Nearly 10 years after it came out, Obsidian's isometric RPG Pillars of Eternity gets a surprise update

GamesRPGPillars of EternityNearly 10 years after it came out, Obsidian’s isometric RPG Pillars of Eternity gets a surprise updateWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Obsidian)

Pillars of Eternity dragon skull

Baldur’s Gate 3 is the big, world-changing isometric party-based RPG that everyone’s still talking about, but I’ve always felt thatPillars of Eternityis the game that really first started turning that engine over. The OG Infinity Engine vibes were strong, but it stood well on its own merits too: We called it “a deep, rich, and wonderfully written RPG that lives up to the towering legacy of the games that inspired it” in our92% review.

That was in 2015, mind, nearly a full decade ago, which is why it comes as a little bit of a surprise that developer Obsidian has released abrand new patchfor the game that’s now available in the Pillars of Eternity beta branch on Steam.

The patch doesn’t add any new content but it does fix a large number of bugs and gameplay issues. There aren’t any full-scale game breakers in the list of fixes, but stuff like unexpected T-poses, troubles with audio triggers, slowness when skipping intros, and inaccessible areas in various scenes have all been cleared up.

One thing you won’t see in the patch are any of the new features added to the sequel,Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire. In response to one fan who asked for a turn-based mode, which was added to Pillars 2 in apost-launch update, Obsidian design director Josh Sawyer (viaGamesRadar) suggested that tech limitations mean it’s not going to happen.

(Image credit: Josh Sawyer (Twitter))

Some minor issues patched in Pillars 1 - You wanting Deadfire features backported - Unity 4

So why is a nearly 10-year-old RPG getting a new patch? It’s possible that withAvowed, Obsidian’s upcoming first-person RPG set in the world of Pillars of Eternity, set to come out this year, the studio wants to make sure everything is tuned and tightened for newcomers who want to see where it all started. It’s also possible developers got bored over the holidays, although… well, no, that’s probably not it.

A few optimists put forward the hope that the patch might signal that the wheels are turning on Pillars of Eternity 3. Sawyer said last year that he’d like to do a third game, but only if he had aBaldur’s Gate 3-size budgetto do it. He also said during a GDC roundtable that the first two Pillars games are “the most compromised” he’s ever worked on because crowdfunding backers wanted a very specific Infinity Engine-style experience, “and now I have a bunch of new ideas for how differently I would do it if I were doing it on my own”—that is, without being beholden to other people’s ideas or expectations.

Pillars of Eternity 3 doesn’t seem like quite the long shot it did even just a year ago. Baldur’s Gate 3 demonstrated emphatically that there’s still life left in the old genre, and with Obsidian now at least theoretically having access to Microsoft money, anything seems possible—after Avowed, of course.

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Pillars is also apparently a favorite of a very important person on the Microsoft gaming front: Xbox boss Phil Spencer recently shared his Xbox Year in Review stats, revealing that he’s got 124 hours in the game, putting in the top 5% of the game’s most active players.

Every minute was worth it. So fun to see this year’s Xbox Year in Review and look back at all the games I played in 2023. Let’s see your #XboxYearinReview https://t.co/17kJSLiNIE pic.twitter.com/KTeBuxGL5JDecember 12, 2023

To see the new Pillars of Eternity patch in action, right-click on the Pillars entry in your Steam library, select “Properties,” and then head to the “Betas” menu. Under “Beta participation,” choose “public_beta,” wait for the game to update, and you’re set. The full patch notes are below.

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TOPICSObsidian Entertainment

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