The director of the Pillars of Eternity franchise, Josh Sawyer, has recently revealed his intentions to develop a third game in the franchise. The first game, Pillars of Eternity, in the franchise was a 2015 release, followed by the sequel, Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire, which was released back in 2018 on PC and then later on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2020.
Both games average around 88 on Metacritic, with positive reviews from both critics and fans, and up until now, there have been no mentions of a third title being developed. In a recent interview, Sawyer revealed he would go ahead with developing the third title in the franchise, but only if a very specific condition was met.
Josh Sawyer Reveals What It Would Take for Him to Consider Developing Pillars of Eternity 3
In a recent interview with Toucharcade, Josh Sawyer spoke at length about Pentiment, which is close to celebrating a year since its release. Introducing himself in the interview, Sawyer mentioned his early projects, which included creating websites for the first game he worked on, Planescape Torment, and two other games, Icewind Dale and Baldur’s Gate 2.
Sawyer joined Obsidian in 2005, where he mentions having worked on Neverwinter Nights 2 and then Directing Fallout: New Vegas, Pillars of Eternity 1 and Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire, and now finally, Pentiment, while being the Studio Design Director for the past five years.
Speaking about the difference in approach between games that get funded through Kickstarter compared to self-funded games, Sawyer mentioned the only difference is the time allotted to a game’s development. Sawyer mentioned that the creative development for Pentiment did not face any compromise in terms of budget and time given to the game’s development.
Asked for a game Sawyer would like to work on, with no restrictions on budget and time allotted to the development of the game, Sawyer revealed he had no plans on developing Pentiment 2, as he felt quite satisfied with the game and would like to wait a bit longer before considering.
Sawyer did, however, feel he might consider the development of Pillars of Eternity 3 if there were indeed no restrictions on time and budget. Sawyer mentioned that he had an idea of the budget spent on Baldur’s Gate 3 and that if he gets a budget as big as that to play on, without revealing a rough estimate, he would consider developing the third title in the Pillars of Eternity franchise.
Earlier this month, Sawyer replied to a post on X (formerly Twitter) about Baldur’s Gate 3‘s success trickling down to future RPGs. Sawyer replied rather cheekily about him waiting for Xbox to give him a call with a $120 million budget to develop Pillars of Eternity 3, which he predicted could be “any day now.”
Sawyer Would Stick to a Purely Turn-Based, Tactical Game
Sawyer went on to reveal that had Deadfire not been crowdfunded, he would have made it turn-based, while also not taking away anything from the Real-Time with Pause (RTwP) system. Sawyer credited Nick Carver and Brian MacIntosh for Deadfire‘s turn-based system and said that it was “really cool“. Sawyer also mentioned that he would have designed the game to be exclusively turn-based, with fewer and smaller encounters and a lot more tactical.
The turn-based mode was added in a post-launch update in Deadfire, as Sawyer revealed he had heard from gamers that a majority of them did not quite understand the game’s combat system. Sawyer believes that an RTwP system isn’t straight-forward and is “very difficult for people to actually parse all of that information and one of the things.”
Without dismissing the RTwP systems entirely, Sawyer revealed how he would like to do “more crunchy stuff with systems, and that is, it’s just easier to make that stuff clear and work in a turn-based setting.”
Apart from Baldur’s Gate 3, Sawyer revealed he had been playing Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, having played 3 hours of the new DLC. He also appreciated the changes brought in along with the Update 2.0 patch.
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