Pillars of Eternity Interview

PC Gamer has published a new Pillars of Eternity-themed interview with project director Josh Sawyer, which covers the lore of the game, the Cipher class, the challenges of a solo playthrough and how the designers are attempting to cater to that specific playstyle and more. Here’s a snippet:

PC Gamer: Will you be able to combine spells and abilities in any interesting ways?

Josh Sawyer: Those aren’t explicitly built in like hard combinations. In most cases it’s situational. A big one is that rogues get sneak attacks and backstabs, but they get it from a wide variety of conditions. If the target is blinded, stunned or prone, all those things allow a rogue to immediately sneak attack on them. A lot of different characters can inflict those status effects, including the rogue. Fighters can knock down targets, druids have spells that can paralyse. So instead of being combinations of effects, it’s mostly about looking at how each of the classes can be maximally effective, and then using the general abilities in classes to bring out the best in those characters. A rogue can do a lot on his or her own, but other classes can also coordinate with them to create neat effects.

In other cases, it’s mostly about using the different characters’ abilities to manage battle spaces better. The fighter has an ability called Defender which allows them to kind of act like flypaper. Something that was a big hassle in the Infinity Engine games was that characters couldn’t really be sticky. It was very hard to get an enemy to stop moving. Often that was a big deal, because if a fighter made a beeline for one of your squishier characters, especially casters, you were in trouble. But now you have to think about where to position them, to maximise their benefit for casters, rogues, and other characters that might not be able to take a beating.

PC Gamer: Party combat is a big part of the game, but you’ve also said it’s possible to play the game solo. Do you think this will be fun, or is it for masochists only?

Josh Sawyer: It’ll be hard. I’m sure people will find certain classes and builds that will make it easier than others. Especially once you’ve already played through the game, and you have the metagame knowledge, it becomes a lot easier. I think the enjoyment comes from the fact that it’s a unique challenge on its own. Some people will say, I don’t know how to play through this whole game with a priest or a wizard, but I’m going to figure out how to do it. It will be pretty challenging, especially at certain points. We’re planning to use a sliding experience system, so if you have a single character they’ll gain levels more quickly than if they were with an entire party.

If you don’t want to have six characters in your party you can have four, or two, or you can just go by yourself. We’re not discouraging this, but also the combat isn’t balanced around it. You can try it, but we’re not going to spend time figuring out if it’s viable to play through the whole game with a single character. It should be possible, but we’re not putting a lot of time into it.

PC Gamer: How do the Trial of Iron and Path of the Damned modes work?

Josh Sawyer: Trial of Iron is a classic iron man mode. Regardless of other difficulty settings, this gives you one rolling save. If a character dies, it’s just one game state that continues on. So if your whole party dies, then that’s pretty much it. You’re completely wiped out and your save is deleted. We’re not going to put a tonne of effort into enforcing that, though. It’s a game of honour for people. It’s for people who want to take on that challenge for themselves.

Path of the Damned is similar to the old Heart of Fury mode from Icewind Dale: Heart of Winter. When we place our encounters in the game, we have different sets of creatures for different levels of difficulty. So if you’re playing on easy there will actually be fewer and less difficult creatures in a given area. If you turn on Path of the Damned it enables all of those creatures at once, so you’re dealing with all of the creatures from hard, medium, and easy, and you get nothing more for it. [laughs] It’s just really hard.