10 years after launch and eight months since the mode’s announcement, Obsidian has revealed more details about Pillars of Eternity’s upcoming turn-based mode, as well as a date for the start of its open beta: This Wednesday, November 5. Pillars of Eternity’s director, Josh Sawyer, explained and introduced the new mode in a new video on YouTube.
Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire added a turn-based mode as an update after launch, but my worries about retrofitting a real time with pause game in this way were compounded by the fact that you were locked into one or the other at the beginning of a playthrough. In addition, turn-based’s design changes effectively nerfed some builds and buffed others, meaning you’d have to relearn an already complicated RPG.
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Obsidian touts “significantly increased” combat lethality to help avoid the unintentionally overlong fights you could run into in turn-based Deadfire—Sawyer cited Deadfire mods that accomplish the same thing—while the “Unbound Turns” and “Smarter Free Actions” line items look like they could avoid the sharp balance differences we saw in Deadfire. The biggest deal, though, is that we’ll be able to freely switch between turn-based and RTWP at will like in Owlcat’s Pathfinder games.
“You can choose Turn-Based Mode alongside difficulty when starting a new game—or swap freely between Real-Time with Pause and Turn-Based Mode in the game options,” Obsidian says of the feature. “We’re also investigating a direct HUD toggle for even more convenience.”
We’re pretty much all turn-based partisans here at PC Gamer. Even Pillars 1 and 2’s lead designer, Josh Sawyer, expressed a preference for the older style, which is now very much back in vogue. Earlier this year, Sawyer explained to me that he saw the initial adoption of RTWP as a reaction to many turn-based RPGs of the time lacking tactical complexity, as well as the rise of the RTS genre.
Pillars, being a throwback to this era, was obligated to prioritize RTWP. These days, action RPGs have raised the bar even further in speeding the genre up, while we now have many more turn-based RPGs like XCOM and Baldur’s Gate 3 that are both tactically rich, and approachable to new players. All of this leaves RTWP holding an awkward middle ground.
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