Pillars of Eternity’s much-anticipated turn-based mode debuts in PC open beta form on November 5th, with Obsidian seeking more input on their very nice tenth anniversary gift before rolling out a final version. That’s not to say the devs haven’t already been working to ensure “very reasonable criticisms” of Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire’s own turn-based mode, though, as outlined by director Josh Sawyer in the beta’s announcement video.
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“This has been a lot of work primarily from Nick Carver and Jesse Bureno,” Sawyer said. “Special shout out to Kurt Decker, who’s also been adding a lot of work of his own recently. This turn-based mode is something that 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. Nick and Jesse are trying to address those as well as they can.”
Getting into specifics, you’ll have the option to switch between turn-based mode and the standard real-time with pause combat at any point in your playthrough by heading into the options, rather than being locked to one system based on your choice at the start of the game. Obsidian are also “investigating” letting you toggle between the two via a button on the HUD, according to an announcement blog post, but Sawyer makes it sound like this addition’s already set in stone.
The number of turns you get per round is now tied to your character’s speed and recovery stats, while the likes of swapping weapons, drinking potions, or enabling modals are now free actions limited to one use per turn, in an effort to avoid them being “abusable”. Finally, you should end up in less skirmishes which devolve into three hour long slogs, with combat lethality having been “significantly increased for both enemies and players to keep battles tense and impactful”, mirroring popular Deadfire mods.
As of right now, there’s no set duration outlined for the beta, with Obsidian simply saying it’ll “run for some time as we continue to roll out updates and prepare for a full release”. We do at least know that the beta’ll be available for Steam and Xbox app players when it arrives tomorrow. There aren’t any instructions in Obsidian’s blog post, but it’s probably safe to assume you’ll be able to opt into it as you usually do Steam update betas on the former storefront. Xbox appers may have to press a special button that summons Phil Spencer or something.
