When comparing Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire vs Dark Souls III, the Slant community recommends Dark Souls III for most people. In the question“What are the best RPG games on Steam?” Dark Souls III is ranked 16th while Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire is ranked 54th. The most important reason people chose Dark Souls III is:
There's tons of lore everywhere for you to discover, but it isn't necessarily told through a conventional story. Weapons, armor, spells, and items you acquire have descriptions on them that tell you where in the game world they came from, any prominent characters they're associated with, and a bunch of other relevant and interesting information. So when you find examples of the lore scattered around the game, like bosses wearing a style of armor you read about, or an obscure NPC mentioned in a sword's description, you know the history behind the design and their purpose without that boss or character needing to explain anything to you. Even though the actual story in Dark Souls III is very thin, there's a lot to find under the surface if you're willing to look for it.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro True freedom of choice in how you handle quests
Quests can be completed in multiple ways, depending on how you want to approach them. You're able to tackle quests in a multitude of interesting ways such as sheer brute force, stealth, diplomacy, and more. For example, if you need to get a key off an NPC you can either fight them, try to steal the key, or even talk them into giving to you. Depending on how you build the skills of each member of your party, the possibilities for completing quests are almost endless.
Pro Strategic combat
Pausing the combat action between every swing of your sword or winding up of a spell can lead to really some really strategic play as you plan each and every move. Positioning your party or deciding what actions to take can be handled with a lot of thought behind it.
Additionally, all of your units can be scripted individually to do things like attack, heal, or use a spell when certain conditions are met. This means your healers will only cast their healing spells when actually needed, or your mages will only use a devastating spell at just the right time. From start to finish, this full control over the combat helps it to feel more like an intricate puzzle beaten with brains and awareness, rather than a button mashing frenzy.
Pro Dynamic roleplaying opportunities
Your skills and character stats influence every dialogue choice, interaction, and even how NPCs react to you. The world around you dynamically adjusts and changes based on how you're building your character and who you choose to recruit to your party.
When interacting with NPCs, you're presented with unique dialogue options or opportunities based on your skills and reputation. Perhaps one NPC that would have given you a quest doesn't trust you anymore based on an action you took previously in the game. Or maybe you're good at stealth, so you are asked to carry out a sneaky operation. If your diplomacy is high, you can even talk your way out fights or help NPCs resolve their problems without violence.
Sometimes, something as simple as being a certain race or hailing from a certain place will change the way you are treated or the quests you are asked to complete. You or your party's background might even mean the difference between an NPC being a friend or foe.
All of this opens to the door to some really immersive role playing opportunities where you can really feel the weight of your decisions and how you choose to flesh out your stats.
Pro It's exciting to commandeer your own pirate ship
While your ship is mainly used to explore and hop from island to island, it goes well beyond that. Seeing another ship on the seas and attacking it (or being attacked by it) in naval combat gets you to you fight to make sure your boat stays afloat. Being out on the ocean can spark a whole bunch of different random encounters with hostile forces.
You can also assign your party members to various positions such as navigation, cannons, and more depending on their unique skillsets. Depending on their skills, different party members will have various benefits when assigned to different positions such as better accuracy or steering capabilities.
You never know what situations you'll find yourself in or what islands you'll discover when you're traveling the high seas, making it a pretty fun and exciting experience.
Pro Open, hand-crafted world
Unlike the first Pillars game, which was a linear set of explorable regions, Deadfire offers up the whole world for your adventures. You'll be exploring anywhere you want right from the beginning. The best part is, nothing is procedurally generated or random. Every map, enemy placement, and interaction is carefully hand-crafted and intentional. This allows for a more organic adventure that doesn't feel forced or suffer from bad placement.
Pro Extensive lore that's presented in unconventional ways
There's tons of lore everywhere for you to discover, but it isn't necessarily told through a conventional story.
Weapons, armor, spells, and items you acquire have descriptions on them that tell you where in the game world they came from, any prominent characters they're associated with, and a bunch of other relevant and interesting information. So when you find examples of the lore scattered around the game, like bosses wearing a style of armor you read about, or an obscure NPC mentioned in a sword's description, you know the history behind the design and their purpose without that boss or character needing to explain anything to you.
Even though the actual story in Dark Souls III is very thin, there's a lot to find under the surface if you're willing to look for it.
Pro Stunning environments
The world of Dark Souls 3 looks amazing, so you may often feel the need to stop and take in the beautiful sights. This can be the sheer size of structures, mountains, or caves. It can also be the decorations, inscriptions, or details in a room. There's always so much to look at, allowing you to truly immerse yourself in its world.
Pro Can give a great feeling of accomplishment
The Dark Souls series is known for its difficulty and Dark Souls 3 is no exception. It's filled with difficult enemies and tough boss battles, able to cause you grief on more than one occasion. However, every time you progress to the next safe spot or defeat a boss you'll often be filled with a mix of joy and relief. Beating this game will almost certainly feel like an achievement.
Pro Unpredictable boss battles
The boss battles in Dark Souls 3 consist of several phases, changing up how the bosses fight over the course of the battle. They will gain new abilities, become more aggressive, or reveal various nasty surprises. This creates an enjoyable experience that is different from most modern games where bosses are just glorified pincushions.
Pro A great variety of equipment for almost any playstyle
You'll be finding new pieces of equipment quite often, giving you many options to choose from. Each one has its strengths and weaknesses, allowing you to pick the equipment that best suits your playstyle.
For example, heavy armor will make you move slower, but you'll be better protected. Greatswords have a wide reach, but you swing them really slow. Conversely a dagger is very fast but it has a horrible reach.
Pro Solid controls
This game feels and plays really well. Your character responds to button inputs immediately and it almost never feels like you're losing control over it. The control scheme can also be customized, giving you the option of a more personalized experience.
Pro Great combat system
Dark Souls 3 is a very fast-paced game but it's not just about having quick reflexes. A lot of the combat comes down to exploiting your enemies. To do that, you have to learn their patterns and attack the moment they pause or perform a telegraphed attack. This creates a combat system, which rewards awareness and patience, and is satisfying to master, even if you don't have extraordinary reflexes.
Cons
Con Unfocused storytelling
Rather than focusing on stopping the god you set out to destroy, much of your time will be spent helping side characters and running errands for the three main factions. Most of the game is devoted to these side quests/objectives and only a handful of these have any noticeable effect on the main storyline progression.
Con Questing becomes unrewarding
It's easy to become level capped about 75% into the game, making quests somewhat meaningless as you'll get no experience reward for completing them.
Con Combat is too easy
Most common enemies pose little to no challenge. It's very easy to become overpowered and simply steamroll through packs of mobs. There is an option to pause the live action and ponder your next move in combat, but it's rarely ever needed or utilized, except on the highest difficulty setting.
Note: At the time of this writing, the devs have promised a future patch to rebalance the combat difficulty.
Con Crafting is useless
Crafted potions, traps, and bombs are very weak and ineffective in combat. It's possible to succeed in combat without them, so there's really no point in crafting or using them to begin with.
Con Poor support for mouse+keyboard control
The default DS3 key/button bindings actually prevent full use of certain weapons by requiring the shift key to be pressed and not-pressed simultaneously. Rebinding is possible, but limited by issues like the left mouse button overriding all others and certain bindings not actually working in game (e.g. Shift+MiddleClick).
Con It's hard
You should try avoiding the trap of great review scores since most of them fail to mention the difficulty. It's simply put - hard. A lot of the combat requires quick reflexes, good mechanics, and the mental fortitude to carry on after failing for hours. If you're new to the Souls-like genre or simply want to enjoy a relaxing evening playing a video game, you most likely won't enjoy Dark Souls III.
Con Poorly tuned dynamic visiblity
You may notice some texture pop in while sharply turning the camera. It can be somewhat distracting if you notice it, but most of the time you won't because it happens in the distance.
Con Occasional performance issues
There are portions of the game that will have noticeable framerate drops, which can negatively affect the gameplay. Most of the fault lies with the game engine, so getting better hardware won't help that much.