Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire is, you may have heard, the 40th best videogame you can play right now. Ask certain incredibly cool members of the PC Gamer team and they might even tell you it's actually higher than that. But it's also not a super difficult game—it's fairly easy to assemble a party that can make mincemeat of any foe they happen across.
Would it have done better if, instead of its more general backer beta that focused on player response to the game as a whole, it had adopted a Baldur's Gate 3-style early access period, where an early portion of the game was released and used to aggressively fine-tune balance in particular? Its director, Josh Sawyer, doesn't think so.
