Pillars of Eternity - Interview @ IncGamers

Project Lead Josh Sawyer of Obsidian did a new audio interview on IncGamers this week to answer a few community questions, and to talk about Pillars of Eternity.

IG: Obsidian has always been a company with great vision, but sometimes games have been plagued by bugs on release. How confident are you that Pillars of Eternity is coming out solid?

JS: I came here to work on Neverwinter Nights 2. The early days of Obsidian were Knights of The Old Republic 2, Neverwinter Nights 2 and Alpha Protocol, and all three of those games had a lot of bugs. After Alpha Protocol we said that as much as possible we needed to fix that problem.

So with Dungeon Siege 3, that came out and it was, I don’t want to say completely bug free, but that was a really really solid launch. South Park also did really well coming out.

With Pillars, because it’s our game and we were doing some of the QA, we knew we had to take control of it and make sure it’s really solid. That’s one of the reasons why it was delayed.

With any RPG of this size there’s so many things you can do that I’m sure people are going to find something that we didn’t find when it comes out. Basically, we’re ready so that when people find things, we’re going to turn around and fix them as soon as possible; come out with a patch as soon as possible; fix anything big. Then we’re going have another patch after that to fix the longer term things people are going to encounter. It’s important that people feel they can trust us and that the game is going to be good when it comes out, but we know that given that it’s and RPG being made from scratch, and an engine that we haven’t worked with before, there’s always going to be some weird stuff that… you know… a few hundred people who might have played the game is not the same as hundreds of thousands of people… But we’re ready!

This has been a really great experience for us, we never thought we’d have the chance to make a game like this again. It’s really the dream of an independent developer to make their own IP and retain control of it, and it’s hard to negotiate deals like that. The fans that have allowed us to do this have done us a great service by helping us. So we hope that, not only that the game is good and they enjoy it, but that they enjoy the world and we can continue making more games in this setting in years to come.