Pillars of Eternity Director Explains Upcoming Story Mode

Replying to a question on his personal Tumblr blog account, Pillars of Eternity game director J.E. Sawyer explained what the Story Mode that will be included in the upcoming patch for the title, planned to release alongside The White March Pt.II expansion, will entail.

In short, instead of modifying encounter composition like the other difficulty modes, it will alter the statistical odds in favor of the player party in a significant way, by altering attributes such as the enemy recovery, critical chance and Disengagement Attack accuracy:

Story Time uses the encounter composition of Normal difficulty but biases the math heavily in the player’s favor. Enemies have lower stats overall. Party members Crit more often, especially when enemies are at low Endurance. Enemies have increased Recovery (attack less frequently), crit far less, have inaccurate Disengagement Attacks, do less damage overall, and do much less damage against party members who are at low Endurance. Hostile status effects on party members are reduced in duration. The party can also carry (effectively) unlimited Camping Supplies.

I’m interested to see how the community will react to this addition. Tactical combat is a large focus for the game, and yet I have heard several players complain about the game’s difficulty and express a desire to simply play for the story. At the same time, in comment sections of RPG-focused communities like ours, the game is usually considered already rather easy, and I remember hearing grumbles about this feature before we even knew any detail about it. I suppose I’ll have to wait until late January to see how this will pan out.