Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire Developer Livestream, Interview

Obsidian’s Josh Sawyer and Aarik Dorobiala are back with another developer livestream, this time around showing off some high level Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire gameplay during one of the late game Fulvano’s Voyage side quests. We get to see some powerful abilities and tough enemies, plenty of combat, dungeoneering, and imposing demonic statues. And, of course, we also get plenty of developer commentary to go along with it all, as well as a decently sized Q&A session. Check it out:

And if you’re in the mood for some reading, PC Gamer has an interview with Deadfire’s narrative co-lead Carrie Patel that revolves around the game’s characters and story and features some rather promising tidbits. For example:

Even after the success of the first Pillars of Eternity, Obsidian hasn’t stopped looking for places to improve. In the writing team, Patel highlights the at times overwhelming prose of Pillars 1: “Compared to the first game, we’ve made a conscious effort to—I think for some people just the presentation of text in the first Pillars was a bit heavy—so we made an effort to pare down a lot of our dialogue nodes so we may convey the same amount of information, but know that it’s going to be split between two or three so it’s just easier to digest.”

They’re also bringing in the tooltips system that Obsidian used in Tyranny to help remind players of important lore information without loading down dialogue itself with repeated references. “Another big thing is we have more tooltips now so you can hover over specific words and names and it will give you the definition and tell you what those mean. Just so we don’t have to build that into the dialogue.”

Patel and the rest of the team are conscious of their spot at the forefront of what I’ve been viewing as an RPG renaissance. After Pillars of Eternity blew its funding goal out of the water, proving that the classic isometric RPG still has an enthusiastic audience, Obsidian found itself in the position of setting precedents.

“I think Obsidian feels a lot of pride and ownership about the renaissance as you call it,” said Patel. “A lot of the people in our company also worked on some of the originals like Icewind Dale and Baldur’s Gate so I think there’s definitely a sense of continuity there and a sense of trying to bring back the things that really worked and made those games so wonderful, but still innovate and bring them into the modern era as well.”