Pillars of Eternity II - Josh Sawyer Interview

Axe of the Blood God is our weekly RPG podcast hosted by Kat Bailey and Nadia Oxford. You can find the previous episodes here.

In this week's episode of Axe of the Blood God (download link here), we welcome back Obsidian's Josh Sawyer to talk Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire!

Our interview with Josh is the latest bit in a series of coverage that we have planned over the next couple weeks. This is part of a greater initiative with the Gamer Network, and there is a ton of great stuff over on Eurogamer as well (as always). If you haven't read it already, check out my look back on the Last Days of Black Isle Studios, which I also discuss in this episode.

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Edit - Commentary:

Ha, Berserker confirmed as barb sub-class, Streetfighter as rogue subclass, Josh likes the combo
Streetfighter likes being flanked and benefits from getting bloodied, Barbs have Carnage, so it's synergistic
No restrictions on multiclassing companions, apart from starting class
Intra-party shenanigans sound cool, not designed top-down with a checklist (N romances, M friendships, E enmities...), but emerging from how the characters were written, Carrie Patel credited
Edér is your racist uncle LOL, you can attempt to steer conversations away from risky areas
Eric F. and Carrie P. mostly responsible for choice of returning characters -- Edér and Pallegina were kind of no-brainers, Aloth was a bit trickier.
Boat is "nothing revolutionary" -- idea borrowed from KOTORs and ME; the ship is something you go back to (but by the sound of it, it's pretty rad actually)
Lots of at-sea encounters -- reefs, whales, sea monsters, dilemmas with your crew and so on, play out differently depending on crew, stats, choices
There is a ship duelling system! Nice -- manoeuvring, sails, naval artillery, etc!
Crew development, multiple ships to choose from, you can switch from the Defiant to other ships you've acquired, you can customise them both cosmetically and mechanically -- which cannons to use, who mans your battle stations, you get trophies from defeating other ships
Your ship can get pretty devastating, so you can turn pirate, with reputation consequences with factions -- nothing to stop you from hunting ships all day long if you want to
Fallout 1/2/BB style main map, quest-content focused maps (references BG2); starting out "you see a very small part of a very large map," Josh wants to give the feeling of having areas with just ocean in every direction, and secret things to find, although you can just follow the crit path if you want to -- again very cool!
Focusing on encounter diversity and not having too many fights & filler content; using patrols to shake things up and provide stealth challenges, "it is actually okay if the content on the screen isn't a fight"
Lots of callbacks to choices made in P1 (e.g. meeting someone you dealt with... cites Tyranny and the way it referenced the prologue)
... and pause ...
Interesting, Josh says flat-out that he thinks the console version of P1 is a bad idea, "surprised" at the changes made to it in the process, says totally a Paradox project, with Obs only providing feedback

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rjshae said:

I thought sea monsters were a stretch goal?

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