Pillars of Eternity II - Making Pillars II Gorgeous

A new update for Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire titled 'Making Pillars II Gorgeous'.

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Update Video

But that's months from now; let's get to the meat of this update. We wanted to show you just how far our artists have pushed Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire forward from the way our visuals looked in Pillars I. Let's join Katrina as she walks us through those changes:

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Birds! Sorry, we got a little caught up in the video. To follow up on the video, an update for the closed Backer Beta is now live. If you are in the Backer Beta, check out the changes in the Backer Beta section of our forums. As we have said many times, your feedback is critical to our development process, so please, please, please let us know what you think of the new changes.

Backer Keys

In addition to pre-orders going live, backers can now redeem your Backer Keys from the Products Page of your Eternity Account Profile on Obsidian.net. This will give you your copy of Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire on either Steam or GOG (your choice), all ready for our April 3rd launch date.

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More information.

New beta patch has the ship features (crew, battles, resources, customization).

I tried it a bit last night, ship battles (not boarding) is a text round based mini-game with sound FX. I like it personally, needs a few changes to help comprehension though and a "skip" button (it can be lengthy battles for people who just want to board the other ship, Josh announced a "skip to boarding" button is coming already).

Another thing I really like this beta, the +1 sec to recovery for almost every actions. It makes combat less busy and crazy. Unfortunately, some people are already saying it sucks because stuff aren't dying fast enough (they just want every encounters to be done in a few seconds).

Loved the video and for me the biggest plus was the animal companion animations. Always love touches like that. Looking fantastic. The only game I think, so far, for 2018 I am really looking forward to.

Looks superb. Love how they've managed to light the environments like they were 3D.

Very nice! Something that might have been enjoyable to see as well, would have been any difference between Pillars 1&2 in regards to "weather effects" (rain, sunshine, wind, snowfall, fog etc. )

Still, it's nice to see that this game will be beautiful and then some.

Yeah it looks fantastic. The water animations, spell effects, animals etc are really well done. Fingers crossed that it plays just as well!

I really like the dynamic shadows, and more environmental animations are always welcome. I thought the spell visual effects are supposed to be dampened when they go off near creatures during combat though, so I'm not sure how much of that flashiness we'll really see during the game.

I love the compare and contrast. Very impressed with these upgrades. Have they released the recommended system specs yet?

Originally Posted by azarhal
Another thing I really like this beta, the +1 sec to recovery for almost every actions. It makes combat less busy and crazy. Unfortunately, some people are already saying it sucks because stuff aren't dying fast enough (they just want every encounters to be done in a few seconds).

Was reading the comments. So many idiots. Give them a story mode with one hit combat. Of course their pride would never let them play that mode. They have to play on hardcore then bitch that it's too long and too hard.

Originally Posted by Rills
I love the compare and contrast. Very impressed with these upgrades. Have they released the recommended system specs yet?

They listed POE1 specs for the beta and current pre-orders, but it is subject to change.

Looks absolutely fantastic. Great job Obsdian.

Just the fix I need after going cold turkey since Divinity original sin 2. Looks great, glad I backed it.

are they improving the character movement animations? I had no problems with PoE graphically, but the way your party moved was often a little odd, they almost glided in some cases or moved in mechanical lockstep. Looked unnatural.

This video looked nice and cool, but then I watched one with sea battle and it was…
I dont know if I ever want to go through that more than once. I mean in a nice looking video game Im suddenly thrown into pen-and-paper style combat! Why?!
If you cant make it visual, then just skip that part - do we really need sea combat here at all costs?