Free Pillars of Eternity 2 DLC adds new crew members and ship upgrades

Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire's latest free DLC, called the Scalawags Pack, allows you to beef up your ship with seven new potential crew members and a number of new upgrades to sails, anchors, and cannons, which are available at shipwrights across the archipelago.

The DLC also adds a new personality setting called Savage, which I can't wait to play around with. Alongside the DLC, an update also fixes crashes, quest-specific bugs, and ensures that crew members heal properly when you rest them with adequate medicine, which is long overdue. The full patch notes are here—you can recruit the new crew members at taverns across the world.

It comes on the back of an even bigger update earlier this month that rebalanced ship combat, class abilities and weapons. The ship changes were the most meaningful, and could drastically alter the way your party does battle at sea.

Ship health was reduced by 20%, which should make fights faster. Ramming now deals more damage to both the aggressor and defender, but closing the distance to board is now easier because you'll take less damage to your hull, sails and crew while doing it.

Cannons have been changed, too: accuracy penalties have been "adjusted to scale gradually"—no more detail there, unfortunately—while the accuracy boost you'll gain at each rank of cannoneer has been reduced, which could make it harder to land your shots, especially early on in the game.

If you want to dig into the changes from earlier this month in more detail to see what's happened to your favourite class or weapon, then read the full patch notes.

And if you haven't picked up Deadfire but you're curious about it, here's Andy's review.

Update: I initially wrote that the update from earlier this month, which changed ship combat, was new. I have updated the article to reflect the more recent release of the Scalawags Pack DLC.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.