‘Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire’ Producer on Moving RPGs onto the Sea

Jeremy Ray
Games Nintendo
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Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire is the best crowdfunding success story for a few years now. The Kickstarter hype has faded a bit in recent times. Perhaps people heard about others getting stung. Perhaps board games are stealing the attention. Whatever the reason, Deadfire seems to be immune to it as it casually strolled across Fig’s finish line with a cool $4 million.

That probably means there were a lot of happy customers from the first game.

In a time when smaller studios are wondering if sequels are feasible, Obsidian seems immune to that too. Though it makes sense — most indie games are expressions of one gameplay idea, where as the story-based nature of the Pillars of Eternity franchise leaves it open to these kinds of welcome continuations.

We sat down and spoke with producer Katrina Garsten, who led the monumental crowdfunding effort. You can see she has fun with it, too. Here’s one of her backer update videos:

But crowdfunding is just one of the many producer hats she wears. Garsten was also able to talk to us about the new world structure and the different cultures on the archipelago — whole languages were created for them — as well as the new lighting system, and the mindbending way Deadfire uses 3D models on a 2D background.

Given the game’s new naval nature, there’s a lot to talk about regarding ship-to-ship combat as well. This plays out in the form of a text adventure, with players decided how close they want to be to the other ship, and if they need to run away. In the case of boarding the enemy ship, the normal Pillars style of combat will occur.

Our thanks to Katrina Garsten. Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire is coming out May 8th, 2018, on all current generation platforms.

Jeremy Ray
Decade-long games critic and esports aficionado. Started in competitive Counter-Strike, then moved into broadcast, online, print and interpretative pantomime. You merely adopted the lag. I was born in it.