Following the successful launch of Avowed, Pillars of Eternity creator Josh Sawyer did an LA Wild Fire Relief Stream yesterday on Obsidian's Twitch channel. During the lengthy stream, he played the newly released game and talked about various topics.
Interestingly, Sawyer revealed that there's quite a lot of interest within the team to make a 'Pillars Tactics' game, although there is uncertainty about its commercial success.
Pillars Tactics is a thing that a lot of people at the studio would like to work on, and there are a lot of people who like tactics games. Figuring out a scope for it is tricky. A scope of development where it feels like it could actually make money, because tactics games have a very enthusiastic fan base, but the fan base is not humongous. It's sort of like that floor is high - like, if you make a decent tactics game, those people are going to buy it. But if all of them buy it, that's still not that many people.
Over a year ago, following the incredible success of Baldur's Gate 3, Sawyer mentioned he'd love to do a more tactical, turn-based Pillars of Eternity 3 if Microsoft would only provide the triple-A budget for it.
I think that would be a lot of fun to do, to do like a high production value party based fantasy RPG. I’m pretty happy with Pillars and Deadfire, but I do think that if it were not crowdfunded, I would probably make it turn based. I’m not saying to not have a real time with pause system, but I do think that the Deadfire turn based system which I can’t take credit for, that Nick Carver and Brian MacIntosh did, was really cool. But, the game wasn’t designed for it, so actually designing the game for turn based, fewer encounters, smaller encounters, but much more tactical, I think that would be a lot of fun, and having awesome cinematics and all that stuff.
Still, as things stand, it seems more likely that Obsidian will continue making first-person action RPGs like Avowed and the upcoming The Outer Worlds 2, which is also slated to launch sometime this year.
