Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire Post-mortem

Obsidian Entertainment’s Josh Sawyer, who directed the studio’s nautical RPG Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, attended this year’s Digital Dragons industry event, where he gave a talk entitled, “Breaking the Mold: RPG Evolution and Paradigm Shifts in Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire.” As you may have guessed from that title, Sawyer’s talk serves as a post-mortem for Deadfire. It examines the game’s somewhat troubled development by focusing on its narrative and combat design along with its ship combat and full voice acting features.

If you have an hour of spare time and would like to learn a thing or two about Deadfire’s development, you might want to check it out:

This post-mortem of Deadfire will examine the assumptions the team made between the first game and the sequel, how expectations changed through the public beta, and what lessons they learned after the game was released. The talk will focus on narrative design, combat design, the ship combat system, and the decision to fully voice all dialogue. The end of the post-mortem will deal with post-launch support, including patches, features, and other DLC content.