ranzware
Here’s the thing: people don’t talk enough about Pillars of Eternity. It’s all ‘New Vegas’ this and ‘KOTOR 2’ that. Those games are incredible, sure, but Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire is an all-time classic of a CRPG, if you ask me, while PoE1 is a damn good revival of the genre that deserves a lot more praise than it gets.
I’m not the only one who thinks so, of course, and in a recent Twitch livestream of Avowed, Obsidian studio design director (and lead on PoE 1 and 2) Josh Sawyer chatted about the possibility of any of us living to see another isometric Pillars game. Maybe that Pillars: Tactics idea he’s discussed before?
“Pillars: Tactics is a thing that a lot of people would like, a lot of people at the studio would like to work on; there are a lot of people that like tactics games,” said Sawyer at 50:51 in the stream. “The difficulty is figuring out a scope of it, in terms of ‘how many people’ and ‘what sort of visual quality are we going for’ and ‘how big is it.'”
Or, in other words, figuring out “a scope of development where it feels like it could actually make money.” Problem is, you see, “Tactics games have a very enthusiastic fanbase, but that fanbase is not humongous.” It creates a bit of a dilemma for the devs and their ambitions, where “It’s sort of like the floor is high: like, if you make a decent tactics game, those people are gonna buy it, but if all of them buy it, it’s still not that many people.”
So that makes threading the needle of the game’s scope in a way that fits what Obsidian wants to make while also, you know, turning a profit, a difficult prospect. I have to wonder, too, what it would take to get Sawyer specifically on board, given he’s previously said he’d be up for making some kind of Pillars of Eternity 3, but only with a Baldur’s Gate 3-size budget. Somehow, I dunno if that would be conducive to a game that made financial sense for Obsidian (though let me be clear: I’m in the ‘give Josh Sawyer as much money as he wants and let him go ham’ camp here, profit be damned).
But with Avowed—which is set in the same universe as the Pillars games—doing pretty well and getting a warm critical response, I’d be surprised if we didn’t see something Pillars-y in the years to come. It might not be the Pillars 3 CRPG of my dreams, but a little, skunkworks-y tactics game? I could see that, and I’d be very happy to get it. During his stream, Sawyer approves an idea from the chat: “Battle Brothers/Pillars of Eternity.” I’d take that. I’d take that eagerly.
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Kurt Indovina
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