14 DAY TRIAL // Pillars of Eternity aims to deliver a classic party-based and turn-powered role-playing experience when it launches later in the year and it seems that the development team at Obsidian Entertainment wants to teach newcomers how to approach the game without using too many tutorial scenarios.
Josh Sawyer, the game director in charge of the project, is quoted by VG247 as saying that, “We tried to keep the mechanics so that you can learn up as you go along, where all the complexity just emerges from the scenarios you get put in. We don’t want to dumb it down, but we also don’t want things to be hard to learn or intentionally obtuse.”
The studio has tried to create a game that has a number of new gameplay systems that require some learning, but they will remain constant once introduced, which means that a player needs to understand them just once.
Pillars of Eternity is created using an entirely new fantasy world, but Obsidian has made sure to include a number of familiar ideas from the genre in order to make it easily understandable in board strokes for all gamers.
At the same time, the company wants gamers to dig deep in order to discover the most interesting aspect of the associated lore and how they can use game mechanics to their own advantage, but only if they are inclined to do so.
Sawyer has also offered some details on the ways his team plans to expand on some ideas from previous titles it has worked on.
He explains, “How we let them build reputation, I think they’re going to dig that. We’ve actually expanded that more than we have in previous games. You get personality-specific reputations.”
This means that a character can have a reputation as troublesome, which some character in the game world might view with sympathy, but can drive others to refuse to interact with the player until the guilty party member is dropped.
Obsidian is offering constant updates on the core game mechanics and on the world as they are being created and welcomes feedback from the community, especially those who have backed the project on Kickstarter.
Pillars of Eternity is expected to arrive on the PC before the end of the year and all marketing and publishing duties for the title will be handled by Paradox Interactive.
At the moment, there are no plans to port the title to consoles.