Pillars of Eternity - Interview @ Gamasutra

Josh Sawyer was interviewed on Gamasutra to talk about, "Novelty out of nostalgia."

While Pillars of Eternity certainly hasn’t been simplified, what has changed is how it is all communicated: The combat makes more immediate sense, and the way the world is structured feels considerably more cohesive, perhaps because it isn’t beholden to the world of Dungeons & Dragons.

This is the result of a variety of different challenges that Obsidian faced, from the very large and initial challenge of taking something as complex and nuanced as the Infinity Engine and transplanting it into Unity, to developing a new world that feels familiar enough to the old that it isn’t abrasive, but has enough of its own identity that it can tread new ground.

The first of these problems actually turned out to be more of an opportunity. "What we found was that prototyping was very fast," says Josh Sawyer, director on Pillars of Eternity. He also served as a designer and writer on the game. "We knew how to do things using the actual Infinity Engine, but doing them within Unity, which is an engine we’d never used before, wasn’t the same because we had to build all those structures without relying on any established pipelines. We had to do everything from scratch."