Pillars of Eternity is a phenomenal RPG — the game that essentially saved Obsidian Entertainment, crowdfunded by fans of the studio. Obsidian, in its current prolific iteration, wouldn't exist without Pillars.
Now, ten years on, Obsidian has released an open beta for a turn-based mode in Pillars of Eternity. The game was originally designed around real-time action (RTA) combat with pauses, but Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire included a turn-based mode that proved very popular with players.
Josh Sawyer—the game's director and a studio design director at Obsidian—revealed the beta in an announcement video, encouraging players to try it out and give feedback.
"This turn-based mode is something we wanted to do because turn-based mode was received so well in Deadfire. That being said, there were a number of very reasonable criticisms of how turn-based mode was implemented in Deadfire," Sawyer explained.
One of these criticisms was the glacial pace of turn-based combat, in part due to the large number of enemies present in every encounter, which makes sense in an RTA system where everything happens much faster.
The action economy of turn-based combat has been reworked to be closer to RTA, i.e. the...
