Pillars of Eternity - Interview @ GameWatcher

Nick Horth of GameWatcher interviewed Game director Josh Sawyer, and asked him a few questions about Pillars of Eternity. As usual here is a small sample of questions.

GameWatcher: Will we experience major choices and consequences throughout the story? You’ve talked about wanting to create a reactive narrative.

Josh Sawyer: It’s important throughout the game. We have a number of different things that reflect your choices throughout the game. We have your reputation between factions, we have immediate reactions depending on the decisions you make in completing a quest, and then we have new a mechanic called ‘Disposition’. What that is is an indicator of how you behave in the world. It’s not good/bad, it’s more like… asshole or benevolent, charismatic or blunt.

We have ten different personality types; benevolent, cruel, diplomatic, aggressive, honest, deceptive, rational, passionate… is that all of them? Pretty much. Anyway, in dialogue you might see an option that says ‘diplomatic minor’ response, you can hide these tags by the way, and as you start picking those you get not only the initial reaction from the character you’re talking to, but you also start adding points to your Disposition score. Choose a lot of aggressive, hothead things and when you walk into town people we be like, “calm down dude, we don’t want any trouble.”

That was important for us because it’s really fun to pick cool dialogue options, and if you’re playing a tabletop RPG it’s fun to mess around with those and see how people respond. In a CRPG, usually the choice feels like a throwaway; you say the sassy thing, the guy says “oh, man, you’re so sassy”, and then it never comes up again. We wanted to have a systemic layer where those choices matter. If you want to be a sassy asshole, you can play that character and NPCs will respond to it. You’re not just building a character from stats, you’re building a personality, and that makes interacting with the world much more interesting and reactive.

GameWatcher: Obviously I’m trying to stay well out of the spoiler minefield here, but does Pillars have a distinct, one-off story? The original Baldur’s Gate sort of set itself up directly for a sequel at the end – does this feel like a complete story in and of itself?

Josh Sawyer: Yes, I think it does. Obviously if we want to make a sequel we’ll follow up on things, but this is a complete story with a distinct ending. There’s no big twist that gets unresolved, and there’s a real sense of closure at the end. There’s lots of stuff to build on, obviously, but the main conflict is resolved at the end of the game.