Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire is, you may have heard, the 40th best videogame you can play right now. Ask certain incredibly cool members of the PC Gamer team and they might even tell you it’s actually higher than that. But it’s also not a super difficult game—it’s fairly easy to assemble a party that can make mincemeat of any foe they happen across.
Would it have done better if, instead of its more general backer beta that focused on player response to the game as a whole, it had adopted a Baldur’s Gate 3-style early access period, where an early portion of the game was released and used to aggressively fine-tune balance in particular? Its director, Josh Sawyer, doesn’t think so.
“I still think we would have had the same issues,” said Sawyer in response to a question from a fan. “A lot of the issues were evident because they got magnified over the course of the game—the later you get in the game, the more the balance gets out of wack, just because there are more numbers inputting into the system.”
“That’s probably because a ton of people saw the beginning of the game—the early game—and then the midgame got a lot of testing. And, as is very common in game development, something slipped through the cracks, and they later addressed it.” That is to say, even with its long time in the balance oven, even BG3 still had its issues when it hit, because it’s a mortal game made by mortal hands.
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“It kind of has less to do with the backer beta and more to do [with]: once you get your feedback from the backer beta, where are you gonna spend your time to make sure it has the maximum impact? And that’s really more of a ‘director priority, production reality’ concern.”
Sawyer points at another game as a point of comparison: Obsidian’s own Grounded. “Not that there’s no story in Grounded, but it’s very light compared to a game like Deadfire,” says Sawyer, “in terms of density of dialogue and things like choice and consequence and quests that can play out in different ways and things like that.”
In other words, it’s a “very gameplay-focused game,” which means there’s a narrow area for devs to focus on when it comes to player feedback. Where Deadfire (or BG3’s) early days saw players critique everything from balance to story to dialogue to voice acting to anything else you can name that’d be part of a big, sweeping RPG, the devs of Grounded “could really just focus on those core things.
“That isn’t to say that it’s easier, but it’s just easier to make the focus be entirely that for a backer beta.”
In other words, no, a more BG3-style early access wouldn’t have dramatically improved Deadfire. Hey, you ask me? There’s nothing to improve.
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