but retained their friendly disposition towards me because I had once helped one of them retrieve his lost puppy.

The reputation system in general is wonky and weird. Why is it possible to build up a reputation for being both cruel and benevolent at the same time? Why do all [cruel] and [aggressive] dialogue options boil down to being a cartoonishly evil roflvillain stealing children’s lunchboxes and threatening the elderly? Why does the game assume that if I choose a [benevolent] dialogue option, I’m actually being benevolent and not merely putting on a show to trick whoever I’m talking to? Why do all [stoic] dialogue options boil down to simply [saying nothing], even in situations where it makes no sense to keep quiet? Why are [clever] dialogue options always anything but? Why don’t [passionate] dialogue options let me choose what I’m passionate about? Why is it [rational] to surrender your gold and run away from a bunch of thugs you could handily wipe the floor with?
The main character’s dialogue choices are so poorly conceived and counterintuitive that I often wish I could choose none of them. I guess [saying nothing] isn’t such a bad choice after all.

It's a shame that Deadfire is plagued by such bad writing and design, because I like its beautiful, hand drawn backgrounds, its Caribbean inspired Deadfire Archipelago (a really cool and original setting for an RPG), the island hopping, the tomb diving, the massively improved itemization and even the combat (which was the first game’s biggest weakness), with its assortment of unique and hand placed encounters that are sure to be a challenge for even the most experienced cRPG afficionado.
Like many others, I would probably give Deadfire a mixed rating if Steam allowed it, but as it is, I can’t say I had enough fun with it to recommend it.

I have genuinely tried to not even love, but at least like this game. The first one was incredible, thick with atmosphere, introducing a fascinationg world, dark, somehow new, filled with memorable characters and an amazing questlines. I enjoyed every minute of it, went back to play it again and again. But Deadfire? After spending 85 hours exploring it I just... stopped. Couldn't force myself to play anymore, couldn't be bothered about almost anything. And I couldn't wrap my head around why exactly that happened. I'm a seasoned RPG player, I loved the first game, what was wrong?
And I think my answer would be a mix of atmosphere, tedious mechanics and the game just being too big and too empty. And sadly, the writing.

First, the atmosphere. It was... not what I expected after the first game. The murky, cold Dyrwood with celtic-inspired language, folklore and rather dark history was something I instantly fell in love with. The hollow children, the bloody cults, the entire deal with animancy... it was fascinating, sometimes oppressive, sometimes chilling. With a villain I was both afraid of and intrigued by. White March took us farther north, offered something else, but bringing back the nice memories of Icewind Dale. And Deadfire? Well... Carribean-like setting, pirates, sea battles and very political commentary about colonialism was not what I expected. At all. I tried to be open minded, but it just felt... off, like somebody took all that darkness and eerieness and replaced it with something lighter and more adventurous. Not my cup of tea.

Second, the mechanics and the open world. Okay, the concept was neat. Your own ship, hiring your own crew and exploring the map with many hidden places, even undiscovered islands you could name yourself. I loved it for the first 20 hours, not gonna lie... but then it turns into a chore. If you're the type of player who likes to explore everything, my condolences, you have hours of boring, repetitive and honestly tedious sailing minigame before you. The map is massive, you have to manage resources to keep the crew's morale high enough, but the worst part is that most of the time what you find around the world is not even that rewarding. After hours of clicking around the world map you click some more around a dusty scrap of land with a single dungeon on it. Or get a quest if you're lucky. The sea battles minigame is... ugh, not very fun. You either board the enemy ship, sustaining some damage to your own vessel, or play an annoying text-based battle with a lot of math. Needless to say, I wasn't a fan.

And last but not least - the writing. It was... weird. The tone was completely different from the previous game, a bit of political commentary about colonnialism and cultural clash of various nations. Also, factions, a lot of factions with unclear agendas playing a local game of power. Again, sounds nice, but I found the storyline simply hard to follow. Who wanted what, who had what opinions on who, why were my companions upset about me talking to someone, who are all these people. To understand it, you need to read a lot of exposition - way too much. And that comes from someone who usually snorts every single bit of lore like cocaine. I was bored. I didn't get why should I care about any of these factions and if they were even a part of the main story or not. Two years after playing the last time, I can't remember a single thing, nothing sticks. I tried to load the save, hoping I would remember anything and... nothing. Not a single thing.
Characters were another problem. Somehow the people I loved in the first game seemed so different in the second one, and there seemed to be less interactions with them. The reputation system was neat, and some of their banter was funny, but most of the time it felt like they hated each other. And - in my opinion - the best written character, Ydwin, didn't even make it to the game as a full companion. She is the only reason I still decided to try to finish the game.

There were good things too - it's a well-made game, technically works great, fighting system was upgraded, graphics and sound are still fantastic, but the three things I wrote about just ruined the whole thing for me. Slowly, steadily, they turned the game into a chore instead of a fun way to spend my evenings. If you're looking for something similar to the first game - don't play it, it's completely different. If you're looking for something new, unique and don't mind a lot of politics or exploration of a bit empty world - go for it.
It just wasn't for me.

Massive upgrade over the first in terms of presentation, every other point in the game's favor comes with an asterisk. If you don't care about how this compares to Pillars 1 and just want a pirate rpg, its is pretty good.

-The story presents alot of neat ideas and involves alot of likable characters; but as strong as the initial thrust of the writing is, the follow-through is lacking. Character writing is inconsistant, and most storylines either, don't go anywhere, or conclude abruptly without ever being revisted. In particular, the main storyline has clear underlying religous themes, where you're literally following god to the edge of the known world, only to cross paths with pariahs and pilgrims who are doing the same thing, only more metophorically. There are maybe two more encounters of any consequence with the Dawnstars, then the game ends. The mouse-over word to get a description in plain english is really cool and I wish more games did stuff like that.

-The removal of the Vancian spell casting systems for Wizards, Priests, and Druids and inclusion of a greater number of active abilities for previously auto-attack heavy classes like Fighters, Rangers, and Thiefs, look good on paper. But the way both of these changes were handled results in every classes functioning the same as every other class, nothing has a distinct identity, and party composition is superficial. Power levels and the Empower mechanic are cool, but even on higher difficulties, are pointless most of the time.

-The world map is large and arranging content in islands means distinct sets of content 'ABC' and 'DEF' can be approached in whatever order the player wants, while individual scenarios, 'A', 'B', 'C', are can be deliberately arranged, so devs may confidently make assumptions about the player, and tailor content based on those assumptions. But most islands are empty with a single combat encounter and nothing else, and all of the major 'adventure' islands (save two endgame islands) play a role in a quest line that starts somewhere else, so there's no reason to explore the high seas on your own.

Pillars 1's main strength as a game was how precise everything felt. Pillars 2 is bigger and brasher, but everything about it feels so much less thought out than the equivalent in the first game.

I was going to do a review of this game a day or so after it launched, but I decided to put some more playing time in before I gave my opinion.


Having done so, I can definitely see a change in my attitude.

TL;DR – Visually nice, familiar gameplay to the first. Fun to be had sailing and being a pirate, good class system, and more than likely get many hours out of it. However, what doesn’t work are things like the main story in both quality and length, fairly flat companions, performance issues, many many bugs, a fairly static, lifeless world outside of the sea, and a drop off in motivation once you reach a certain point, which leads to balance (both gold and difficulty) being out of whack

A few hours after I started playing, a friend of mine asked me “How is it?” and I replied (something like) “Yeah mate, it’s really good so far.” However, after many, many hours playing I realised that whenever I’d send them a message describing something about the game, it had almost always been something negative. Which is a shame, because we both loved Pillars of Eternity.

Firstly, I will say that visually it’s very nice. The animations are really nice, the voice acting is decent although very occasionally you’ll hear a line presented so, so poorly that it’s really jarring. At first I hated the ship to ship combat mechanics, but after many hours I now think it’s a nice little change of pace from the norm, and sailing around being a pirate is a lot of fun, for longer than you’d think. On a side note, I love those sea shanties. There are, as you might expect, a lot of classes and even more options with the multiclass system, which I find a great addition.

Now, with all that said, why the negative review?

Well, firstly you’ll notice I haven’t mentioned the story yet. Considering it’s a CRPG genre, the main story is (for me) way, way too short. I never felt a sense of mystery with it, nor awe. It felt to me like long side mission at best. I am also on the fence, as it where, regarding your companions. Apart from a few lines of dialogue and a couple of instances, they really didn’t impress me as fully fleshed out characters, that were a part of this world, and story. Each main companion has a little ‘quest’ you can do for them but most were very short and had no impact on anything (save one). Each time I’d finish a companion quest I’d think “Oh, is that…it?”.

As for side missions, there are enough to keep you going for many hours, and some are quite good. This, however, leads me into something of a complaint. The number of times I’ve encountered bugs in this game, is frankly embarrassing. I like to explore the world in RPGs before embarking on the main objective, and in Deadfire, if you go somewhere to explore, but you haven’t spoken to an NPC to initiate a quest there, it can bug out entirely. This has happened to me on a number of occasions. There is also a problem I’ve had a LOT, where left-clicking the mouse button works, unless you click on any part of the UI. Then it just doesn’t register, rendering the Save, Load, Quit to Desktop functions unavailable, as well as disabling your ability to move anything in your inventory. Using F8 for quickloading does not fix the problem, so you’re forced to ALT-F4 and reload. I have lost count of the number of times this has happened to me, mid game. On top of that, sometimes the left mouse button works, but only 50% of the time, so you have to click X number of times to register what you want to do.

Combat is fun, as it was in the first game, and very much what you would expect (although the AI is sketchy). However, performance seems awful at times, and I’ve experienced a complete freeze mid combat, sometimes for up to about 8 seconds or so, which is frustrating because you think you might have pressed Pause, then you press it and you don’t know then what is going to happen when the game finally catches up. I’ve also had 2 or 3 full crashes to desktop, but I won’t hold this against them, since it’s very early and I’m sympathetic to an extent where this is concerned.

They have done a great job with the sea, and I really enjoyed sailing around and attacking ships whenever I liked, so for that they deserve props. However, a lot of the islands didn’t feel very fleshed out, or ‘alive’ to me, apart from the main city. I also noticed multiple occasions where the “battle maps” would be reused, and this takes something away from the experience for me. This leads me to another point. Up until I hit max level, I was encouraged to go to new places, pirate ships, do side missions, take on bounties etc. But once I’d reached the level cap, I had no motivation to do anything but the main missions, by which point it was very, very easy. You could say “Do quests for gold!” but once you hit level 11-12 or so, and enemies regularly start dropping ‘exceptional’ rated gear, money becomes a non-issue. This is multiplied when they start dropping ‘Superb’ rated gear. For example, you can be sent on a high level bounty to kill a target, and be rewarded with 5,000 gold, but I could meander through a short dungeon and come out with 80-90,000 just from gear I’ll never use. Having said that, I’d rather them give the player too much gold, than not enough, but that’s just me.

I’ll wrap it up here by saying this; I have had fun playing this game, and for the time I’ve invested then I have gotten value out of it, and that’s good. However, I had high expectations for this game and the story was what I was, perhaps, most excited for. With the characters feeling one dimensional, the story being so bland and short, the world feeling mostly lifeless, the sheer number of bugs, and the performance issues, I have to ask myself if I’d recommend this to my friend who loves the first game, and I’d have to say “Not at this time, no.”

Keep in mind that this is for people who played the original and loved the experience and everything that came with it. Will you have some fun playing this game? Probably, yeah. Will you get a fair number of hours out of it? Sure. But ultimately I feel this hasn’t hit that high note that people (myself included) would expect from a CRPG of this size. If it's on 'sail' (see what I did there?) then sure, pick it up. If you're new to the series, then I'd recommend the first one.

EDIT: For those concerned by the increased playtime since writing the review:
I played my ~83 hours when the game launched back in 2018, and I stand by what I said at the time. Since then the game released a turn based combat mode, and since I slightly prefer turn based combat like Divinity Original Sin, Wasteland, and original Fallout etc, I decided to give the game another shot. While I give the developers credit for implementing this feature, it’s clear that the game was not designed with the concept in mind, and this means that every combat encounter takes a lot longer to complete as a result. It isn’t ‘bad’, it just feels a little bit clunky. That accounted for a decent chunk of the additional time. After this I put the game down again, for a time. Then during lockdown I found myself catching up on some Critical Role, and I had an itch to play a game where I could create a team close to what they were playing. Since they provide a voice pack of their characters in Pillars 2, it seemed the only real choice. I played this for another chunk of time, once again turn based combat, but never finished as the novelty wore off.

So, that’s why my playtime has increased, and although some of the minor bugs have been cleared up, I don’t feel any differently about the game now, than I did back when I reviewed it. I never ‘hated’ the game, and I never wanted to make people think that. I was simply disappointed in the ways I described and ultimately I really wanted to like the game, which is why I’ve given it a few chances over the years to woo me back.

As a person who absolutely loves Baldur's Gate saga and PoE with White March I must say I was deeply disappointed by PoE II. Don't get me wrong - it is a very decent title and definitely can be enjoyed, but my expectations were much higher than what was delivered. Vast majority of reviews is positive and they do not mention its biggest flaws. So here it is:

What I liked:

• Combat. Loved it in PoE, but it's even better in PoE II. You do not have to rest now to cast most of your spells/abilities now which makes gameplay more fluid. Still, there are vaild reasons for your party to rest (like to remove injuries, reset power points and more powerful abbilities), but you do not need to do it so often.
  
• Unique loot. Loads of items now have unique attributes and lore, but what is more - their own (unique!) enchantments. There are usually 2-3 choices that can completely alter item's behaviour which allows you to perfectly match your playstyle.
  
• Graphics. Nice improvement compared to PoE.

What I hated:

• Main storyline. It consists of 7 (sic!) fairly short quests. Seven! And they are boring as hell, there is nothing that would drive me to go and do the next one. Mild spoiler:
  There is no nemesis that you would fight in the final fight. Actually, there is even no final fight.
  
• Epic boss battles. There is only (in my opinion) 5 boss-like fights in the game. The number of epic creatures (dragons, archmages, liches, undead kings) is just sad.
  
• Exploration. Great idea, terrible execution. Journeys are often interrupted by random events, the problem is they are not that meaningful and repeat themselves too often (try playing Orlan's head or smelling fish for the 10th time...). It would not be the end of the world if not for...
  
• Quality of locations. Vast majority of locations (over 80%) are just either text encounters that give you random loot, or one of 5 maps with one group of enemies, or a short text encounter that you can either pass through attribute check or end in a fight with just regular enemies. There is not a single dungeon that would feel excting to explore as most of them do not even have levels. Forget Caed Nua. Hell, forget even 1/3rd of Caed Nua. This game is seriously lacking real content.
  
• Soulbound items. There is only 5 or 6 of them, you can get them quite late in the game and are not that powerful.
  
• Naval battles. Fun at the beginning, gets very boring later on. After 5th battle I found myself just racing to board the ship and kill the crew myself.
  
• Side quests. Just a couple of memorable quests here, but over 50% of the rest look as if they were generated by a computer (go, kill A, return with its head; or go and explore island B; or destroy ship C; go talk to D and either pass an attribute/skill test or fight). It feels to me like in order to meet the deadline everything was rushed.
  
• Companions. There is really no difference between a companion and a sidekick as companion relationship and quests are almost nonexistent (in Eder's case there is actually no companion quest!). Not to mention you can only have 5 members of the team now.
  
• Level of difficulty. Laughable, there were perhaps 2-3 battles that required me to use pause more than once.
  
• Amount of content - I have completed the game in less than 45h and that is only because I dragged it out as much as possible on trying different approaches to quests and combat tactics. It is much shoter than original PoE, BG II, Divinity Original Sin, Witcher 3 or Dragon Age Inqusition.
  
• Loads of bugs. And many of them are game or quest-breaking. Plus optimization is really crappy, I basically had to restart game every 2-3 hours due to memory leaks.

It really breaks my heart as this easily could have been one of the best RPG game, but the overall lack of quality content and depth just kills it for me. It feels like graphics and combat changes left no resources to work on quests, maps and story.

Coming from replaying Baldurs Gate and Icewind dale at least 5-10 times each over the years, Pillars of Eternity has always been a weird one for me. While it improves a good amount of things, it takes a step back on others. I was singing this one's praises for the first 10 hours or so. It felt like the massive upgrade that was Baldurs Gate 2 over it's predecessor. That died suddenly and surprisingly though.

TL;DR Difficulty and balance needs to be patched before I can ever recommend this game.

PROS:

Lots of fun weapons to pick and choose. I found myself just using a bunch of melee characters because weapons were so fun to play around with. Stackable item effects is a huge improvement over the first.

Beautiful graphics and city design. It's so nice to find hand drawn complex pathways and areas in an era where the CRPG genre is usually a bunch of copy paste and bland pathways (*Cough* Dragon Age)

Good mix of classes and builds. The complexity makes it much more interesting than other modern RPGS with lots of different effects and abilities.

Much better story this time around than pillars 1. Thaos(?) was a pretty bland final boss with the generic evil plan in the first. Eothas is interesting, and communing with the gods strokes your ego. That's always fun in RPGS, and something I loved about tyranny.

Rogue class is awesome early and stays awesome for the whole game. It's tons of fun to teleport around and assassinate stuff. Something oldschool inifinity engine games lacked outside of multiclassing kensi or endgame.

Piracy yarrr


CONS:

WAY too easy. And that's not just me flexing my e-peen. This game is piss easy after you reach about the haflway point.

The bosses and leaders are a joke. In classic CRPGs, you might have to reload 10 times to perfectly fight a boss and win. It feels awesome when you finally accomplish victory. Here? They are just regular npcs usually. There was one interesting fight in the earlier game, then the very few big dragony bosses after that are all pushovers that you just auto-attack down. Even pillars 1 had an optional dragon boss that was difficult. This was just sad.

Going along with all of that, 90% of spells are completely useless. Wizard protections are basically paper, so there isn't any kind of counter-play required vs them, which is usually the hardest thing to deal with in what this game is trying to be (BG2). Your rogue can just 1 shot them. Crowd control is pointless compared to just blowing stuff up.

They also lack enemy types or strategic encounters that make you think and use your non damage stuff. No mindflayers 1 shotting people. No basalisks turning people to stone. No gazers spamming all sorts of nastyness forcing you to find unique ways to deal with them. No demons requiring you to bust out your only +3 weapon and buffing the hell out of the only guy that can hit them. No dragons blasting your entire party for all their health forcing you to stack resist gear on someone to absorb it. Just bland damage dealers. I think the only thing with a slightly interesting ability was the fampyr charming stuff, but that's about it. I get that it's trying to appeal to a wider audience, but gutting all difficulty isn't a good way to do it. There was a reason those games are so replayable. I didn't even look in my potion or scroll bag because it was never required for anything. In BG you'd be digging through your potions and protection scrolls looking for something to deal with a weird mechanic all the time.

It's also completely broken economically. When you explore the city early on with your piddly little sack of gold, you see all these amazing weapons and armor you want to try out and can't wait to come back and blow your fortune on that crossbow that shoots magic missiles. What actually happens? You killed a pirate ship and a few camps, came back and suddenly had 300k. Every weapon and armor in the city was suddenly yours. Go out again and come back for another 500k. Those ships that seemed like things to look forward to are suddenly skippable as you buy the best one with all the best equipment and are suddenly a god. It's like they didn't even try to balance this. Or test it in any way.

The entire ship upgrading and battle section in general is pretty much ignorable and again, completely unbalanced. It felt like an afterthought really. I have no idea what any of the crew "traits" actually did since they genuinely didn't seem to do anything. Eventually I just stopped bothering and went for boarding the enemies instead, as it was fast and everything dies in 30 seconds anyway.

This game has a great shell, but the core is an absolute mess. I want to give it a better score some day, but right now I just can't. Save your money for a patch. The people reviewing it on metacritic experienced the fun first 10 characters levels and reviewed it. After that it's just too broken.

A perfect example of a time where I wish Steam had a mixed review button.

The game is engaging, cool systems, improvements abound from the first Pillars, which I played to completion.

A better glimpse into the religion and gods of the world. Cool maps and the ship system? Amazing.

**However - dialogue bugs are still all over the place, and when you google it, it's a "known issue," and that was 2 years ago. Come on guys. I know there's a lot of checks and trees for dialogue but this is completely immersion breaking. The relationship system just doesn't really *work* right. Because of these persistent bugs, I really just can't recommend it. Hopefully is gets fixed at some point.

Unfortunately Obsidian abandoned this game with several game-breaking bugs and broken quests. Some questlines break if you complete them in a different order than the seemingly one specific order they bothered to test. This results in a lot of frustration as the decisions you made are ignored and the game acts as though you did something you didn't. Some bugs, such as guards becoming hostile in turn based mode when trying to complete bounties were extensively reported by players and acknowledged by Obsidian on their forums but never fixed.

The story and setting of the game are not nearly as good as the first Pillars and not worth putting up with the frustration of bugs and broken quests.

i have 100+ hours in this game. Never finished it.
The reason is, i give up on this game every time i try it.

I love these types of narrative-driven isometric rpg's, and obsidian is a benchmark in that regard, but when it comes to PoE 2, the technical side of things completely ruins the immersion and general experience for me.

To be more precise - it's the loading times. Individual loading screens don't take that long, especially on SSD, it can range between ~10-40 seconds (longer on HDD), BUT the way the gameplay is designed, you are forced to travel between small zones ALL THE TIME, and these short loading screens really start to pile up.
The gameplay in big cities (which you spend a looot of time at) is as follows: Loading screen > small area > dialogue > loading screen > small area > dialogue > loading screen... you get the point,
The game discourages you from exploring, because you know you'll have to look at the black screen again and again and again.
And as the game progresses it gets worse, data piles up, you have more items, more stuff to load - loading screens are longer and you have even more small rooms to visit.
I tried this game on 3 different PC's: my old Athlon x4 4gb ram, geforce 650ti, HDD: my work PC with core i7 7700, 128GB RAM (yes) and geforce 1060, SSD; and my new upgraded PC Ryzen 1600x, 16GB RAM, 1070TI
Performance varied, but it sucked in all cases.

To conclude: i recommend against playing this game, unless you are 100% sure you can handle the frustration, it's not a bad game but a good game that won't let you enjoy it.

There are some incredibly well done Parts in this game but it really never manages to put them together into a motivating experience. I really liked the predecessor and the added element of exploration made me excited for PoE2 but it proved to be a dissapointment, the world feels fractured, you only got a handful of proper questlines and those tend to be short and not very memorable, aside from conquering the pirate-base and exploring the undercity i never got a feeling of adventure from those. Side quests and mini-dungeons are plentyful but ultimately all come down to one or two brawls and thats it.
The game is also too easy, leveling happens very fast and if you refuse to use the level-scaling mechanic (like i do because its just bad game-design) you will soon run out of any challenging encounters.

The main Questline is just visiting 4 different isles and its over.

The ending also proved to be a massive dissapointment and the summarization just reminded me how uninterresting and focussed on politics every questline was.

Its a shame really because the basics of an incredible RPG experience sure are present.