Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire Interviews

Talking to PCGamesN at this year’s Gamescom, Obsidian Entertainment’s Brandon Adler shared plenty of new information about the upcoming Seeker, Slayer, Survivor DLC for the studio’s pirate-themed RPG Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire that will feature a good deal of arena-style battles with plenty of varied twists and combat puzzles. Here’s a snippet:

“It’s heavily focused on combat, we’re trying to play around with that,” Adler says. But he makes clear that this isn’t just a standard arena mode: “The fights are not just ‘grab a bunch of creatures, throw them in an arena and have a fight’. One of the fights is two wizard brothers that are fighting each other, and they both cast different types of magic. They put giant wards on the ground to protect themselves from their brother’s magic, and so you jump between those wards whenever you’re trying to avoid spells.”

The DLC’s title is drawn from the three forms of fights that you’ll conduct within the arena: seeker, survivor, and slayer matches.

“All the fights have a little puzzle to figure out,” Adler explains. “In seeker type fights you have to find something special about the fight, like a set of spiders with regenerating properties where and you have to figure out which is the queen spider [who you must defeat] so you can take out the others.”

Survivor fights are, as the same suggests, about staying alive through a series of enemy waves. Slayer fights are tough in a different way: “they’re big hard creatures that kill you quickly and you have to kind of smash and grab,” Adler explains.

There’s also a brief interview with Josh Sawyer, confirming his continued involvement with the game:

The game is soon to patched with the first two God Challenges in update 2.0.1 – Abydon and Skaen – and further gods, including Berath and Magran, will be added over time. “We’re planning on introducing a God Challenge for every god, and that’ll all be through our free DLC,” says Josh, indicating that there will be 11 challenges for the 11 gods in the Pillars pantheon.

For those who had been worried that Sawyer stepping away from the leading role would affect the game’s long-term quality, it appears that there’s little to be concerned about. “I’m the design director of the studio so I’m helping out on other projects, but I do wanna make sure Deadfire continues to get refined and features new content,” Sawyer says. “Even for people who don’t get the DLC, because I think people appreciated that in Pillars 1 that we kept supporting and trying to add things through our patches over time.”