Pillars of Eternity PAX South Panel Twitch Stream

Update: A recording of the Pillars of Eternity PAX South panel is available at this link and starts at the 2:23:16 mark. After roughly 15 minutes of gameplay footage (largely dungeon delving) the stream turns into a full Q&A panel.

A lot of questions and answers covered familiar ground, so I’ll take the liberty of only highlighting the tidbits that I found particularly interesting:

Josh Sawyer’s oft-debated and criticized desire to make all character concepts with a given class potentially viable stemmed from his experience with tabletop role-playing games, where some players would come up with interesting characters that would end up useless throughout a campaign.

While Pillars of Eternity won’t feature AI scripting for companions at release, Obsidian is looking into implementing them with the game’s expansion.

The project was, from the very beginning, planned to be a real-time with pause combat game. That said, all the panelists showed interest in developing a turn-based title.

While Obsidian is doing everything in its power to support mods, making new areas and campaigns may prove like a problem for modders. That said, the developers are still interested in this possibility for future projects and will still try to work with the community to see if it’s possible to make it work.

One feature Eric Fenstermaker, a narrative designer on the project, specifically asked: rather than automatically forcing dialogue, companions will have an icon on their portrait to let a player know when they’d be interested in talking.

When working on the Wizard’s spell selection, Josh Sawyer researched the D&D Spell Companion book, and attempted to figure out what spells are absolutely vital to reproduce the D&D atmosphere. He cited Magic Missile and Fireball as examples of spells that they simply had to implement.

The portrait variants and descriptions from Shadowrun Returns provided inspiration for Obsidian during the project. MMOs and Skyrim also provided some research material for the team’s implementation of the Stronghold. Sawyer praised Divinity: Original Sin but also noted that there are major differences between the two projects, and stressed that Pillars of Eternity is designed around single-player. It shouldn’t come as a surprise at this point, but Darklands was also cited as an inspiration.

Original story: The PAX South Pillars of Eternity panel has just started, and is currently being streamed on PAX’s official Twitch channel. Present at the panel are Obsidian’s CCO Chris Avellone, programmer and designer Tim Cain, lead programmer Adam Brennecke, project director J.E. Sawyer and lead producer Brandon Adler. Currently, Obsidian has been playing the game live and showcasing some areas that had never been shown before. After the demo is over, a Q&A with the people attending the panel will follow.

We’ll update this newspost as soon as a recording of the full panel is available, and if not we’ll attempt to at least provide a summary with the most interesting questions and answers.